Gina Fairley: I know from your earlier series Family (1995-2001) and On Moving Out and Moving In (2005) you have always painted your close personal circle. It has been a kind of validating anchor, the root of their sincerity. This show is called The Women. Who, then, are ‘these women’?

Yau Bee Ling: Simply, these women are constructed as well as collected. They were not drawn to describe an individual but were collected from found images, namely the glossy layouts of lifestyle magazines. These images served as my visual containers – a frame for structuring emotions. It has to be said that I am more grounded with my feelings in this series than the earlier ones, and have responded with a more controlled way of painting.

GF: This idea of control I find interesting. Lifestyle magazines prescribe a certain image of contemporary life, subconsciously permeating our psyche with constructed notions of beauty, value and success. You seem to be using this vernacular of advertising yet have thwarted its very intention by overlaying it with your personal stamp of femininity and the female role. It takes strength to subvert something so strong.

YBL: I attempted to carve out these figures for objectified examination through unconscious browsing and, in turn, conscious selection. I experimented by relocating these various “original” images into subjective designs to effectively distill my fleeting emotions, desires, and perceptions against a real circle of friends, sisters, housewives, and neighbours. It is my visual questionnaire of what is the “real“ world, and a kind of checklist highlighting today’s commercial dislocation with the nature world.

GF: What you say Bee Ling opens the viewer up to a really interesting entry point to understanding these paintings and their graphic rawness. They become a dissection of modern culture while at the same time a kind of very personal breaking down of self in relation to prescribed mores. Your technique really ushers the viewer into that “headspace” of questioning.

YBL: For me, these painted images of the “woman figure” serve to interact within another being, and that is our “real” sense of who we should be? It is the social symbolism of self, or more simply the fear of the unknown self. These paintings are a visual process where my strong awareness and penetration of human modern culture overwhelms its material practices. Stated another way, these painted women mimic advertising billboard representation of women while at the same time revealing its “cracked” veneer, exposing layers of underlying uneasiness of feelings and perceptions.

GF: This is your second solo exhibition over your 15-year career, the first being Portraits of Paradox in 2008. Life changes us all in five years. In your mind, how has time matured these works?

YBL: I see The Women Series visual having more intricate and sophisticated mark-making, palette control, and layering compared to the Portrait of Paradox Series. The early period of my life could be described as the ‘breath out’ moment while the present is ‘breath in’ time. I was searching for the key water of life to make sense of who I am. It was a transformative path, one that I feared and yet longed for the growth if offered. Artmaking is my inner bridge as well as my outer ray. It took 15 years for me to achieve the self-awareness to understand this path. This body of work embarked me on self-assurance, self-empower, and self-growth spiritually and in defining new boundaries. It is a crucial time in my artistic maturity and my life process.

GF: As viewing audiences we tend to forget the brave outpouring of an artist, laying themselves and their emotions exposed on the wall. We judge them like a quick flick of those glossy magazines you mentioned. You remind us of the privilege we are given.

YBL: It is always a private and public ideal world recasting moment. I always try to objectify its truth after the “let go“ moment.

GF: In Portraits of Paradox Series the face filled the canvas with a proud, almost indignant [perhaps arrogant] tilt of the head. There was nowhere to escape or hide; it was raw emotion in large format. It was a dramatic shift form the earlier series and the genesis of this new work.

YBL: I was beginning to be interested in faces as containers to confront my reactions and raw emotions. I was unsettled after my Rimbun Dahan Residency, coming to grasp with my simultaneous roles as an artist, a wife, and recent mother, all interwoven with societal ‘stereotypes’ and their many impinging expectations. I was determined to find the answers through my artmaking, discharging my emotions and finding inner rhythms. I suppose those early faces were a kind of mapping of those questions and reactions.

GF: In contrast, the women in this exhibition strike me as wearing a different confidence, less introspective or psychologically driven as a study. They are blatantly more sexual. Have these paintings become bold placards of a feminist position in our times? Are you advocating a stance for the Malaysian woman? To quote Nadiah Bamadhaj, she described your paintings as moving to ‘opinions that want to be heard.’

YBL: First and foremost, I am more concerned with developing an artistic expression rather than consciously advocating any feminist stance for Malaysian women. I tried to explore visual perceptions concerning the complex conditions surrounding contemporary women in relation to myself. Objectively, I was especially triggered by many idealistic images of women in magazines and questioned ‘why-what-how-and-who’ we should look like in relation to who I am.

GF: And that sexuality? Even when presented in the role of mother with child, there is sense of renewal in their identity and confidence. The child almost fills a similar role of adornment or badge of femininity as the emphasis placed on fashion elements – handbags, high heels, jewelry and hair-dos. What is going on here?

YBL: Yes, the poses are deliberately derived from sources that were unavoidable for their sexual mannerism but, more significantly, I wanted the audience to see beyond the comfort of its original structure and move towards the emotions within the figures. It is this very interplay of external and internal tension that I want to co-exist and be read when viewing these new paintings.

GF: You are right Bee Ling, our times mandate that we embrace a kind of duality – personas for differing needs and occasions. What is real and where the truth lies, I agree, comes down to our maturity to filter what we see and to have confidence in who we are. You find that in these paintings.

YBL: Yes. I was inspired by many “real-life” women at the same time that I was drawn to another environment, the advertisements of women. As a benchmark of maturity, I supposed that I am more composed and conscious of this interplay of marketing forces (outer) and how they have been consumed. As an artist I felt compelled to question these in my painting. So were these ‘real-life’ women subconsciously used as signposts for a new found confidence? I, for sure, like these painted women to be grounded for questioning and that perhaps can be my new found objectified maturity as a painter.

GF: These are not ‘pretty’ pictures. At moments they verge on the grotesque, fractured into shards, spliced by a definitive black line and garish hues. There is little softness prescribed by the stereotypes of femininity and motherhood – or for that part those magazines. For me, their layering is interesting from several levels: the figures are first sketched out then are blocked out in black drawing them forward, and then they are filled in with the chaos of chatter, their kaleidoscopic abstraction an independent web of gesture and movement, of freedom and friction. There is little resolve between these layers and yet it is a very successful device that you have developed in ‘popping’ the figure out for consideration. I wonder what your thoughts are on this reading?

YBL: Yes, I wanted deliberately for that tension. That was what made my painted women vital and, hopefully, able to press the audience to consider their outer stability and embrace their inner frictions and fragility. The figures look as a whole and, yet, they are not totally static and resolved – just like us.

GF: There is something “old fashioned” about their abstraction. I use that term as a compliment. You are a real painter’s painter Bee Ling – the movement of brush, the determination, exploration, and resolve in finding the forms, and a passion to throw colour upon colour uncensored. I think they are brave paintings within the context of Malaysian contemporary art. I am curious, then, how you see these paintings as bridging that traditional-slash-contemporary divide?

YBL: These paintings were done as a very conscious reflection on the contemporary human condition. Contemporary – as in artistic attitude – is about having the courage to confront and embrace present day subject-matter with all its contradictory emotion and not to be measured with any given standard but one’s own standard for its effective expression. When seen as such, their so-called “traditional medium” like oil paint can be made to be relevant and lively. I have also created tensions with my colours and marks to show complexity and its interwoven relationship.

GF: Flicking over the series, looking again and again, I am overwhelmed by their scale. These are big confident paintings – no shrinking violets here! Why the compulsion for scale?

YBL: Yes they are big! I supposed I was taken in by contemporary advertising formats, like billboards with their seductive larger-than-life figures with their messages of perfection and beauty. It is a heroic scale, and it captured my inspiration as I moved across the landscape of these images in my suburbs and the city. And yet, personally, I felt the opposite of these billboard images – detached, alienated and fragmented in my feelings. I suppose these paintings redress that “reality” through scale.

GF: Along these same lines of thought there is predominant consumer affluence in the staging of these new portraits – a cognizance of the “female“ defined by fashion and society. In particular there are two paintings of a red figure on a blue background, Indulgence and The Essence, which are all buck-some passion described in an illustrative style. They are less reliant – or obliterated – by their own abstraction. What does this style-shift say for you?

YBL: These red palette figures appear distant and somewhat angry, impulsive but suppressed. Using the same technique as in the painting you mention, the two figures in Truly precious give weight to the notion of friendship as a truly precious and appealing trait accessible to the majority. Here you can see an entirely new trend as beauty icons of femininity.

GF: Are they about the projection of some storybook recipe for femininity, of sisterhood?

YBL: Quiet the contrary. Overall, it is illustratively related to the fashion-language formula of feminine beauty, which satisfies more of marketing culture than individual self-hood or sisterhood. Their constructed plasticity and layering of paints with drawn overlapping visual contours perhaps show my anxious feelings in this destabilized fluid world where notions of identity are changing, adapting, in a way reminiscent of the chameleon-like transformative social world of advertising. We are seduced by its exciting camouflage and fear its disembodiment of relationships.

GF: Is anonymity important in these works? What is the role of that in terms of constructing a narrative for the viewer?

YBL: In this series, anonymity is important. I mean, these women are on one hand distant in their identity and invite close scrutiny. I want to destabilize the stereotypical contemporary woman without individual or specific critique. I did not want to point my viewer in the direction of the story and its characters. Rather, I wanted to intrigue and develop curiosity within the viewer as an entry point to an overall narrative mood, to build on and to expand upon the complexities of their intimacies.

GF: It is a very interesting psychological position that you pose, then, regardless of gender. Anonymity offers a certain freedom to, as you say, delve deeper. And yet the structure of the paintings are very closed, the activity of the figures are very internalized. It is a duplicity both extremely current and astute to contemporary Malaysian life, but also, one that acknowledges our own closed-system imperfection.

YBL: These close painted figure relationships are to be viewed as ongoing, interwoven, and layered interconnections within the totality of the picture formation. Perhaps it can be concluded simply as a metaphor to the construction of emotional turmoil in daily individual encounters. For me, these paintings are my lived everyday experiences and conscious observations.

This conversation occurred 1-5 March 2013 via email correspondence between the artist and writer. Gina Fairley is a freelance writer living between Australia and Southeast Asia. She was on residency with Yau Bee Ling at Rimbun Dahan in 2005.