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CONTEMPORARY Sabah artist Yee I-Lann said Sabah’s creative community is largely invisible at home despite producing some of Malaysia’s most internationally recognised talents.

“Nobody knows we exist,” she said. 

“Nobody knows we are in the Tate, in the Met, in the Guggenheim. Sabahan artists are not just me. But we are invisible,” said the contemporary artist known for her works using photography, collage, film, collaborative weaving and everyday objects.

Yee I-Lann, whose works are held in the collections of major institutions including the Tate, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim in both New York and Abu Dhabi, was in attendance as an audience member when she took the floor to address the panel.

For the record, the Tate, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) and The Guggenheim are some of the world’s most renowned art museum networks and institutions.

Each offers a unique cultural experience, ranging from historic antiquities to iconic modern and contemporary art.

She told the forum that she was due to open at the Guggenheim New York the following day as the only Southeast Asian artist featured in the exhibition Pop Art: 1960s to Now. 

“The work on show was produced by stateless people in Omadal and explores colonial power and ancestral community,” she said, pointing out that she instead of being in New York for her opening, she chose instead to attend the Creative Minds Forum organised by Daily Express.

Yee I-Lann pointed out the contrast between Sabah and Sarawak’s approach to the creative sector, pointing out that Sarawak’s sustained investment in cultural infrastructure was not generosity but deliberate state-building. 

She cited the Borneo Cultures Museum, a Borneo Performing Arts Centre currently under construction and a new airport as evidence of a coordinated strategy.

“Sarawak’s approach is through Benedict Anderson’s theory of Imagined Communities, a book written in the 1980s about how states construct a shared identity and sense of collective purpose among their people.

“Their (Sarawak) concerted effort is a step-by-step exercise in creating an imagined community, an imagined state, a people.

“Sabah has not yet reached that maturity of thinking about the arts as a fundamental element in the creation of a state,” she said. 

She said the question policymakers needed to ask was not whether the arts deserved funding, but why Sarawak, with all its resources, had chosen to spend so heavily in that direction.

“Why would Sarawak invest so heavily in the arts when Sabah actually has more artists? 

“We in Sabah have very little infrastructure, but Sarawak is putting so much emphasis into the arts and creative industries,” she said. 

She said the arts were the common denominator that grounded everything else, from business and science to education and the environment and that Sabah had yet to connect that to its broader development agenda.

She also cited the Kota Kinabalu waterfront, which she described as a billion-dollar view, as an obvious site for a landmark cultural facility.

“We should have a Sydney Opera House,” she said. “We should have that museum, that cinema, that performance space. Where is our creative centre?”

She also called for a dedicated arts criticism ecosystem, pointing out that institutions alone were not enough without writers, thinkers and critics who could help the public engage meaningfully with creative work.

Yee I-Lann has held her first exhibition at Sabah Art Gallery since 1994 and said she had worked in the Malaysian film industry across every State in the country except Sabah, where the only productions she had shot were her own art films.

Borneo’s creative heritage holds key to Sabah’s future

RENOWNED visual artist Yee I-Lann said it was significant that Daily Express, as the voice of record for Sabah, has chosen to champion a creative gathering rather than a purely commercial or political one.

“I think it is wonderful that Daily Express is hosting a creative gathering of people,” she said, adding that the paper’s decision reflected an understanding of how deeply culture shaped a society’s sense of direction and self. Sabah really needs to start embracing the arts and coming together through expression, through identity issues, through cultural heritage.

“People do not realise how important culture is to a sense of place, a sense of identity, people working together towards something, coming together as an imagined community,” she said.

She said Sabah needed to find its collective voice before it could project itself outward with confidence. 

“When you want to bring a State together where everyone is moving towards a similar direction, first of all it is getting into a mindset, it is getting unity, it is getting an understanding of who we are,” she said, adding that those intangible qualities were communicated to the public through music, film, visual arts and writing. 

“Sabah really needs to gather to be a voice and the business and the medical line, all of it will come into place when we know who we are and when we have a certain confidence in ourselves,” she said. 

She also made a bold claim about Borneo’s place in the history of human creativity, noting that the oldest known figurative cave painting in the world, as cited by the Smithsonian Museum, is found in Kalimantan. 

“Borneans invented art,” she said.