Re-imagining ancient tales

Shivangi Ambani-Gandhi enjoyed deciphering the fantastical worlds of Minam Apang’s drawings

The surreal worlds and fantastical creatures of popular myths and folktales, find a visual reinterpretation in the works of Indian artist, Minam Apang. She chooses to work with ink on paper—a fluid medium that can capture the liquid worlds of myths. Yet, her technique of using this traditional medium is fresh—deliberately illegible scribbles wash away into undulating waves, misshapen hybrid creatures lurk under the larger image and even the paper bearing the image rises and falls forming the landscape of Apang’s world.

The 30-year-old’s works have traveled to Paris, Madrid and Tokyo, and three works are currently on display at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane as part of the 6^th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT).

Her drawings are engaging, engrossing, and require the viewer to shift visual perspectives to unravel the story behind the image. From afar, He wore them like talismans all over his body (2008) is a gigantic, menacing bat, with wings outstretched, possibly zooming in on the kill. Move closer and you will find that prowling under the bat’s wing are hundreds of half-human, menacing yet caricature-like, comic-tragic creatures. Let your imagination run wild and you could conjure up a dozen of your own stories using Apang’s imagery.

Apang was born in Arunachal Pradesh, and in this North-East Indian region, the bat often takes on the role of the story-teller in traditional tales. As the keeper of stories, the bat then visually holds these folktale characters under his wing in Apang’s work. “(The title) is meant to be ironic since the bat is a keeper of stories, but also one who is weighed down by them. Therefore you can't tell if he's flying or drowning,” she says.

To view the 240cm long The sleeping army may stir (2008), viewers must walk alongside the work as if reading the drawing like a book. The work is part of a series titled War with the stars. “I made (these works) loosely around a creation story from Arunachal Pradesh at a time when I was trying to read about the history of region,” says Apang. “The myths and folktales have acted as a spring board, a point of departure that allows for new connections with my immediate reality and personal history.”

Although Apang had heard these stories when growing up, she was re-acquainted with them as an adult in the form of printed texts. “Perhaps that is why this work has text appearing in the works themselves.”

In The Sleeping Army May Stir, the familiar English script is used as illegible gibberish, visually forming cascading waves—it is not the meaning in the word that Apang wants us to decipher, but appreciate the form of the letters.

For a workshop as part of the kids’ program for the APT, Apang invited participating children to animate alphabets and unfamiliar scripts to ascribe new meaning to them. “There are a couple of things I wanted to address and lead the children to explore… to reflect on the geo-cultural diversity of the Asia Pacific region… to examine the forms of unfamiliar scripts like Khmer, Mandarin, Devnagri, Pharsi, Roman, Korean,” she says.

Besides the use of text as visual texture, she has also often used spills and markings to shape micro-narrative within the larger image. For instance, He wore them like talismans all over his body is drawn over the backdrop of a tea wash. “In an older work, titled Whiskey Wash, from my very first show, I did use things like diluted whiskey and cola. At that time I was interested in playing with the idea of spillages and chance and so deliberately allowed bits of my environment—cola, whiskey, tea and my kitten's paw marks—to leave their trails on my paper.”

Her experiments soon led Apang to transform the very medium she worked with. “I was wrestling with the two dimensionality of the flat and unyielding sheet of paper in front of me,” she says. “I really wanted to work with the paper at a physical level without the work being about novelty, spectacle or a specialized craft technique.”

In her third work at the APT, Nothing of him doth fade (2009 Apang recreates the bottom of a lake in three dimensions by crumpling the paper and then creating the rugged mountain surface by repeatedly drawing with a ball point pen. “It is not a finished two-dimensional drawing that I sculpt into a form: both processes of shaping the form and then treating the surface occur simultaneously,” Apang explains of the process of creating these sculptural drawings. “The worlds I attempt to create are upside-down, inside-out universes, where anything is possible… akin to the fluid worlds of dreams and mythic spaces. These extended possibilities allow me to explore an organic, evolving dialogue, between me as the artist and the work as another entity. It is this dialogue, dictated as much by chance, as it is an evolving network of connections, arrived at not so much through skill but through a process of learning and uncovering that finally allows for revelation.”