Coinciding with the launch of a pothole-reporting mobile application by the Petaling Jaya city council, this exhibition plays upon the common gripe of Malaysian road users, and applies a sometimes-effective metaphor to urban and national concerns. Photographs take the form of post-internet images, although its crude manipulation denote an amateurish execution. In ‘New Technique?’, a giant plaster is crafted to emphasize the analogy, the exaggerated object posing a visually potent motif that can be used for anything from graffiti to statement posters to advertising. The state of the nation is represented as a punctured race track, while more immediate concerns like golf diplomacy and water shortages, are doctored into photographs.
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| New Technique? (2015) |
Reference to local colloquialisms are pretentious with the exception being ‘Grandfather’s road’, its chalk drawing imbuing a comic element to a favourite rant, frequently blurted on the relatively less holey Jalan Tun Razak. ‘Fair race?’ depicts the advantage of being a snail over a racing car, the picture more useful to the viewer who exercises humility in reading the political inference. Showcasing a map where the potholes were found, You Sef could do well to report these existing evidence via the CleanMyCity app. Maintaining a structurally flawed infrastructure is unsustainable, which leads to the question, do we need such infrastructure in the first place?
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| Grandfather's road (2015) |