Heaven is a Place...

...a place where nothing, nothing ever happens.

I had heard it repeatedly said that nothing happened here and that it would be difficult to get anything afoot or sell my work. I could feel the void - I had no doubts about that - but I had difficulty accepting the notion that nothing could be done, that there was no Art, no artists or living cultural dimension to the place. I insisted in believing that maybe they just weren’t visible, or that the people telling me such tales simply didn’t have an appetite for these kind of things and therefore hadn’t looked in the right places, or for the right things.

I had never really given much thought to the effect absurd amounts of money can have on a society as a whole – I had never been this close to absurd amounts of money. Here, in the land of unexpected treasures, there are reminders of the absurdity of the amounts of money at hand at every street corner. Here, too, one more of my naïve preconceptions was brushed aside: absurd amounts of money do not necessarily promote a happy and more productive society with a greater focus on culture and the arts.

Money alone doesn’t do the trick, it merely lulls you to sleep. If there is no deep-rooted motivation for the appreciation of aesthetics or the joy of creation and what it can bring about, money only goes two ways – it either slips between your fingers or finds ways to multiply itself even further, but it will not, in and of itself, motivate higher culture. This was the biggest and most difficult paradox to accept – that I really had reached a cultural black-hole: a beautiful place which I had believed to be culturally rich but where, in spite of all its riches, nothing ever happened. It felt very much like Heaven in the Talking Heads song.

My first steps away from the studio in an attempt to assess the situation and devise a strategy, or at least a workable course of action, took me to the local framers. My framers have often been key allies and Michael Lim at Alley Framemakers in Kiulap was one of the most enthusiastic and supporting I ever came across. Most of the work one could see being taken to Alley’s were prints and posters brought back from weekend trips to London or NY, the odd photograph, mostly landscape, and an abundance of portraits of Royal-Family members waiting to be hung in households and shops throughout the land. There was very little in the way of what one might call Art - a few, very few, watercolours and the odd sketch or etching surrounded by members of the Royal family in various combinations, nothing more.

It was at the framers that I came face to face with the facts. I learnt that there was indeed no commercial art gallery in town and that the Brunei Arts Society was long since inactive, if not altogether extinct. There was a museum down by the river with a gallery but very little happened there aside from a biennial selection exhibition for the ASEAN Art Awards for which a handful of Bruneian artists showed up for the prize-money and the opportunity to travel beyond the enclave. But most of the time these circumstantial artists were happy to hang on to their government jobs at the museum or as teachers in local schools - the perks were too good to pass on and no one in their right mind could afford or would even contemplate living off their art, there simply wasn’t a market or any other sort of incentive. The combined Malay-Moslem mindset and the security of a government job do away with the desire to create art for the sake of art – of wishing to fly the trapeze without a safety net. Money stifles the creative spark and if you ever do get too close to absurd amounts, as I did here, you must discipline yourself not to march to the beat of its drum.

The information gathered was a starting point, not the brightest of perspectives, but information I could chew on nonetheless. In the meantime, and after a luckless first visit to the museum where I found very little happening and where the artists were nowhere to be found there was little else I could do except concentrate on my work.

Day in and day out I sat outside trying to capture the rain, waiting for inspiration to trickle down.