(Low resolution image taken on a phone camera)
Sin Mui Chong-Martin is a Worthing based artist, originally from Malaysia with her roots in China. Her work is varied and defies being placed in a single category.
This entrancing print takes for its subject the highest mountain in Malaysia - Gunung Kinabalu. Like many mountains around the world Kinabalu is a holy place, and is focal to Sin Mui's memories of her homeland. She has created the image using a photopolymer plate (a resin-based plate which reacts to light) and has completed the print with hand-colouring.
Holiness is an interesting concept, and makes a fascinating subject in art. The popular understanding of the word means being devout or god-like, but the reality is quite different. Holiness is about being set apart from the ordinary and about being within a presence - a presence which is indeed Good and True and Beautiful. And Holiness is far from safe; it has a dangerous quality about it, which one approaches with caution and reverence.
Sin Mui has presented this holy place to us, rising out of the horizon, surrounded by the fertile grasslands and meadows of the Kinabalu Park World Heritage Site. She has also lined the bottom of the main image with a series of seven boxes containing studies of the fruits and flowers typical of that region - Slipper Orchids, Pitcher Plants and the Rafflesia Plant.
I had the chance to talk to Sin Mui about this piece, and she told me how for her it represents memories. The indigenous plant life, the boxes of the market places, and the ever-present Mountain visible from so much of the peninsula, are all there. The slightly blurred and incomplete result of the printing technique emphasises the nature of remembered sights and experiences.
Do you think at first that the line of floral species in their boxes seems out of place somehow? Well it might if this were a simple landscape: a representation of a parcel of land. But this is more. This is a memory of being in the presence of holiness. Sin Mui told me that as a small child she received a Roman Catholic schooling, but for most of her life her religious culture had been Buddhist. So I am quite sure that the fact those boxes put me in mind of the predella paintings around Italianate altarpieces had nothing to do with her artistic intentions. And yet that's exactly what they remind me of. Those small images which expound on the subject of the main altar image, or populate the Court of Heaven indicated in the main panel. A happy coincidence.
This particular image, and more of Sin Mui's beautiful work, can be seen at Worthing Museum and Art Gallery until 21 December 2019.
smcmartin.60@gmail.com
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