Queensland Art Gallery - Queensland Government

Shooshie Sulaiman
Who’s afraid of the dark?
My father, of Scottish heritage, is a great storyteller, and I have many
eloquent memories of him telling stories about his life. My parents
have always been very open and no question was taboo in our
household. There was, however, one question I never posed — about
my mother’s life in Malaysia. She was born in Malaysia to Chinese
parents and came to Australia to attend university in the 1970s, but all
other details are shrouded in darkness.
I was the only child with Chinese heritage at my small primary school
in far north Queensland. Apart from my mother’s face, the faces on
the nightly news were the only representations of Chinese and Malay
people that I was familiar with. Many years later, I still feel a sense of
the unfamiliar while viewing Shooshie Sulaiman’s Darkroom 2009, an
installation of photographic portraits of men and women from around
Malaysia, posed alone, in pairs and in groups.
Sulaiman found these portraits of nameless people in second-hand
stores around Malacca. The portraits, dating from the 1950s and 1960s
with their sepia tones, reference the time preceding the 13 May 1969
race riots. 1 Sulaiman was born after the riots, but lives with their legacy as
a person of both Malay and Chinese heritage. In Darkroom, she brings
together approximately 50 portraits, transforming the faces of the portrait
sitters using flower petals, collage, ink and paint, and mounting the
images in found frames. The petals of pressed lily, lotus, poppy, tulip and,
particularly, the hibiscus are used to soften the faces of the male figures.
Hibiscus rosa-sinensis is the national flower of Malaysia, although
it is not native to the country. Its five petals represent the nation’s
five principles: belief in God, loyalty to king and country, upholding
the constitution, the sovereignty of the law, and good behaviour
and morality. These were first announced at Independence Day
celebrations in 1970 in response to the events of 1969. Sulaiman’s use
of single hibiscus petals in Darkroom is thus a subtle device through
which she questions Malaysia’s national principles and laws.
people. Single group photographs tend to display a false sense of
unity; although the family is all smiles, many other frames reveal frowns
and tensions. Portraits of a nation also tend towards a false sense
of unity. The Malaysian Government describes the nation as a place
where ‘Malays, Chinese, Indians and many other ethnic groups . . . have
influenced each other, creating a truly Malaysian culture’. 2 It may be
argued that Darkroom, as a collection of nameless faces, is better able
to display the diversity and multiplicity of stories — as well as hint at the
lost ones — that create the Malaysian national portrait.
The portraits of these nameless faces are installed in an ‘open house’, a
replication of the library in Sulaiman’s former Kuala Lumpur residence,
a small wooden building behind the National Art Gallery and the
National Theatre — two of Malaysia’s major art institutions. The ‘open
house’ is an ongoing metaphor in Sulaiman’s work — she makes herself
and her work accessible via open spaces. She opens her home for art
exhibitions, in keeping with the Malaysian festive tradition of opening
your home to family, friends and strangers to celebrate cultural or
religious festivities. For Darkroom, Sulaiman opens the doors of her
library to us, inviting us to join her in celebrating the ambiguous and
fractured nature of Malaysian identity.
Ellie Buttrose
Endnotes
1 On 13 May 1969, following the 10 May Malaysian general election, Chinese–Malay
race riots broke out in Kuala Lumpur. A state of emergency was declared, and there
were officially around 200 deaths, although unofficial figures are far greater.
2 Tourism Malaysia,
viewed October 2009.
Shooshie Sulaiman
Malaysia b.1973
Indian father + Indian mother = Chinese daughter 2009
Lily petal, ink, old photograph / 24 x 18.4cm /
Image courtesy: The artist
Women are chronically under-represented in some aspects of Malaysian
society, especially in politics, where they make up only ten per cent of
parliament. Sulaiman counters this by using flower petals to soften the
dominant representation of men, and brings women’s issues to the
surface by painting over the women’s portraits with red ink, with titles
like ‘menstruation’. Sulaiman is also interested in the slippage that occurs
in the process of trying to define genders, which, like race, dominates
identity politics. She creates ambiguity by partially covering female
portraits with paper laden with text and titling them ‘masculine’, and
using flower petals as a mechanism for feminising the male portraits.
My parents, sister and I have very rarely been captured in the same
frame. Our collection of photographs of us in pairs or trios is better
able to represent my family as a group of related but independent
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