What’s the first thing you notice when you look at this picture? Is it the colourful nyonya kebaya tops, or the fact that only one young woman is looking at the camera? Or is it which social media app interface is being used?
Everything about this painting is playful, yet deliberate. Yap Toong Wei is fascinated with the fusion and collision between traditional culture and modern values made possible in the digital age. Visual languages and ideas cheerfully collide here. The medium of digital photography is captured in the medium of painting – this is an old-school portrait of a new style self-portrait – the smartphone selfie (or, more fashionably, “wefie”). In wearing Peranakan Chinese dress, itself part of an older “fusion” culture, these Gen Z subjects embrace the aesthetics of their great-grandparents’ generation but they project a very contemporary attitude, each trying out different poses, performing the different “set” expressions of female personalities online, in a “V” configuration for a choreographed effect in the wide-angled lens. The vibrant colours and complex patterns of their clothes sing out against the dull neutral modern-day city backdrop.
These young women are clearly having fun expressing themselves in this way, adapting a unique Malaysian heritage style, signalling a revitalization and reinvigoration of Malaysians’ sense of the past. Even as they celebrate nyonya dress, though, they’re probably feeling quite lucky they’re not living the strictured and demanding lives of the women who would have worn it originally.
The image appears as a message from a contact. And look, we’ve already “hearted” it.