Loss and Liberation
‘Surrender’, 1997, Oil on canvas
One of the few works that survived the total loss I experienced at Jaguar Motors. This piece was saved because it was kept by Sanna during my visit to Sweden.
Letting Go: Beyond the Jaguar Studio
Introduction
In 2001, Malaysian artist Amir Zainorin experienced a profound rupture when his artworks, documents, and personal archives were removed without notice from the Jaguar Motors studio in Kuala Lumpur. What remained was almost nothing—only fragments of a practice, including Surrender (1997) and Double W (1999).
This sudden erasure did more than strip away material history; it destabilized trust, memory, and identity. Yet from this collapse emerged a quieter, more enduring shift—toward impermanence, resilience, and a redefinition of what it means to hold, and to let go. What began as loss gradually transformed into a lifelong meditation on freedom.
The Studio Without Warning
I lived in a spacious bungalow on Jalan Yap Kwan Seng, just a five-minute walk from KLCC. The house doubled as an artist studio owned by Jaguar Motors, their showroom sitting next door like a polished counterpart to our mess of making.
Inside, the space was expansive—generous enough to hold everything I wanted to try. Paintings, prints, collages, woodcuts, monoprints, assemblages, drawings. I worked alongside Johari Said, a print artist, and Azhar Mohd, a sculptor working in marble.
It felt like a fragile sanctuary. A place where something was slowly taking shape.
I had brought everything with me—my earlier works, family photographs from Melaka, documents, traces of a life I was trying to understand through art. It was one of the most productive periods I had known.
And then—I left, briefly. Just a short trip to Perhentian Island.
When I returned, the studio was no longer mine.
Construction workers occupied the space. Renovation had already begun. My belongings, they told me, had been removed—left on the roadside. Days earlier.
No notice. No message.
At the Jaguar showroom, the staff confirmed it plainly: everything had been cleared.
Just like that.
Erasure
What followed was not just loss, but a kind of disappearance.
Paintings, prints, drawings, notebooks, photographs. My passport. Diplomas. My birth certificate.
Everything that marked who I had been—gone.
Three days later, a truck came and took what remained from the roadside. Whatever survived exposure didn’t survive that.
I kept asking myself why.
It wasn’t the eviction itself. That, I could have accepted.
It was the way it happened. The silence. The absence of care.
Echoes of Earlier Fractures
The loss did not stand alone.
It reopened something older.
Before this, I had built a business with someone I trusted deeply. We had plans, ambitions—shared dreams. But it unraveled. Promises shifted. Words dissolved. Trust collapsed.
So when the studio was erased, it wasn’t just about objects.
It was about people. About belief. About the quiet question that lingered afterward:
How do you trust anyone again?
Even those who laugh with you. Eat with you. Call you brother.
And yet, not everything closed.
There were still people like Jeri.
He didn’t owe me anything. But he welcomed me—shared his knowledge, his space, his presence. He taught me how to stretch a canvas, but more than that, he restored something less visible.
A sense that not everyone takes.
That some people simply give.
Three Days of Silence
I returned to my mother’s house in Melaka and stayed in my room for three days.
No words. No movement. Just the weight of absence.
It felt like the end of the world.
No photographs. No journals. No evidence of who I had been.
And then, on the third day, something shifted.
Not dramatically. Not heroically.
Just a quiet thought:
What the heck. I can start again.
Beginning Again
The first thing I made was a drawing of my mother.
In that moment, I remembered—she had always been there. Quietly, without asking for anything. Carrying her own sense of not belonging, yet continuing anyway.
That quiet resilience—maybe that’s what stayed.
Not the objects. Not the archive.
Just the thread.
Thin, sometimes invisible—but still there.
Learning to Let Go
The loss changed the way I work.
Before, I held on tightly. There were works I refused to sell, even when offered. I believed in keeping, in preserving.
After Jaguar, something loosened.
Not completely—but enough.
I began to understand that attachment could shift. That objects—artworks even—did not have to be permanent to be meaningful.
Unconsciously, my work started to move toward the temporary. The fragile. The fleeting.
I learned to hold things more lightly.
And in that loosening, something unexpected appeared:
A kind of freedom.
Trust, Slowly
I still believe in trust.
But now, I let it grow slowly.
Like a plant—you water it, give it time, watch how it bends toward the light.
I no longer assume permanence—in people, in spaces, in systems.
I work with openness, but also with care.
I give—but I keep a small part for myself.
Not out of fear.
Out of learning.
Art as Staying
I didn’t find my way into art in any clear, deliberate way.
I fell into it.
And then I stayed.
Or got stuck.
Hard to say.
But maybe art was never about solving anything.
Maybe it was about staying—with something long enough for it to change on its own.
Patience disguised as defiance.
Or maybe just stubbornness.
After Jaguar
Looking back, Jaguar was not just a loss of things.
It was a stripping away.
Of certainty. Of trust. Of accumulation.
What remained was smaller, but more durable.
A way of working that accepts disappearance.
A way of living that holds lightly.
And an understanding that identity does not live in objects alone.
You can lose almost everything.
But if even one thread remains—
a memory, a belief, a person who held you once—
then you are not starting from nothing.
You are simply beginning again.
‘Double W’, 1999, Acrylic and collage on canvas
Another work that survived the Jaguar loss. Created while visiting Sanna in Gothenburg, Sweden.
