When I arrived at the gate of Lost Generation Space two days ago, its de facto caretaker, visual artist Yeoh Lian Heng, was putting on gloves and prepping to mow his (artistically) unkempt yard. Spotting me, he immediately knew what I was there for. “You can go in,” he said, though he sounded uncertain. “Since the exhibition they’ve put guards, but see whether they will let you go and look.” He gestured up the road. “The circus people are up there now.”

Lost Generation Space -- the second-last lot on Lorong Permai, nestled in the bosom of Robson Heights -- serves both as a site for exhibitions or performances, as well as a lodging-house for a diverse array of artists. Cyclown Circus, a troupe that does acrobatics with modified bicycles and brass instruments, was just one of Yeoh’s present guests; today, however, these performers had decided to rehearse next door -- in the same place I was here to see.

Walking through a garage-way (heavily graffiti-ed) and up a flight of stairs (engulfed in tree roots) I found myself in the living room of a derelict bungalow. The floorboards had rotted through in places, as one may have expected; more out of place in this tableau were miniature cement mixers, yellow-hued, positioned around the floor’s cavities, pouring plaster as if in a vain attempt to repair the room’s potholes. There was a piece of paper on a wall, indicating that this was the work Ilham Fadhli Mohd Shaimy's "Forever Delayed".

Ilham Fadhli was one of 25 artists involved in “Bangun - Abandon Project”, a three-day exhibition (from February 1st to 3rd, 2008) of site-specific and installation work. The site was Lost Generation Space’s neighbour: a complex of three empty and overgrown buildings. Even though the exhibition was over, I knew the pieces -- like Ilham’s -- were still around, scattered throughout the environs; Yeoh (who also organised “Bangun”) and his fellows had decided to let their art remain, abandoned as the houses themselves.

I had already seen the work, so this current sojourn was merely to satisfy my curiosity -- but before I could venture further, I heard voices. The members of Cyclown, trombones and all, were hurrying down steps that lead further into the compound; behind them was a security guard and a man in office attire. Meanwhile, Yeoh had appeared (how did he do that?) and, shedding his gloves, advised me to leave. He had the harried look of someone steeling himself to negotiate with angry authority.

As I walked out I noticed pieces of A4 paper posted around the empty house. “Action will be taken against trespassers,” they said.

Abandonment

Yeoh had described the particulars of “Bangun - Abandon Project” ’s illegality to me on the evening it opened. As guides walked us through the various works that Saturday evening we were all trespassing on private property; it was a guerrilla project, since the artists had no written consent from the property’s owners. “That’s why we have only three days, and it's on a weekend just before Chinese New Year,” Yeoh said. “Hopefully they don’t come and check.”

“They” would have been corporate suits. The space in which “Bangun” (“Bring your own torchlight, umbrella and wear sensible shoes,” we were warned, in the covertly circulated postcards) happened belongs to a Malaysian multinational that also owns several properties in the Robson Heights area, most of which are now dilapidated. (I asked Yeoh whether I could identify the company; “They are very sensitive about this,” he answered.) Gaining permission for the show meant that Yeoh spoke to two separate departments within the business juggernaut, management and maintenance. “The management people said ‘Better you don’t touch the building,’ ” Yeoh said. His contact in maintenance was more game -- “He said: ‘You just use it, because it’s been abandoned for ten years,’ ” Yeoh told me -- but even that approval was tacit and informal.

The piece that grappled most with the site’s specific issues of ownership was Wing Lim Kok Yoong’s "VIP", a multimedia installation that audiences experienced first in their journey through the compound. It sported a mosaic of faces the artist had pulled from off the Internet; all were of people surnamed with the same surname as that of our mystery corporation’s founder, and all were rigged up to a motion sensor that, when triggered, opened or closed their eyes: a wall of pseudo-anonymous ghosts watching our passage through the space, alternating between passport cheer and embalmed repose.

Some of “Bangun” ’s artists dealt with architectural abandonment directly -- like Ilham Fadhli’s piece; or Tsuji Lam’s photographs of edifices like the Majestic Hotel and pilings in Putrajaya, each in a hole and protected by a ring of sulfur, as if to ward against serpentine developers. Others played with the aesthetics of abandonment -- like the installations of Lost Generation Space’s two current artists-in-residence, Australians Hayley West and Tobias Richardson. In "Can", Hayley commandeered a kitchen area and started enclosing found debris in bright, fruit-emblazoned wrapping paper, trying to convince us that the old and decrepit had a history that was intrinsically valuable. For "World Without Us", Tobias spent two weeks cleaning his chosen room, filling in gaps in the parquet with coloured blocks, then hung up a mobile made of satay sticks -- a surprise retreat against the surrounding decay.

Yap Sau Bin, monopolising what was perhaps the most striking feature of the property, positioned toy soldiers (painted pink) around what used to be a pool area: some guarded a metal bar, a squad paraded under the shade of a tree, an unlucky few were trapped in a Bukit Kepong-like last stand against an unseen foe. Invaders seemed appropriate, considering the site’s history as a Japanese Club, before it was abandoned a decade ago -- but “Taking Over Feng Shui Hill” (as the piece was called) was more interested in tackling the idea that space is politics. Taking over, or merely claiming a geographical location modifies it and every reaction to it. Sau Bin took a drained pool and turned it into this Feng Shui Hill diorama, in the same way the other artists in “Bangun” had turned these abandoned buildings -- dirty, leaky, a magnet for vermin, refuse and drug addicts; all in all, a place one would normally avoid -- into a something that, for a few days at least, we could all say was beautiful in its dereliction.

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Novelty

Unfortunately, few of the works in “Bangun” stood out. (This is not at all saying that any of them were disappointing, save perhaps for Teh Leong Kwee’s empty frames, which ostensibly highlighted found beauty -- a stain on the wall, etc -- but ended up being completely forgettable.) Tan Wai Ding arranged disused electronic fixtures in an expansive grid on the upper floor of the property’s clubhouse, and that was pretty; Melissa Lin’s altar of shattered bricks, rocks and twigs collected from around the environs was cute; looking for Chao Harn Kae's little dispassionate plaster faces, and the mud-fashioned fixtures of Chuah Chong Yong, Hoo Keiw Hang, Pauline Siah and Tan Wai Ding's "Recon Project" had the all the fun of an Easter egg hunt.

Pretty, fun, and novel -- and that was the problem. Most of “Bangun” ’s 25 participants were so caught up in the excitement of working in such an unusual site that they forgot to say very much (or anything very well) about it. George Wielgus, in explaining why he piled empty beer cans and monologued, at length, in one of houses, thought that it would have been “something that the space hasn’t seen before,” -- not a very stimulating conceptual justification. The exhibition was conceived so that:

“Through their individual and collaborative art practices, these artists have come together to respond to the abandoned spaces provided for exhibition. Bangun in Bahasa Malaysia means Wake up! Attention! In this project the artists are saying - Wake up and notice the abandonment of buildings (bangunan) in KL!”

Yet what resulted was largely a romance: about the melancholy splendour of a 50-year-old piece of architecture (it was a tycoon’s palatial estate, before it was a club) -- one that hid its scandalous history of love and murder (naturally) like ghosts in between the walls. What the artists failed to realise was that the house didn’t need them to achieve this -- nature had accomplished mystery and discovery far beyond that which was possible of any constructed installation. Lost Generation Space’s contribution was that they provided us with an excuse to explore this space.

The biggest pleasure in “Bangun”, for me, was to step across the cordons that the organisers placed -- it was a guerrilla action twice over, and practically every visitor to the exhibition did it -- to discover spaces that the artists did not use. In the clubhouse at the top of the hill I found a library, with rows and rows of empty shelves, some collapsed, some tilting over menacingly, huddled together as if it was a storehouse of treasure.

Trespass

Yeoh Lian Heng found Lost Generation Space in late 2003. He remembers having to jump through a window to get into the house; it is a testament to his perseverance -- as well as that of several senior and junior graduates for the Central Academy of Art, who were also looking for a studio -- that by April 2004 the new venue looked presentable (only the kitchen roof still leaks, now). Since then, Lost Generation has become one of the Klang Valley’s more important alternative space, what with its hosting of the cheeky, National Art Gallery-snubbing notthatbalai Art Festival -- among other things.

“Bangun” was a long time coming. “I wanted to do something about it since the beginning,” Yeoh told me, when I asked where the idea for such a project came from. Old, derelict buildings -- criminal wastes when such good architecture could be put to other uses -- were clearly the passion of the exhibition’s 25 participants; the inclusion of Penang-based urban poor activist Ong Boon Keong in that roll is proof that the socio-political implications of leaving aesthetically beautiful structures to rot while people sleep on the streets are issues they mean to address.

After-tour discussion, that Saturday, naturally turned to how a project like “Bangun” could possibly make an impact in its community. There were significant challenges: any initiative meant pitting artistic and social needs against economic and political clout; after all, two major arts events in the bowels of the Majestic Hotel in recent memory hasn’t persuaded owner YTL Corporation to begin any restoration. Even being part of “Bangun”, as an artist or and audience-member, already meant we were dipping into (technically) the illegal.

Yeoh seemed to have these considerations in mind when he conceived of his contribution to “Bangun”. His installation, titled “Drawing Light”, brought together several dozen fluorescent light-tubes that the artist had found scattered across the property (he didn’t use every single one; there were more than a hundred), and suspended them for the ceiling; Yeoh chose a room that was situated underneath the pool area, and this enclosure meant that a guide with a torch was required to even find it; the space was barely lit, and entering the maze-like, claustrophobic arrangement of blinded lights was a challenge in itself. It was my favourite piece in the exhibition, because it seemed to embody the necropolitan beauty of the site and the difficulty involved in acquiring this experience for us.

Lost Generation Space plans to orchestrate “Bangun” analogues in other sites; for the time being, Yeoh has already incurred the ire of one real estate developer. Yesterday, he phoned to inform me that they wanted him to dismantle all the installations that were currently left in and around those abandoned bungalows. “So this evening I’m going in to take all the art down,” he said. “If you want to come and see the art again come along with me lah.”

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Zedeck Siew writes for Kakiseni.

“Bangun - Abandon Project”, which ran from February 1st to 3rd, 2008, was organised by Lost Generation Art Space and included 25 artists from Malaysia, Australia, Indonesia and the United Kingdom. It was taken down on February 13th, 2008.