Yee I-Lann at A+ Works of Artwork

How a lot of our notion of the world is formed by the way in which we measure it? Is there ever an satisfactory measurement for affection? These are among the many questions one grapples with in Yee I-Lann’s exhibition “Allom! Amatai! Allom!,” certainly one of a collection or 5 concurrent occasions timed to coincide with the artist’s touring survey “Borneo Coronary heart.” The gallery present gathers three photomedia essays stemming from Yee’s latest collaborations with Bajau Laut weavers and different Bornean Indigenous communities. The primary, “rasa saying”, 2014–21, manifests as a constellation of dye-sublimation prints on navy-tinted aluminum. From afar, the photographs resemble a cryptic alphabet of neon-orange hieroglyphs, inducing palinopsia by the juxtaposition of complementary colours. Upon nearer inspection, this script shape-shifts right into a pair of arms that hug, wrestle, and squeeze. These limbs bear no figuring out markers, merely serving as an undiluted image of each love and battle. With just a little creativeness, one can decipher the coded messages beneath these arm-scribbles, such because the snatches of affection poems, soaked with eager for intimacy, that opens the fourth chapter of the collection. The title means “to really feel love” or “the sensation of affection” in Bahasa Malaysia, a translation that subtly bleeds into the brightly printed sheets, with their encrypted poetry and their tinge of phantasm. Maybe it’s on the intersection of those parts that we are able to doubtlessly learn to measure love: by the size of an embrace.

Within the seven-chapter “Measuring Mission”, 2021–22, Yee explores two techniques of worlding: the egalitarian tikar (mat), an invite to collect that’s calibrated to the physique of its weaver, and the regnant meja (desk), which inflicts its inorganic geometries on our bodies in proximity. In the meantime, Untitled Self-portrait, 2017, weaves collectively threads of visual-kinesthetic reminiscences from Yee’s inventive evolution. The work pays specific consideration to the artist’s 2016 homecoming from Kuala Lumpur again to the Borneo heartland—a testomony to her dedication to collective decolonization and her open embrace of Indigenous methods of experiencing the world round us.

— Hung Duong