CONFESSION time. I have a love-hate relationship with Kuala Lumpur. The city has taken 14 years of my adult life but I am still torn, unsure if it has my undying loyalty. The tussle is between a deep impulse to run away and longing to finally put down roots. I came in the boom years of the mid-90s when KL and its denizens seemed puffed-up with material success.
Konkrit Jungle — by Liew Kung Yu
Everything could be forgiven or explained away by what seemed like the steady march of our economic success. In my first year I would take long walks through the city. I would begin in the late evening at Dataran Merdeka and walk the full length of Jalan Ampang back home to the hilly edges of the Klang Valley, with its panoramic view of the city’s skyline.
I took many notes on encounters and of objects from the streets that were still unfamiliar to me. Coming from 14 years in the ultra-efficient tropical citystate of Singapore, the adjustment process required me to unlearn as much as learn many habits. I shed some with delight and embraced others reluctantly.
Then came the Asian financial crisis of the late 90s and factional fighting in the government that did so much to unravel the certainties the city clung to. I watched with fascination as politics, rather than economics, provided the slogans of the times.
Unable to resist the temptation, I joined those eager for change and inhaled my share of tear gas. I even harvested some cans, which I then donated to an artist friend who used them in his work. For me the tear gas can, which I picked while still hot and noxious, is the cherished debris from a city suddenly shocked into recognising its own failures.
With the turnaround in the economy, the city returned to many of its old ways but I watched, more detached, both the old excesses as well as new possibilities. The hideous and grandiose architecture of both personal and corporate hubris has returned. But that in itself cannot erase those moments in the life of the city that redeems, that makes a city special and vital.
Young, hip people serving food to the city’s poor signalling new forms of activism; recent migrant communities establishing supermarkets and restaurants bringing along with it unfamiliar scripts on signage into view; new cultural spaces where art struggles to give form to new ideas and attitudes. Almost all of this is done without the aid of the State, which seems ill equipped, in a bureaucratic sense, to do anything more than to hollow out the fashionable slogans of the times: from ISOs to Excellance to Glocal.
These empty slogans clog the arteries of our city. They numb the mind. And ultimately, change nothing. I want this city to be better but at the moment I am at a loss at what can be done. I think I should fish out my notebook and perhaps then I can view the city again with fresh eyes. And see possibilities in all that has become too familiar.
● Sharaad Kuttan will be moderating a panel discussion: “Examining the aesthetic choices of our urban environment” at Galeri Petronas, Level 3, Suria KLCC on Saturday at 4 pm. It is being held in conjunction with the exhibition, “Cadangan-Cadangan Untuk Negaraku: New Photographic Works” by Liew Kung Yu.
On the panel will be design consultant William Harald-Wong, architect Kevin Mark Low and public art promoter Azhar Ahmad. The discussion will bring a range of perspectives from architecture to design, to explore issues concerning the development of our urban environment, from the selection of public sculptures to urban planning and architecture, including the relationship between urban communities and the space that they inhabit.
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