Al-Khuzairie Ali’s Binoculars borrows its title from the optical instrument and symbolizes the artist’s act of looking into the distant future with his eighteen ceramic works, which in turn consist of three discernable series: Reborn, Mind Machine, and Xerox.
Across the three, forms take on space-age guises as body parts mingle with machine components and human flesh fraternizes with nuts and bolts. And altogether, the humble, utilitarian medium of ceramic is given a futuristic facelift to represent Khuzairie’s observations of socio-cultural changes caused by our ever-increasing dependence on science and technology.
Khuzairie, a ceramics major from Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM), studied the basics of the trade with Ham Rabeah, one of the country’s pioneering ceramic artists. The young artist, however, credits Umibaizurah Mahir – or Umi as she is casually known – for opening his eyes to the possibilities of ceramic as a medium for contemporary art.
His relationship with Umi began in 2008 with a two-month stint at Umi’s Patisatu studio and it continued after Umi spotted Khuzairie’s artworks in a group exhibition the following year and invited him to be her assistant.
This apprentice-mentor relationship continues till today and we can detect some parallels between the works of both artists. Khuzairie has, for example, borrowed his mentor’s trick of assembling or moulding ceramic pieces with other parts and he also shares Umi’s penchant for quirky or unusual moulds.
In the Xerox series, for example, we see sections of human torsos. The Mind Machine works, on the other hand, feature heads fused with various mechanical bits. The latter – ingredients used throughout Binocular and added after the firing process - consist of found objects, including discarded computer parts and pieces from sewing machines. Certain works from the Mind Machine series even, ambitiously, feature build-in LED lights that bring the ceramic pieces to life.
These added elements collectively makeup the biggest difference between mentor and mentee: whilst Umi injects her femininity and female identity into her works, Khuzairie infuses his male identity and espouses discernibly masculine themes.
The physical differences between Umi and Khuzairie’s artworks duly match this contrast with Umi’s ceramic works tending towards patterns and bright colours and Khuzairie’s appearing sparser and more restrained.
In short, Khuzairie’s works bear his own unique stamp. His personal identity can be detected in his works and his portrayal of robots, cyborgs, and xerox in Binoculars disclose a youth imbued with video games and sci-fi novels, illustrating a generation that grew up with films like Terminator or Stargate.
The artist defines his youth as the “half-half” generation, a term that refers to the balance young adults like him had between wholesome activities and technology. Video games were interspersed with healthy pursuits in his time, but technology has steadily been increasing its grip on today’s youth; handheld video games, he observes, have become more appealing than the great outdoors.
Khuzairie’s works embody this change and remark on how these forms of entertainment – indeed, science and technology as a whole - detach us from each other.
Each of his eighteen works feature solitary figures or fragmented body parts, illustrating the isolation that technology brings, and the artist’s choice of palette - whether it is the artificial and inhuman metallic colours, muted earthenware, or crackled glaze – seems to signify a cheerless and despondent loss of humanity.
Khuzairie’s artworks are, therefore, red flags or necessary questions for our modern age. The artist quotes statistics from the Scientific American Magazine for his Mind Machine series (By about 2020 a $1,000 computer will at least match the processing power of the human brain. By 2029 the software for intelligence will have been largely mastered, and the average personal computer will be equivalent to 1,000 brains), and on his Xerox series – torsos with mechanical parts to represent the manipulation of the human body through cosmetic surgery, body building, or even cloning - the artist says, “I even think there is a similarity between ‘body’ and ‘machine’. Here, the modern human is like an assembly of organs that can be inter-changeably constructed or reconstructed, just like a machine’s spare parts.”
Finally, Khuzairie’s Reborn series, featuring robots that aptly resemble marionette dolls with movable parts, seem to contain the artist’s greatest lament: that technology, for all its good in reducing “the burden of human life”, can equally bring about war and suffering.
The contrasts between these thoughts on the future and the very old medium (ceramics date back to prehistoric times) are interesting and pose a dialectical opposition between the message and the medium. And, the artist’s attempts to marry different media, a provoking go at the unconventional.
Khuzairie, whose inspiration also comes from artists Lee Bul, Shigenki, Gerard Justin Ferrari, and video artist, Nam Jun Paik, says ceramics is different from other mediums, as from the start to the end, the artist’s participation can be detected in the artwork. He recounts how ceramic artists can collect their own clay, use scientific knowledge to bring their artworks to life, and capitalize on the medium’s malleable qualities.
Indeed, there’s a magical quality inherent to the medium, an alchemistical nature that is rendered by the acts of having to work with temperatures of up to 1,200ºc and having to mix the powders of ceramic colours like a wizard does with his brew.
Working in ceramic also boasts unpredictability and the element of chance. Colours, for instance, often appear different after being fired in a kiln, as volatile temperatures in the kiln transform colours in an erratic fashion.
Khuzairie is a young Malaysian artist that has committed himself to moving his chosen medium away from its dowdy definitions to be forcibly reckoned with on contemporary terms. He capitalizes on the medium’s versatility to fool viewers (his ceramic works’ metallic colours looks remarkably like metal parts), and, channels the ethos of other practices to create something distinctively his own.
Binoculars is Khuzairie’s look into the future, and what will soon be apparent to all of us, is that his own is really, rather bright.
