Last Saturday morning we saw two excellent exhibitions at the National Art Gallery.

Choong Kam Kow's is entitled "Cross Culture, Trans Era" (which sounds a lot better in Malay: Merentasi Budaya, Melintasi Era).

It's a Bildungsroman, tracing the artist's progress from beautiful but cautious depictions of Taiwan and Kinta, through the cultural assault of New York (in which the idea that "identity coexists with globalization" stood out prominently for me), through a blocky abstract phase (which I didn't like), to several gloriously coloured and textured series of festivals, dragons, and kung fu, which brought the artist triumphantly back to his roots.



Then there was Unpack -- Repack: A Tribute to Ismail Hashim. How could I NOT go to an exhibition with a title like Unpack -- Repack...

The exhibition is a journey into Hashim's private life, and it turns out he sees life a little like I do: he loves the little everyday details, the little quirky, grungy things that make a lived environment. By embracing the details, whether conventionally beautiful or not, we learn not to pity and blame and judge, but to marvel and give thanks...



That Saturday evening we went to listen to the MPO playing Mahler's Second Symphony. Truly, I've never heard anything quite like this. The richness of the tone colour, the inventiveness of the motifs, the sheer SOUND of over 100 musicians, over 100 singers, and an organ...

It's about death and life. So it's both terrifying and inspiring. I felt that old German Romanticism wrapping its tendrils round me again, as it had in my 20s. All those BIG ideas, all that longing, all that outpouring, all that ambiguity...

On Sunday afternoon we went up to KLPAC to see Shakespeare Wallah. The setting is post-Raj India, where the British no longer call the shots, and the Shakespearian performances of a down-at-heel band of British players are losing out to Bollywood. (In fact, just 11 years after this movie was made, the ultimate Hindi movie cinema, Raj Mandir, was being opened in Jaipur.)



Times had irrevocably changed, to the chagrin even of some Indians.

The movie, lightly but poignantly, explores the tension between cultures, histories, art forms, and gender expectations.

This juxtaposition of art events was quite unplanned. But the themes seemed viscerally connected. Life is a journey. Life is about change and learning. Life is about learning to see things differently. Even death is not the end, but the beginning of another journey. Adaptation is crucial.

So many cliches, I suppose, yet so much inescapable truth...