From the performance 'Play Time' at FreshWind Biennale Iceland, 2017
The Emergence of New-ism: Ritual in Flux
New-ism
Introduction
New-ism is not an art movement but a lived practice. For me, it began in small rituals — cutting scraps of newspapers into collages, calling the prayer with my grandfather in Muar, watching bicycles move in unison through Copenhagen streets. It explores ritual, discipline, and transformation as the essence of contemporary art. Rather than producing fixed objects, New-ism embraces impermanence, participation, and process — inviting audiences to witness change, contribute gestures, and reflect on the fragile rhythms of identity and belonging.
Through performances, installations, and participatory acts, New-ism dissolves the boundaries between artist and viewer, art and life, the individual and the collective. But at its core lies a question: what is truly new?
The Emergence of New-ism: Ritual in Flux
A Practice Beyond the “Ism”
Art history is filled with movements defined by style, manifesto, or ideology. New-ism, however, is not an “ism” in that sense. It has no fixed rules, no stylistic formulas, no single school of thought. Instead, it is a way of working — an engagement with ritual, discipline, and transformation. Art here is not a finished object but a lived practice, unfolding through presence and process.
When I was living with my grandparents in Muar, I remember the call to prayer echoing five times a day. My grandfather, though not a particularly pious man, always performed his prayers. He would gather us together, and before we began, he asked one of us to call for prayers. That moment — like singing to wake us all up — was one of the most moving rituals of my childhood. It was not only about religion; it was about discipline, about sound gathering us into one breath, one gesture.
Years later, in Copenhagen, I began to notice similar rhythms in unexpected places: the morning tide of bicycles, pedals turning almost in unison, carrying bodies forward in a collective cadence. These echoes — sacred and mundane — became the ground from which New-ism emerged.
But is it really new?
The name carries its own contradiction. Rituals, discipline, repetition — these are ancient things. New-ism does not claim invention. The “new” is not about discovering something never seen before, but about recognising how each disciplined act produces difference. Every time a prayer is called, the voice shifts. Every wheel turns the same but not the same. Every collage cut and reassembled alters the fragments just enough to make them different.
The “new” in New-ism is not invention but recognition — that even repetition carries difference, and that in each gesture lies both memory and renewal. Nothing is ever wholly new, yet everything is always becoming.
Art as Ritual: The Sacred and the Mutable
I began this discipline not with clay or drums, but with trash. Old magazines and newspapers became my first materials, cut, torn, and reassembled into collages and assemblages. This practice was rooted in the moment I was first introduced to art-making by the late artist Jeri Azhari in Kuala Lumpur.
He only taught me a few technical things — how to stretch a canvas, how to use photocopies to make portraits — the rest I had to discover myself. What mattered more were the endless conversations we had, sometimes talking from afternoon until late at night, until the morning call to prayer reminded us it was time to sleep. Other times, we sat together in silence, saying nothing at all, simply embracing the quiet. In that rhythm of words and silence, I first learned that art could be its own ritual — a discipline of mind and presence.
As I see it now, these artistic rituals are not so different from religious ones. Just as prayer five times a day, or going to church every Sunday, binds the believer to a rhythm larger than themselves, so too does the daily discipline of the artist — coloring, cutting, reading, or simply sitting in solitude. If you have a studio, or just a quiet corner to reflect, that place becomes a chapel. The gestures, repeated and imperfect, become prayer.
For me, art is a religion. A faith not in dogma, but in process: the belief that through returning again and again to humble acts — cutting, layering, undoing, and reassembling — something greater than the sum of scraps can appear.
The Liminal Space of Creation
New-ism thrives in thresholds — the line between accident and intention, presence and absence, destruction and reconstruction. The artist does not stand above the work but surrenders control, becoming part of processes that hover between futility and devotion.
Daily disciplines of assembling and disassembling, gestures repeated until they lose and gain meaning, works shifting between physical and digital, personal and collective — these are not static objects but acts of becoming.
Materials as Memory and Time
Materials are not inert. They are vessels of memory and markers of time. Paper frays, fabric fades, stamps blur into illegibility. Sometimes I dismantle my own past works, reassembling fragments into new configurations. In this cycle of destruction and renewal, materials carry scars like memory itself — fragile, layered, unfinished.
Unlike movements built on purity of form (Minimalism, Abstract Expressionism), New-ism embraces impurity — the unstable, the marked, the layered — as its core truth.
The Role of the Viewer: Participation as Invocation
The viewer is no longer a spectator but a participant. Their presence, touch, or gesture completes the work.
In Dear Helle, I began by installing postcards on the wall. But the work did not end when the exhibition opened. Throughout the exhibition period, visitors were invited to write their own postcards and add them directly to the piece. The installation grew, shifted, and transformed through these contributions. Authorship dissolved; the work became a shared ritual of writing, remembering, and leaving traces.
In New-ism, art becomes a communal practice: a discipline of acknowledging impermanence, presence, and renewal.
New-ism in the Contemporary Context
In an age of speed, automation, and digital saturation, New-ism insists on slowness, tactility, and discipline. It resists spectacle and commodification, urging art to be lived rather than consumed.
By foregrounding process over product, New-ism destabilizes the structures of gallery and market. It offers instead a practice rooted in resilience, in rituals that ground us within cycles of making and unmaking.
Conclusion: A New Ritual
New-ism is less a movement than a state of being. It honors imperfection, embraces discipline, and thrives in flux. It teaches that art is not something we finish but something we inhabit — always in transition, always becoming.
For me, art is a religion. Not one bound by temples or texts, but by the faith that daily gestures — cutting, layering, drawing, sitting in silence — can open us to transformation. To return to the work, again and again, is to pray. To assemble and disassemble is to believe.
And in this, I return to where it began: my grandfather asking us to call the prayer, the bicycles flowing through Copenhagen, the endless talks with Jeri. Each act the same, yet never the same.
This is our new ritual.
Though what feels new to me
may already be old to you.
And perhaps that is the point.
This is New-ism.
From the performance The hand Shake at Port's Residency Program, 2022
From the performance X- Box National Art Gallery Malaysia, 2010 
From Installation art at Heerup Museum, Rødover, Denmark, 2004
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