THE UNIVERSALITY OF ART

In the closing scene of Yasmin Ahmad's film, Talentime, the main Malay protagonist, Hafiz dressed in a white Baju Melayu and playing the guitar, singing the English song entitled 'I go'. Not long after that, his schoolmate, a Chinese boy joined him on stage fully dressed in the Chinese traditional attire and playing the Erhu into the tune of the song.

Without saying anything, this scene talks about the how individuals of different race, religion and background projecting the same values through a single piece of art, although individually, it might sound a little bit different. We are all indeed human and go through the same pleasure and pain in life.

Quoting Marina Mahathir in today's The Star article titled "Universal heritage", she wrote, "What is clear, the arts in many ways have no ethnicity, even if they originate from a particular cultures."

"Representation" is the hot word that can be manipulated, and more often than not, misused. Not to mention, in a selective manner. Some can rant about it about an art festival, but silenced on the lack of it when it comes to the national Olympics attire.

But it is hard to complain because the system that we are in feeds on division instead of unity. We have stopped seeing the progress as a civilization as a dialectic process through time (a zeitgeist) To learn to look at things objectively instead of subjectively.

Instead we love approaching it pedagogically and look backwards (not the same as looking at the past and learn a thing or two from it) and drown ourselves in its romanticism and nostalgia for too long, moving forward through developing synthesis is forgotten and sometimes demonized. (and the Internet feeds on that demon).

As Alejandro Jodorowsky once aptly said, “Birds born in a cage thinks flying is an illness”.

A piece of art speaks of its place in history. Perhaps that is what Yasmin Ahmad mean with the title Talentime (Tale In Time).