Nickel-plated steel, fabric, silicone
107 x 107 x 81 cm
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Artwork Essay By Ellen Lee
Despite the “return” in its title, Return to Form appears, in fact, to be a future-oriented piece of work. It’s crafted out of steel that’s been bent, hammered, and welded in a garage in the cul-de-sacs of Klang, a Frankensteinian monster built from the scraps of the industrial 21st century. Curled in upon itself and chrome-electroplated, it evokes a cross-bred baby between an alien and a robot that’s still gestating in an artificial womb; the only thing that breaks this illusion is the metal base it stands on. Silicone skin stretched over the steel spine looks as if it hardly contains the creature within and brings to mind machine-fetish movies like Julia Ducournau’s Titane (2021) or David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996). The work draws upon transhumanist ideas and references, and meditates upon the condition of the human body and possibilities for its optimisation.
The sculpture is built by young Malaysian artist Silas Oo as his submission for the 2023 edition of the bi-annual Bakat Muda Sezaman (Young Contemporaries) Award organised by the National Art Gallery of Malaysia. It is his first sculpture that utilises steel and welding machinery, and also his first sculpture of this scale. Silas is generally more recognised for his intricate pen and ink drawings featuring elements of fantasy, myth, scifi, cyberpunk, and horror, inspired by retro-futurist visions from vintage eras. This is not the first time he’s experimented with sculpture, having previously made sculptural paintings with tissue-paper papier mache and small sculptures out of concrete and leather. But it is his first time creating a sculpture using steel and welding machinery and also his first time creating a sculpture of this scale. For this work, he learned the skill of welding within the span of a few short months, and used bulky welding tools that the garage he was working at had decommissioned because they were so heavy and old.
Since around 2020, Silas’s art has been preoccupied with the body. Although, it may be more accurate to say that Silas has been preoccupied with the body his entire life—a fixation that naturally bleeds into his art—but the theme of the body has only become more pronounced in recent works. His work has shed the cartoon and pop-culture references that used to populate his college-era drawings, and started featuring more original figures, many of which are skeletal, wraith-like, and often contorted into positions of pain and anguish. Beyond the body, but linked to it, perhaps what Silas’s art has always been preoccupied with is pain, both physical and emotional.
Since childhood, frequent injuries sustained due to his tall stature and weight fluctuations have made him a regular visitor at hospitals and operating rooms. From such an injury-filled childhood, he grew up with a fixation over his body beyond what an average healthy human feels, and it seems that this physical frailty also translated to a more sensitive emotional state. Just as his body is more prone to injury than other bodies, his temperament is equally receptive to the emotions of others and thus to more abstract forms of pain for himself. The silicone skin wrapped around the curled skeleton of Return to Form makes some reference to this, in the tenuous way that skin stretched tight over the brittle body barely protects the inner self from outer harm. The malfunctioning body, and the artist’s own struggles to gain control and mastery over his own body, is unintentionally reflected in the imperfect construction of the steel skeleton. Closer inspection of Return to Form reveals minor flaws in the curled spine that give away Silas’s struggles with welding and getting the proportions right on his first metal sculpture: there are ribs that don’t quite join the spine at the places where they should, and vertebrae that are not quite the shapes they ought to be.
For someone as concerned with his body—and to whom the body often poses a concern—as Silas is, it comes as no surprise then that such bodily occupations should often manifest in his work; the ghosts and anguish in his drawings make it clear that their artist is someone who’s haunted by his body nearly all the time. The duality of man riven between his lofty ambitions and the gravity of his own grounded body, is a common theme in a lot of Silas’s works, present one included. In utopian visions of trans-humanist optimisation, the advancement of technology is presented as a good thing because the technology will compensate for the shortcomings of the human body. Such visions see man fusing with his technology in order to ascend to the heights he dreams of; the determinacy of the body and genetics no longer hinder one’s future. The things we build become extensions of us and eventually even our replacements — machines, buildings, and man become fused into a superman.
With its futuristic horizons, the idea of “return” in the work’s title throws us on a curveball. The idea of a cyberpunk unity between man, building, and machine reflects a deeper desire for a unity or cohesion of form between the “essence” of a man and his actions and creations in the world. (In the art context, this speaks to a greater desire for the unity of art and artist.) In contemporary Internet meme culture and parlance, the idea of “return” has been having a moment among late millennials and Zoomers, as young people are coming to terms with the barrenness of our present age and making posts expressing their yearning to “return” to past eras, even eras when they weren’t even born yet. (The “ideal” era differs among age and Internet subsets, but in general anytime before the advent of social media is desirable, whether this takes the form of the anti-authoritarian grunge of the 90s, a cottage in the pre-industrial English countryside, or thinking about the Roman Empire every day.) It should be noted here that Silas’s injury-filled childhood was also coupled with a Christian religious upbringing—his father was a pastor—and ideas of sin, and straying too far from God’s perfection, are other common themes in his art that are linked with the torment of the body. Hence, “return to form” could also be read as an injunction to “return” to the state of purity and innocence that all humans are born in before the corrupting influence of the world. Vertebrae and ribs aside, the primary anatomical impossibility of Silas’s sculpture is its circular, curled-in form, which signifies the equally impossible ambition of attaining wholeness through return.
The cyberpunk genre is characterised by “high tech and low life”, i.e. advanced technology found in the most dismal urban landscapes. In cyberpunk fiction, most adventures start in a remote junkyard, just as Silas’s sculpture did, with protagonists who often appear to be on the run from something, including their own selves. Perhaps the desire to “return” is not inconsistent with futuristic aesthetics after all. Like a cyberpunk movie, the physical body is similarly surpassed in the making of Return to Form, as the artist transcends the sensitive, injury-prone childhood through labour clocked in at a hot garage, using rusty tools to birth his new steel counterpart.
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