Elephant Utopia is a wall-bound installation consisting of 78 painted panels. The piece represents a continuation of the artist’s concern with the urban architectural fabric of his native city, portraying, in the visual language of geometric abstraction, the façades of Kuala Lumpur’s built environment and – in particular – its low-cost housing. The work is a commentary on architectural construction and its relationship to societal perceptions of progress and development in Malaysia. It references the history and idioms of Western abstraction – from Mondrian to the post-painterly school – as well as the geometric arabesques of Islamic visual culture, while gesturing simultaneously at everyday reality. The piece, which is composed of numerous, smaller modular panels, also recalls the Fordist division of labor and mechanical reproduction that emerged with modernization and modernism in the early years of the twentieth century, and which thereafter spread to Southeast Asia with the onset of independence for much of the region. Elephant Utopia, simultaneously a painting and a sculpture, calls to mind the skyline of downtown KL and characterizes present-day structures as the ‘white elephants’ of modernity; visually appealing yet devoid of any real cultural and progressive significance.
