Puteri 3 (Ulek Mayang Series)

2018 - Sculpture (Sculpture)
94 x 55 x 24 cm

Anne Samat’s Puteri 3 references Ulek Mayang, a classical Malay dance, performed in a ritualistic pre-Islamic context. It is based on the myth of a princess from the sea who steals the soul of a fisherman she falls in love with, leaving his body lifeless. A battle ensues for the soul of the fisherman, between a shaman (bomoh) trying to bring back the spirit into the earthly flesh and the princess aided by five of her sisters. The undecided struggle only ends when the more senior seventh sister intervenes and restores the cosmic balance and order of things disturbed by love. She thus separates the sea worlds from the earthly ones, allowing the spirit of the fisherman to leave the depths of the ocean and the thralls of love and to return to his mortal body. As a sign of gratitude towards the elder princess, the fisherman’s community offers coloured rice to the sea in an elaborate ceremony of which Ulek Mayang was a part of. This practice-turned-tradition continued until very recently when it was threatened by the rising Islamization movement that has opposed many other cultural forms arising from a syncretic Malay tradition.

An exuberant and precise sculptor, Anne Samat blends the aesthetic of international queer cultures – which she proudly represents as a transgender activist – with various textile and bricolage influences from South East Asia and beyond. She queers tradition with originality and confidence, creating figures that defy any fixed categories, be it of species, gender, or human versus sacred or fantastical figures. She navigates regimes of referentiality with grace and employs resources that range from drag queen ingeniousness to ancient Malay songket pageantry. Using intricately-woven textile, synthetic fibres, rattan sticks and other found objects, she creates colourful and elaborate totems inspired by ancient tales of her ancestry, evoking her familial lineage and the different cultures in Malaysia. She puts together found objects and elements with great intricacy, from indigenous natural materials to cheap industrial artefacts, creating striking totemic appearances that transcend time and geographies, but which nevertheless act as both metaphors for composite, intersectional, and empowered personal identities, as well as for the hybridity of Malaysian culture and its many influences and constitutive communities. In the face of increasing religious conservatism in the artist’s native country, her works with their figuration, unabashed vanity, and references certainly gain an extravagantly subversive quality.

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