Ruminations on the Opening of Rumah Lat dan Galeri (or, Lat is still a simple man)

by CT Lim

Years in the making. And inevitably delayed by Covid. Rumah Lat dan Galeri (the Lat gallery), a permanent museum devoted to the Malaysian cartoonist, finally had its official opening on July 8, 2023.

I had received a call from Lat two  weeks prior, asking if I was free to attend the opening. I said yes. I have known Lat since the 1990s and all of us are getting on in age. These days I travel to meet up with friends, most recently in June, with a trip to Hong Kong to visit the political cartoonist, Zunzi. 

Lat also asked me to contact Miel, a cartoonist for The Straits Times in Singapore. Miel and I had done a road trip in 2009 to visit Lat in Ipoh. That trip was partly for me to seal the deal with Lat for his contribution to Liquid City Volume 2, a Southeast Asian comics anthology which I co-edited. He sent in a short story about the thrills of attending a soccer match. 

I once described Lat as a simple man. I think that is still true. But life is complicated. When we arrived at the gallery, an instrumental version of "Just My Imagination" was playing in the background. We imagine our best selves and future, but sometimes reality lets us down. Life is often a series of disappointments and disillusionments. 

But dreams also do come true, as in the case of the Lat gallery. The opening was no simple affair. The event was graced by the presence of the Sultan of Perak and his wife. It was a full-on Malay royalty occasion, a first for me and totally fascinating, the rituals and procedures. 

The Sultan was a cool guy. He not only officiated over the opening and made Lat the royal artist / cartoonist of Perak; he also played the cartoon historian. In his speech, he gave a historical overview of Lat's career and cartoons. (Ok, most likely he did not write his own speech, but it is still cool that he made it.)

The Sultan and his wife

After all the speeches and the private tour for the VIPs, we were able to go around to see the gallery and the recreated kampung house on our own. Being the consumers we were, we headed to the gift shop to buy mech - caps, tees, pencil cases, etc. 

Lat merch

The gallery was a mix of reproductions (the old Lat cartoons: the originals were long lost) and originals for the newer pieces. There was a preview of the new book, Mat Som 2. Long anticipated and in the works for the past few years, Lat was aided by Arif Rafhan for the inking. Arif and his family were there too to attend the opening and we chatted. 

Mat Som 2

There was a recreation of Lat's desk in the gallery. Next to it was a record player. I wondered if it was a Bob Dylan vinyl on it and true enough, it was Nashville Skyline. My friendship with Lat was cemented by our love for Dylan and old John Wayne movies. I remembered Lat telling me that when Nashville Skyline came out, he was a young man and poor. He could only buy the EP version of the album (with less songs) and could only afford the full album later on. 

This got me to reflect on what would be my opportunities if I were born in Malaysia. Would my family be middle class like Frankie from Town Boy? Would I have to go overseas for my further studies? Or would I be a Chinese gangster in Cheras?

But enough of my ruminations (but the best works of art do that to us). Finally we found Lat and we recreated our kampong shot from 2009. 

Miel, Lat, and CT Lim in 2023

CT Lim, Lat, and Miel in 2009

Lat and family were tired by the end of the event. Many asked Lat for autographs and quick sketches. Some even took the plates from the catering to get Lat to draw on. We decided to let Lat rest. I went to Ipoh to start my food tour of the town. I also found a rare P Ramlee remastered record. I told Lat and he said that was a good buy. 

Le Petit Poilu in concert: a fresh take on music and movement in comics

 

Le Petit Poilu in concert: a fresh take on music and movement in comics

A “BD-Concert” at the Comics Art Museum in Brussels, Belgium. June 10, 2023

 

Reviewed by Laurie Anne Agnese

 

 

 

 

 On a Saturday morning in June, in a small room just off the busy and bright majestic art nouveau hall of the Comics Art Museum in Brussels, three rows of small children were sitting on the steps in front of a stage with two musicians and a screen.  Their parents, seated in chairs behind them, were coaxing them to be quiet and still.  For some of these children as young as 2 or 3 years old, this was their first live concert; for nearly all, it was their first BD concert. 

 

 The BD concerts were programmed for the museum’s temporary exhibit of Le Petit Poilu (on display until August 15 2023), the popular wordless bande dessinée series that the Belgian cartoonist Pierre Bailly and scriptwriter Céline Fraipont created for preschool children. What is special about Le Petit Poilu is how children as young as 3 years old can read the pictures on their own and understand these complex stories independently of their parents. 

 

 The performance, the first of three scheduled that day, combined projected images from the comic to original live music. The concept leaned into the unique comic forms of Le Petit Poilu, while borrowing cinematic techniques to draw out the tensions and meaning of the story.  Stéphane Arbon, wrote the score, and Christophe Bardon performed the live soundtrack mixing blues, rock and jazz to bring to life one of the older and better known stories in the series, Pagaille au Potager (Garden Frenzy).  The two have been collaborating for more than twenty years, both as TOTOF et le grand orchestre intended for kids, and other collaborations.

 

 In Pagaille au Potager, Petit Poilu starts his day like any ordinary preschooler - waking up and getting ready. But on his way to school, he falls down a mysterious hole and digs himself out into a lush, oversized garden where he has fantastical adventures with a group of friendly insects.

 

The good times are interrupted with the seemingly gratuitous aggression of a bee who attacks and stings Poilu’s red nose that balloons with pain. The group sets out to enact their own revenge on the Bee.  But during the dramatic confrontation, Petit Poilu witnesses the Bee’s troubling situation, pauses and dares to react with kindness, offering the Bee a chance to be friends. This is a classic Poilu story, mixing fantasy together with real world empathy. 

 

 

 Pagaille au Potager was the first Le Petit Poilu series to be made into an episode of the animated series, transforming the twenty-eight page wordless album into a fast-paced seven minute cartoon. This version, with characters sometimes speaking in balderdash and other nonsensical sounds, is entertaining and quick to the point, but more defined and narrower than the comic.

 

 

The BD concert is a fresh interpretation of the story, and rich with the human touch of the expressive line drawings, well-developed plot lines, and the live percussion and stringed instruments. At forty minutes long, the concert significantly slowed down the story, particularly the pacing of the visuals, allowing the audience to linger on the panels for much longer than they would while silently reading. The overall effect still gives enough space for interpretation, and feels true to the comic’s original form. The slide show, for example, played with the concept of the page in comics, carefully timing the display of still images, one next to the other, eventually filling the entire screen.

In other vignettes, basic cinematic techniques such panning, zooming, or animation, brought gentle movement to the characters and textures to the story, and were meant to direct the eye to emphasize beauty of the illustrations or highlight the tensions in the story. The score, however, was the consistent cinematic throughline; the original songs punctuated with sound effects, is playful and resonant, and in itself a reference to the musicality of the original comic.

Because of its use of structure and repetition, Le Petit Poilu is not silent at all, but actually quite musical and rhythmic. Arbon and Bardon’s interpretation and musical performance had much to add to the emotional richness of the story.

 

All photos and video taken by Laurie Anne Agnese

 

 

Exhibition in photos: Barbara Dale Retrospective in Baltimore

 Barbara Dale Retrospective. Jeffrey Kent (cur.). Baltimore: Peale Museum. June 15-August 6, 2023. https://www.thepeale.org/exhibition-barbara-dale-retrospective/

Since I know the artist, this is not a review, but rather a description of the exhibit. - Mike Rhode

The Peale Museum is in a classical 3-story building close to Baltimore’s city hall, and the exhibit fills three rooms on the second floor. As you enter the building, you see the steps have been decorated so the risers show Dale’s COVID-era project of painting / decorating / illustrating an empty roll of toilet paper per day.  Towards one side of the steps is the curator’s statement, which begins,

Stepping into Baltimore-based cartoonist Barbara Dale’s studio, Peale chief curator Jeffrey Kent was truly awed by the experience as he witnessed Barbara’s effortless utilization of various mediums in her creative practice, including pastel chalk, lithographs, ceramics, paint, pencil, ink, etc., etc., etc..

Barbara Dale’s artistic journey began with a modest inheritance of $500 from her grandfather. With this seed money, she ventured into the world of printing and created Dale Cards in 1979—a line of alternative greeting cards known for their wit and edginess.

Dale firmly holds the belief that commercial art is just as valuable as fine art, considering both to be equally significant creative practices without a clear distinction between them. In this exhibition, you will encounter ten thought-provoking themes, each approached in a unique manner that is sure to ignite meaningful conversations and provoke laughter. With her unparalleled perspective, Barbara explores a wide range of topics, including women’s issues, the fragility of life and the life cycle, food and sex, commentary on art itself, character-driven narratives and relationships, self-portraits, the juxtaposition of objects, political and social justice commentary, the exploration of reality versus illusion, and the similarities between commercial and fine art.

Kent’s layout of the exhibit reflects this. A small hallway links the rooms, and on one side has an exhibit illustration done by Dale while the other wall is artwork with found images of hands and a label asks “What is Real & What Isn’t?” The largest room is full of Dale’s recent work – self-portraits, COVID response art (including over 200 toilet paper rolls repurposed into art and displayed in one long row and a monitor playing a news story about them), women’s rights material (including an older large lithograph detailing the circumstances of her marriage in divorce in a silent comic strip), large ceramic vessels (almost amphora) painted to look like women’s bodies, and an older set of maternity mugs that depicted a stylized pregnant woman’s abdomen.

The second largest room displays Dale’s commercial work including the greeting cards and calendars which made her one of the most successful women cartoonists of the late 20^th century. Viewers of a certain age will recognize Dale’s working women character. Dale’s penchant for sexual humor is on display in this room, in the greeting cards but also in a section of paintings labelled Food & Sex. Other paintings are of Characters, and there is a significant amount of her work with found objects, including old photographs, cardboard rolls and packing material, and junk mail. Three pieces in this section show how successful the greeting card line was with one ad noting, “75,000,000 sold so far!” Dale’s comic strip, The Stanley Family, is also highlighted.

The final small room consists of Dale’s charity work, reflected in stories in Parade and Life magazines, and her recent anti-Trump artwork. Throughout the entire exhibit are quotes from Dale’s peers as well as excerpts from a recent article “’Working Woman’: Barbara Dale, Cartoonist and Fine Artist,” by former Library of Congress curator Martha H. Kennedy, Persimmon Tree (Summer 2023): https://persimmontree.org/summer-2023/working-woman/

The exhibit is free to visit, but donations are requested.

With her permission, the following photographs give a very complete overview of the exhibit.

 

 

  

 

Hallway:

 

 

 

Largest room of self-portaits, COVID-era works, and ceramics: 

 

 

The toilet paper roll COVID project:

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Wayne Nicolette, from Xibitz demonstrating mounting of toilet paper roll art

Dale and cartoonist Mike Jenkins

The second room:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Third room: