The Visual Poetry Project

‘The Visual Poetry Project’ is a collaboration that brings the visual arts and literature together, highlighting the links between these two mediums of expression. Through inviting Malaysian poets and writers to immerse themselves in the paintings of prominent Malaysian abstract artist Hamidi Hadi, the hope is that they may be inspired to respond to the work through the written word.

Being in the presence of these quietly commanding works, the team behind this project realised how these naturally evocative and visually poetic paintings might resonate with writers and poets, and inspire them to respond in a literary sense. Thus sparking an energy transference between the written and the visual, demonstrating the links that can bind two mediums of expression together.

The main goal for this project is to unite Malaysian poets and writers, including Charissa Ong Ty, Viji Krishnamoorthy, Zack Shah, Renie Leng, Sharon Bakar, Pauline Fan, amongst others – to bring about connections and collaboration in a time of forced separation, and to highlight the cross-pollination of different art disciplines. The project also hopes to create a sense of community across the arts, highlighting its emotional connection with Malaysians.

Hamidi Hadi – Magic Flower (2020), Chinese Ink and Acrylic on canvas

Charissa Ong Ty is an author of two bestselling titles Midnight Monologues (2016) and Daylight Dialogues (2018) and the founder of Penwings Publishing.

She aims to increase readership and interest in writing in Malaysia. Follow her on @cotypoems

Hamidi Hadi – Magic Flower (2020), Chinese Ink and Acrylic on canvas

Magic Flower
If you can find me and consume me,
You will live forever.

I would first taste sweet, sour, then bitter,
See me through my tinted glass,
For I’m more than just a magic flower.
Many left just before dusk,
But if you stay,
You’ll see why I’m sought after.

I am fire,
I am love,
I am warmth and also your savior,
Love me until it is all over,
And you’ll live for an eternity-
As my flower, forever.

Hamidi Hadi – Magic Flower (2020), Chinese Ink and Acrylic on canvas

Viji Krishnamoorthy loves the written word and was a freelance writer in what seems a lifetime ago! She is the co-editor and has contributed a story to the recently published The Lockdown Chronicles, an anthology of 19 Malaysian voices. She has another piece of fiction bubbling away on the back burner.

Follow @thelockdownchronicles19

Hamidi Hadi – Di bawah Pohon Beringin; Baring (Lying under Banyan Tree II) (2020), Enamel paint on canvas

Di bawah Pohon Beringin; Baring (Lying under Banyan Tree II) [Diptych]

Di bawah Pohon Beringin; Baring (Lying under Banyan Tree II)
I love the word ‘daydreaming’. I love the word now as much as I loved the word then, as a child. Sat in front of an open textbook, the mind on a frolic of its own travelling, on an adventure, escaping the drudgery of homework.

Di Bawah Pohon Beringin takes me straight back there, on a one-way ticket and places older than me at the foot of the red flame of the forest – my favourite tree. I used to search the steaming black bitumen for bright red flowers. Freshly fallen, unblemished by heavy feet and bruise – free from hot tyres. And I would pick them, young fingers a little clumsy but earnest, keen not to scratch its delicate petals with impatient fingers.

I would spread the fiery flaring flame of the forest in the middle pages of heavy brown encyclopaedia Britannica’s and patiently wait for them to dry and sought them out when they were brown and crumbly. I would gingerly lift them and paste them under a shroud of cello tape into my handwritten book of “Quotable Quotes”.

Take me back there, to lie under the tree yet soar above the clouds.

Hamidi Hadi – Magic Flower (2020), Chinese Ink and Acrylic on canvas

Zack Shah is a best-selling Malaysian poet based in Johore.
His debut publication “More than Words” is available in all major bookstores and at the publisher’s website, Penwings.com.
You can follow him on instagram @zackshahpoet

Hamidi Hadi – Solitude (2020), Chinese Ink and Acrylic on canvas

Solitude
Wandering stars in a sea of darkness
Our fleeting fates etched in stone,
To spend our days on a dying world
And leave a legacy of dust and bone
Our only hope is to find the ones
Who can make us feel a little less alone
But until that time I must embrace the emptiness
And learn to languish on my own

Hamidi Hadi – Magic Flower (2020), Chinese Ink and Acrylic on canvas

Renie Leng has been published in Oxford Poetry, The Kindling, The Principal Girl: Feminist Tales from Asia, Tell Tale Food where her zuihitsu won the inaugural Fay Khoo Food + Writing Award in 2017 and in The Lockdown Chronicles. She also has two poetry manuscripts in her oven, and has taught in international education for over 20 years. While proudly raising her three children, and marking Shakespeare essays, she also writes poems and short fiction, with her pieces navigating between family, heritage, food, identity, nationhood and travel. She can be found always hiking, sometimes doing yoga, occasionally cooking, and recently, growing green babies in her garden. She may have more notebooks than fingers.

Hamidi Hadi – Mandi Hutan/Forest Bathing (2020), Chinese Ink and Acrylic on canvas

Mandi Hutan/Forest bathing
Shinrin-yoku:
Under the canopy of healing green,
In the harmony of emerald, jasper and jade
Entranced by the mossy magical botanica
of intricate flourishing flora and leaves that weave.

In the steady thrum of breathing trunks
You inhale and imbibe
In the whispers of floating leaves
You hope
Under this wild foliage that transcends
You pause
Under the umbrella of century old sentries
You dance

The scene changes every time…
Snakes as silent as their skin slither by
Slow tortoises avoid them as they meander their merry way
Darting butterflies seem shy as they hide between fronds from busy bees
Water sprouts and flows gently amongst cracks and crevices
of rocks and roots.
A rooster wanders by, for real.

Lively lovely lianas frame the stage
Amongst the tapestry of trees
of curling branches awaiting for Jane to swing
From the monkeys’ first to fifth acts-
You grow
Sheltered and shielded in this sacred space
You pray
The symphony of cicadas arrive at a crescendo
And the rites of passage of travelling ants
Go undisturbed by the walker’s boots, just so.
As mushrooms quietly thrive with joy, before their seasons end.
As your heart sings
You heal
As clear as the running waters of the gurgling brooks
In the spellbound rejuvenation
of the baptism of trees.

Hamidi Hadi – Fuse II (2020), Acrylic on canvas

Fuse II
Purple incandescence
Uncommonly glorious
The hope of Day’s promise:
Velveteen, violet & visceral.
The royal crown
of Dawn’s wishes,
Whispered through
her silent stigma and shy ovule,
Her petal in full bloom as
her pores enters the core of your soul
But it wilts away- temporal,
Lasting just one day.

Hamidi Hadi – Magic Flower (2020), Chinese Ink and Acrylic on canvas

Sharon Bakar is a writer, editor, publisher and has lived in Malaysia for the past 36 years. She runs creative writing courses and organises monthly literary gatherings called Readings (currently all online).

For more information see http://www.sharonbakar.com and https://www.facebook.com/groups/ReadingsKL

Hamidi Hadi – Embracing (2020), Enamel on canvas

Sublimity (A Prose Sonnet)
Trees huge and buttressed thrust upwards force outwards
canopies interlacing.
Stag’s horns cling to bark crevices. Lianas spiral
rattans hook and strain to reach the sunlight
filtering into deep green shade.
Growing things whisper and tangle in the undergrowth
and stirring creatures move unseen among leaves
still wet from last night’s storm.

In a clearing, a bird wave;
a moving rainbow of sound and colour
breaks cover to catch insects stirred by a passing mousedeer.
The air is electric with the pulsing crescendo of cicadas. Blossoms signal,
and one, bright as the sun’s heart, opens to bees.
A purple bud is folded into itself,
the soul of the flower still hidden, mysterious.

On the forest floor, leaf litter and mossy detritus.
Fallen seedpods litter the tracks of foraging animals.
Roots intersect, share nourishment.
Fungal filaments pulse messages beneath the forest floor.

Artist, your senses are both soothed and sharpened in the forest depth.
You know that all this,
all this burgeoning life is interconnected
and that you are one with all things.

Hamidi Hadi – Magic Flower (2020), Chinese Ink and Acrylic on canvas

Pauline Fan is a writer, literary translator, and cultural researcher. She is Creative Director of PUSAKA and Co-Director of the George Town Literary Festival. Her translation of Kulleh Grashi’s book Tell me, Kenyalang: selected poems is shortlisted in the US for the 2020 National Translation Award in Poetry, and longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Award.

Pauline Fan is a writer, literary translator and cultural researcher. Her translations from German to Malay include works by Bertolt Brecht, Immanuel Kant, Rainer Maria Rilke and Paul Celan. Her English translation of poems by Sarawak poet Kulleh Grasi, Tell Me, Kenyalang (Circumference Books, 2019), was shortlisted for the 2020 National Translation Award in Poetry, and longlisted for the Best Translated Book Awards 2020. She is the Creative Director of PUSAKA and Co-Director of the George Town Literary Festival. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Malaysian Institute of Translation and Books (ITBM), and is the Malaysia editor for the Berlin-based poetry archive and network, Lyrikline. Pauline was a student of classical Burmese dance master, U Win Maung, and is a guest dancer with Shwe Man Thabin Dance Theatre of Myanmar. Pauline holds a Masters in German Literature from the University of Oxford.

Hamidi Hadi – ShanShui (Gunungan dan Sungai) (2020), Chinese Ink and Acrylic on canvas

ShanShui (Gunungan dan Sungai) [Diptych]

ShanShui I (Gunungan dan Sungai)
The eye is an hour without history — a dead sun sloping towards the last spectre of light. When the river bank broke, we saw the face of the water: a dark herald baying at the contours of our bodies. Through blood and dust we took flight from the mountain that bore down upon us like ancestry. Even now we are lost. Let us follow the stones to the bend in the river. Let us remember her names of origin and end: Mata air. Air mata. Let her waters return us from the edge of oblivion.

Hamidi Hadi – Magic Flower (2020), Chinese Ink and Acrylic on canvas

Bettina Chua Abdullah is an award-winning former television presenter, and the founder of Hikayat, Penang’s celebrated nexus of literature and creative expression.
She set up the Fay Khoo Award for Food+Drink Writing in 2017, and is presently on a writing sabbatical.
You can follow her (very occasional) narratives on Instagram
@atelierislamica
@books_on_the_boil

Hamidi Hadi – Fuse I (2020), Acrylic on canvas

(Fuze)
Born to the Purple I
A chain-link fence separated our home from our neighbour
the metal margin twisted into a sheet of open diamonds
and through this a mob of green vines wound themselves with unruly determination into a giant, impenetrable thicket.
They clung to the fence with the defiance of gangsters guarding their turf.
Such was their stranglehold that if one pulled too hard at the excess of leaves and stems, the chain-link fence would yield its position and bend helplessly out of shape.
(It was not neat, and therefore not a good choice of fencing material to assert ownership.
Boundaries should be immaculate if they are to be taken seriously.)
But for all its loutish messiness, each morning fresh stems wormed their way through the green bulk, and waved audacious and free at the top of the fence.
And there the sun warmed the pale, closed buds and coaxed them to spiral open into violet flowers.
How soft you are. How vulnerable. You are kembang seri pagi: the morning glory.
How unjust it is that you are born to the purple, yet unfit for palace gardens.

Hamidi Hadi – Fuse II (2020), Acrylic on canvas

(Fuze II)
Born to the Purple II
Like our universe, you were born of nothing: the void inside
a bubble of gas trapped in a tumbling flow of lava and molten rock
and somehow you held your black hole nothingness as the world cooled around your hollow.

Drop by precious drop, moisture seeped through your porous crust of iron-rich, igneous rock, settling on the cool inner lining of the cavern, clinging like an egg on a life-giving placenta.
Over millennia, the deposits of mineral-rich waters grew into the crystals we call quartz.

(Quartz is plentiful: search dusty acres of limestone and basalt for a knobbly orb resembling the head of a cauliflower.Call it a geode if you want to be taken seriously).

Hunters listen for one that taps hollow and is lighter than it looks, and when they have unearthed it, they split it open with a single blow.
And light falls where it never has before, on sparkling obelisks and prisms of violet and heliotrope: a purple rain frozen in time.
You are dazzling. You are triumphant. You are batu kecubong, the amethyst.
How unjust it is that you are born to the purple, yet deemed semi-precious, for a Prince at best.

Hamidi Hadi – Magic Flower (2020), Chinese Ink and Acrylic on canvas

Shireen is a freelance photographer and writer. Alasdair and she produced the first evening of traditional oral storytelling at the last Rainforest Fringe Festival in Borneo, on their platform In Voices. Shireen also co-edited and contributed a story to The Lockdown Chronicles which is available in bookshops now. She is currently working on another collection of short stories as she awaits the opening of borders so she can visit desert, mountain and the deep blue seas again.

You could if you like follow her on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/goddesshireenxxx/

The Lockdown Chronicles is available to purchase at https://www.bookxcessonline.com/products/the-lockdown-chronicles

Hamidi Hadi – Magic Flower (2020), Chinese Ink and Acrylic on canvas

Alasdair was born in Borneo and grew up in England. He studied Anthropology at Cambridge and went to Columbia University Film School in New York. Currently he is writing about the Sa’ban tribe of Sarawak. Together with Shireen, he directed and co-produced In Voices, an evening of “tingling tales from Sarawak storytellers” at the last Rainforest Fringe Festival in Kuching and recently contributed a short story to The Lockdown Chronicles.

Hamidi Hadi – Terbakar Hangus [Diptych] (2020), Industrial Paint on canvas

Talking It Over

She: It’s symmetrical. A reflection.

Like it was peeled from a mirror. Then watched as it rolled out

He: Huh.

It looks like a stone. Like the boulders in the fields when they’ve torched them for padi. That ochre pigment could be lichen growing back.

She: Isn’t it litch-en?

He: Nope. Lai-ken.

She: Huh…

I would lai-ken it more to an image of destruction. Brimstone in an operatic spectacle. Scorched but not bleak. There is fledgling life. Flecks of green. Fresh. Optimistic. The pitter patter of the newlyborn. And what you think is lai-ken, perhaps immutable life force. That twisting lucent faith cheering this cycle on. All in the cycle seeking to lengthen this time between their creation and death. To layer it. Pack it with texture and weave it with colour. Maybe it’s instinct. This striving to leave something indelible in the space called Life.

He: Hmmm.

Or granite. With shards of quartz. And moss. Mind you that could almost be a leopard skin in the middle, or the whole thing could be the Turin shroud version of a tiger’s face.

She: Hah!

And if I tilted my head to the right and tapped my heels together 3 times… I might see a bomoh harnessing the tug of the moon.

He: Or… the universe expanding. After the big bang. Reaching into the darkness we see round the edges. Constellations and black holes. That would be symmetric too I guess.

She: The very beginning. The wish that the creator breathed. Let there be light.

He: Or he just yanked the symmetry apart, like a cosmic wishbone.

On the other hand, it could just be a close-up of that Japanese ceramic. What’s it called?

She: Raku ware? Well, again, birthed from the furnace still glowing-hot.

His phone rang.

He: Time to go.

They left hand in hand.

Hamidi Hadi – Magic Flower (2020), Chinese Ink and Acrylic on canvas

Kasthury Paramiswaran is a lost naadodi (tamil word for wanderer/nomad) who is an emerging spoken word poet. She is currently back home learning to grow some roots, and giving back to the country that gave her so much. When she is not writing or performing, Kasthury volunteers with organizations and works with at-risk children from the urban poor of Malaysia. Recently she was featured in Unilever’s Youth Power Hack and Toronto Tamil Chair’s World of Tamil Poets. She hopes her writing evokes emotions, catching readers and listeners at their sensitive feelings. The rest of her work can be found online at @LostNaadodi on Instagram.

Hamidi Hadi – Terbakar Hangus [Diptych] (2020), Industrial Paint on canvas

Rebuild to re-bloom,

As we rise from sunken depths,

With all those astray.

A true fatigued feat,

But we are so tenacious,

We will persevere.

For the forgotten,

The castaways and outcasts,

We rise from ashes.

Hamidi Hadi – Diam (Quite) (2020) | Chinese Ink and acrylic on canvas; 223cm x 160cm

Shh, quiet down.

The shade too loud, one with the Sun.

You are arrogant-self-centred.

Let me roll over you in my perfect compulsion.

Straight rows inked out of strength,

My power in all its intensity

Swathes of sieze.

An elegance borne of stealth

To mask your frigid restlessness.

Shh, shhhh

calm down,

Let me envelop your passion

Encumbered by my mystery

Nature calls for a balance.

And your freedom is all miscreants.

Your creative energy knows no bounds,

It’s hostile, radioactive!

Shh shh shh

Let me be the dead gloom

The good effigy in black.

Let me hold you, caress you to serenity.

In this time of stillness,

May your brilliance shine through

In rays of cheers

escaping the unknown.

SHHhhhhhhhh.

Hamidi Hadi – Magic Flower (2020), Chinese Ink and Acrylic on canvas

Yanna Hashri is a Malaysian writer, poet and editor. Her works have been published in online publications including ISUU Mag, Eksentrika and Metaphrs. In 2018 she self-published her first poetry chapbook, ‘At Night We Come Out’. She has also translated fiction and non-fiction books for prominent Malaysian authors.

Hamidi Hadi – Di bawah Pohon Beringin; Baring (Lying under Banyan Tree II) (2020), Enamel paint on canvas

BECOMING

Before you, the blank canvas of your stranger

Before dawn, the dark imaginings

of a body yet unformed.

Come sunlight you must wake and decide:

Are you gazer, waiting for someone

to cloth you in white

and tell you what to do?

Are you seller, slapping on

reds and yellows so

the big boys can pay bigger bucks?

Or are you weaver,

architect of a burgeoning bloom

braiding the greens and purples

of a story only you can tell?

What a time you live in, love.

to speak in the hues of the world’s palette

to steer a rainbow of your own making

to weep and laugh and be strong

in the shape of a self

you know truly to be You.

Hamidi Hadi – Magic Flower (2020), Chinese Ink and Acrylic on canvas

Shazz is a professional banker and self-taught poet, who is currently exploring abstract painting.

Her favourite self quote is: “Let your soul dive and seek for magical wonders in the realms of the unknown.”.

Hamidi Hadi – Embrace (Dalam Pelukannya) (2020) | Chinese Ink and acrylic on canvas; 173cm x 290.5cm (Diptych)

Embraced: Dalam Pelukan

As I walked into ‘Saring’

I stumbled to find the

equilibrium within me

I was mentally tortured!

As blood rushed into my face

I managed to keep up

My vigorous thoughts in place

As days passed by

My sense of morality hit

Straight into my darkest scars

As time turned down

My warm salvation

Reality struck harder on me back!

Alas,

I’m in peace with myself

Mentally, physically and internally!

I screamed as loud as I can

But you ain’t there to saved me

Rhythm and sounds ain’t soothing

and feeding my souls well these days

Stepping out from these miseries

and dark edges

Locked up all my resentment inside

Not letting them out through these physical walls

Total madness sipping thru

These blood streams as my souls

Battling inside what’s left to be feel and

what’s left to be done

Tempted and deceived

by another lust and temporary pleasures

It’s just another gesture

Covering up the inner needs

What’s left was this authenticity

Barely living

Between surrealism and realism