Sidang Seni 2008 National Art Gallery
A last minute decision to attend the seminar. It is part of a larger collaborative program between the ministry, NAG and Persatuan pendidikan Seni visual Malaysia. The seminar does present a list of pretty impressive speakers like Dr.Zakaria, Dr. Muliyadi, En. Hasnul Saidon.. at least that’s the few that I know and have read their works. The topics weren’t really that interesting considering that this is supposed to be an academic conference. The papers presented are rather generic in nature and I cannot see any hardcore research in visual arts being presented. Perhaps that the reason why I heard the word “ketandusan” a few times in Q and A.
And one good and also bad point about the seminar is that it was conducted entirely in Bahasa Malaysia. Good in the sense that this is a nasional event, and it should be conducted in our nasional language. It would sound pretty weird if it is conducted in any other languages. The bad thing is that I’m sad that my international friends cannot join in due to language problem. Amazingly enough all my classmates in visual arts are from overseas and can hardly understand simple words in bahasa. One interesting phenomenon to note is that there are hardly any chinese or indian represented in the participants. If there is a non malaysian at the seminar, this person would have thought that Malaysian visual arts are dominated by Malays. Art is supposed to be universal. Although our nasional cultural policy is racist in nature but it doesn’t mean that artists of other ethnic groups cannot join in for academic discussion. It just seems so one sided.
The best talk of the day was the keynote address. We were lucky enough to have the Director of Design Research from Swinburn University Australia, Prof. Allan Whitfield who happened to be in KL today and was invited to give the talk. His foundation discipline is in psychology but his main interest is in art. He gave a little introductory lecture on the Arts and the brain. And the first slide he presented four scientific disciplines that perhaps most visual arts people in Malaysia are unfamiliar to: Cognitive neuroscience, Behaviorial genetics, Evolutionary psychology, Anthropology and Paleontology. This was really fresh to me to see it being discussed in Malaysia. I was familiar with the connection because I watched one of Christof Koch’s lecture in a conference online last year. He researches in consciousness and neuroscience. And evolutionary psychology is what Steven Pinker is all about. I recently read his old book “how the mind works”. The cultural studies in visual arts and the natural sciences always seems like two opposite poles. The common thread is always through psychology. And with the advancement in cognitive neuroscience, evolutionary biology and genetics, I don’t think it will be long before we see real science crossing the boundary into the realms of the Arts. He remarked at the end with something like this, “the brain is like an iceberg, and culture is only the tip that we can see”. The way he spoke just reminded me so much of Steven Pinker. Steven Pinker hated the idea of relativism represented in most cultural studies. He is a purely empirical scientific guy. Anyhow, it was a good lecture, very general but informative.
The rest of the papers presented were mere reports rather than anything academic. What I am trying to say is that seminar is supposed to present some new knowledge but it seems that the issues being discussed are pretty much old news. Although I didn’t get to attend all the lectures because the organiser decided to split up the presentations into overlaping timeslots and forced the participants to choose the best of three in each slot. Terrible strategies. Anyway, tomorrow is the second and last day. Hopefully will get to listen to something interesting.
