Subject to Change

Mnd My Hat (2010)-Installation view

Subject to Change (2010)

Video, digital prints, mixed media works

Exhibition Context

Subject to Change
RA Gallery, MAP Publika, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 2010

Curatorial Perspective — Sharon Chin

November 2010

I first encountered Amir through digital connections—emails, blogs, Facebook—and an unexpected package in my mailbox, containing his works. From these thin, mostly electronic threads, a conversation began, woven from curiosity, mutual recognition, and perhaps the earliest strands of friendship.

Though I’ve never met him in person, I know Amir’s layered journey. Born in Kelantan and Johor, educated in the U.S., and now based in Denmark with his family, his sense of self is exquisitely malleable. This “putty-like” identity surfaces in routine moments—crossing a street, buying bread—each a subtle cultural experiment.

What does it mean to be Malaysian today? Perhaps “interesting,” perhaps “scary.” Since the 2008 general elections, political upheaval has seeped into everyday life. Our collective foundations feel fluid—social contracts, institutions, even identity markers once seen as immutable.

Labels like Bumiputera, Si botol, Si mata sepet are pulled taut, echoing a management of identity that mirrors colonial histories. Amir enters this space—asking the core questions: Who am I? Who are we? Not to resolve them, but to open up their possibilities.

He insists he isn’t just a “Malaysian artist.” “I am just an artist,” he says, “born in Malaysia, with a global curiosity.” And that precision matters because it insists on junction—not fixity.

His video Mind My Hat plays like a fragmented self-portrait. Wearing the headgear of a sultan, Tok Guru Nik Aziz, a Jew, Uncle Sam, and others, his face dissolves into a montage of identities—an internet-ready glitch of digital paste-ups. The result feels disposable, yet lingering.

This digital mash-up is not nostalgic; it’s subversive. Pop culture’s detritus becomes form, resonating Warhol’s legacy of commodity and mass reproduction—but flipping it into self-portraiture.

Amir’s practice feels like that early Pop articulation: the image is mutable, fleeting, yet powerful. His digital prints splice together history, media, advertising, personal archives—flattened into new, instantaneous fairytales written for the Facebook-YouTube-Twitter generation.

One work, Status, repackages Facebook updates from his own network—fragments of lived identity reassembled as art. Another, Mr Prime Minister, looks deceptively like a painting—but is actually outsourced to a Chinese studio, printed with digital precision. These quiet subversions make us question: What is precious today? What do we choose to value?

In a world of disposable media, how do we handle persistent images and language? Today's controversies—much like the cartoons of the Prophet or religious debates about “Allah”—remind us that representation still burns. Amir prompts: what do we define as sacred, and what do we share?

But his greatest interventions are embodied. At the Danish embassy—an impersonal space defined by visa bureaucracy—Amir staged a countergesture: he invited conversation. Like A Prayer gathered anonymous prayers from around the world, posted for all to read—a subtle reclamation of the digital public sphere.

He also interviewed Malaysian art icons—Redza Piyadasa, Jeri Azahari, Rahime Haron—not for spectacle, but for listening. These dialogues are Acts—not surfaces for manipulation, but for connection. Through these exchanges, Amir traces new roads for meaning in art and in life.

— Sharon Chin, Curator and Artist