At certain moments Azlan’s palimpsests/collages oscillate, flap and quiver on transparent scaffolds of structure and order, at other moments, of metaphor and symbol, still at another, on a framework of simple objects and perspectives, in aerial views or suspended between the rigid delineations of urban planning drawings. One seems always to be caught unawares. And yet, these components flow together, beyond and around the gridlock of historical limitations set up by our postmodern regressions to a place where myth, intuition, and empathy hold sway, but also in sync with the historical record. (Not so incidentally, “Kuala Lumpur” means “muddy confluence.”)

 

It’s as if the medical imaging specialist (Azlan is also a diagnostic radiographer) has transcended the useful limits of science and seeks those essences that cannot be seen, reproduced, or reduced to mere anatomical notation or societal prognosis.  

 

By letting go of the limitations of the merely functional, and yet keeping them close  and at the ready, Azlan is able to weld logic to intuition, memory to history, dream to purposeful functionality and into maps of collective consciousness, thereby producing x-ray-like leaves of local habitation, forensic documentations of failed or aspiring humanity.

 

Macro- and micro-textures are flattened together as though in a bacteriologist’s Petri dish or beneath a glass slide. Meanwhile, branches of trees are rendered as veins of a single leaf pressed in a book. 

 

Technique and vision have been wed, beyond the photographer’s usual bag of tricks (selective focus, double/triple exposures, blurs, spills, silhouettes, scratches, scrapes,  dull or overexposures, reticulation, staining (in Azlan’s case, with coffee), to realize a vision that includes newsprint headlines, etchings, layers of old documents, tracings, faded urban street maps, negatives, drawings, handwriting, in several languages including both Malaysian and Arabic, all gracefully floating together with the weight of memory. Whether it is ours or his or those who have already passed or are yet to be born remains unimportant.

 

 

 

Not only does Azlan not process his images digitally, he calculates and maneuvers by hand each stage of the creative procedure in order to actualise a pre-existing idea. Even the paper he uses for his prints is developed using a special process. After having collected leftover coffee from his workplace cafeteria each day, and once he has a sufficient quantity of it over a two or three week period, he dilutes it with photographic chemicals.

 

There is a John Dos Passos-like quality to the gathering of evidence by way of collage in order to help tell each story. Nothing is shunned: neither culture nor politics, nor art, nature, work, class, poverty, wealth, weather, traffic, bridges, power lines, nor seemingly simple and disconnected objects, in one instance, a hat (a khaki communist cap embellished with a red star, the image of the cap juxtaposed with those symbols of financially induced globalism, the Petronas Twin Towers; in another there is a boot hovering in the sky, perched as though to stamp “on a face forever” in Orwell’s language, his “vision of the future,” or perhaps simply serving as a handmade example of an anonymous sweatshop worker’s toil; finally, there is the intrusion of technology by way of the tilted placement of an airliner in a wan sky. Indeed, color has been drained from these veils of perspective, these sheaths of documentation, these “proofs,” evoking a mood and a sample of modernity vitiated of life force. 

 

The strategically randomized placement of these objects is fraught with meaning, and brings to mind Alphonse de Lamartine’s line: “Objets inanimés, avez-vous donc une âme qui s’attache à notre âme et la force d’aimer?” Nostalgia plays it’s low-key role as well, but not in any way that remotely approaches the destructively sentimental.