Shrineshare: Weird worlds in a box of rubber stamps
Critical weirdness shortage on earth
Hello from too hot days, and nights like a devil's armpit. Yesterday some rain arrived and we could finally turn the fans blasting at level 5 down to 4. The garden seems happy though; durian and avocado are getting fat and heavy in the heat. Everyone - shrews, musangs, lizards, monkeys, us - is on fruit watch.
Ok, a bunch of big updates first, then a fun Signal about weird rubber stamps!
It feels like we just had a Shrineshare show, but I realize my last newsletter was two months ago. We have another round of shrine-sharing this weekend, 24 - 25 May, courtesy of our friends RogueArt and 293, who are co-hosting this edition of Shrineshare: Section 17, PJ - in the city! I've already planned my outfits.
Inspired by the CRT (cathode-ray tube) computer monitors of the 80s and 90s
Speaking of two months ago, Zedeck wrote a scene report about Portal Party. Grateful to everyone who came to Port Dickson. The beach ceremony seemed to set off a series of long-awaited and urgent life changes, which partly explains my silence since March.
Also this weekend, the launch of Kehidupan Seterusnya: Sejarah Lisan 13 Mei at KL International Book Fair. I'll be at the Gerakbudaya booth on 12 - 1pm on Sunday, 25 May. It's a true honor to have made the cover art for this vital book of oral history about the May 13, 1969 racial riot that continues to shadow Malaysia's past, present, and future.
Thrilled about this great interview with Prince Claus Fund about art, activism, and being part of last year's CAREC (Cultural and Artistic Responses to the Environmental Crisis) program. It's an important record of where I stand currently with my practice and thinking.
"In the field of action, art and activism exist as separate positions for me. These positions engender different modes of thinking and speaking; they require different skill sets."
I can show you the weird, shining shimmering splennndid
As I'm writing, Zedeck is busy making shrines with rubber stamps and ink pads. This will be the second printing of Shrineshare - 16 hand-stamped artworks collected in a folder; 16 drawings from artists across Malaysia, Thailand, the UK and the US, all responding to the question: in times of crisis, what do you hold sacred?
I'm not sure if you've noticed, but since the rise of AI summarys and chatbots on the net, web search has seriously degraded. I realized it when I Googled 'weird rubber stamps' while researching for Shrineshare, and got page after page of blandly commercial 'live, laugh, love' type results. Florals, teacups, cartoon dachshunds... all fine, but where was the weird stuff? I would know! I've regularly searched 'weird rubber stamps' on the internet for as long as I can remember.
Like this chess stamp set you can use to send a chess problem to someone you want to dominate... or seduce! intellectually. A wildly romantic idea, and I don't even play chess.
Still on the subject of seduction, how about this Ink Pad Orgy stamp set by Tomi Ungerer?
More about Tomi Ungerer
This architectural stamp set lets you build and rebuild a neighborhood with the most recognizable parts of itself. This is such a tender ode to a specific place.
"Paper Neighborhood" by Steam Whistle. Check out these landscape architecture tree stamps!
So are eki stamps, found at train stations across Japan. Here's some stamps I collected during an art exchange trip to Tokyo in 2009.
And this is a tender ode to the kiwi fruit. The sweetness of attention to each visual component - a slice of kiwi, in 4 parts!
Ok, no one does weird rubber stamps like Fluxus artists. "The New Fluxus Symbol Set" - this... this is what I'm talking about. It's a set of symbols. Then it's a set of rubber stamps. Then it's a performance and a short film. Then it's stamped on bread with food coloring. Then the bread is cut out and vacuum sealed in a plastic sheet (!!!).
"The New Fluxus Symbol Set"
There's something magical about capturing a spontaneous scribble in a rubber stamp. Fiona Allison Duncan turned signed book messages into rubber stamps for Loves A Loves Me (2018), an exhibition about books and their readers.
Still inspired by the embracing warmth of this show years later. I say this as someone who hates books in art installations.
When I was a kid, I became obsessed with this Little Twin Stars stamp set, which came with name cards you could customize. Four stamps and two ink pads in a tiny plastic suitcase contained a whole world - echantment-filled, modular, interactive, reproduceable... shareable.
Maybe my destiny was written in that stamp set, and all I'm ever doing as an artist is trying to get back to that wondrously tactile sense of potentiality. AI is a rounding technology - in order to predict the right answers (understand this: AI doesn't 'think'; it doesn't 'create'), LLMs mathematically compute huge amounts of data and calculate outcomes towards the mean, i.e the middle of the curve. But weirdness lives close to the edges - it's not really useful for anything, and so could become anything. Weirdness is human, and therefore sacred.
From my first solo exhibition Boats and Bridges (2005). Left: "Benua", rubber stamped drawing, 51 x 74cm. Right: "Boats", site-specific installation of a giant word search on the floor
Sharon Chin, "Weeds in a Box" (2013), a box of rubber stamps featuring Malaysian weeds
This has been Signal 010. You are warmly invited to Shrineshare: Section 17, PJ this weekend! There will be rubber stamps, and fire. Also, please...
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In celebration of sharonchin.com getting fixed and back online, here's a selection of links from my own beloved website:
This banger of an interview with artist and Bundusan Books founder Jesse Joy. "Blood flows through you. Practices ground you... You can’t pass down blood like you can pass down your practice. Blood isn’t everything. What counts is – being the person who says yes."
This one is for the daughters.
"A daughter on a quest can free us all. She changes the river she is descended from, she shows us where to go... Every language is a daughter."
This interview with Zikri Rahman, in which I answer how I want to be remembered: "ingatilah saya sebagai sebatang sungai yang kecil namun deras, yang mengalir jauh melewati semua tempat, terutamanya buat yang rendah dalam serba sederhana." (remember me as a river, small but swift, who went all kinds of places, especially the low ones.)
And finally, not a sharonchin.com link, but a long conversation between 3 writers, in which they disclose their book advances. "I’m addicted to swapping financial intel, it’s the most moral form of gossip."
Amen, and with that, I'll leave you with a blind item: I recently turned down giving an artist talk at the branch of a private art museum in the city, one that charges entry fees, because they wouldn't pay me, but would I accept one of their publications as a token of appreciation? Friends, I know it's a hard world out there for artists, but some good rules still apply: don't do free work for rich people.
