With Malika, home video jamming session

 

Repeat or To Respond: Discipline vs. Repetition – Don’t Confuse the Two

By Amir Zainorin

In creative work—and in life—we often confuse discipline with repetition. They can look similar from the outside: someone doing something day after day. But they grow from very different roots. Understanding the difference can mean the survival of a creative practice—and its capacity to stay alive, connected, and evolving.

Discipline Is Alive

Discipline is intentional, self-aware consistency. It means showing up—not just physically, but mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. It’s about committing to your practice with flexibility, curiosity, and a willingness to shift when something no longer serves you. Discipline asks: Why am I doing this? What does the work need now?

For me, discipline has never meant sticking to one form. When I feel bored or stuck with painting, I move to collage, drawing, or writing. Sometimes, I take a walk or go cycling instead. That act of stepping away isn’t a detachment from art—it’s a way of reentering it through a different door. It connects my practice back to the outside world. The city, the street, the body in motion—all of that feeds the work in ways repetition alone never could.

Discipline includes breaks. Silence. Shifting gears. It includes letting go of what no longer works, even if it once brought success. It’s an ongoing relationship, not a contract carved in stone.

Repetition Can Trap You

Repetition is simply doing something again and again. It can be useful—practice builds fluency, comfort, and confidence—but when repetition becomes mechanical, it loses meaning. You’re just moving your hands, not your mind or heart. It becomes habit, not growth.

There have been times when I’ve noticed this in my own routine. I’d return to the studio, follow the same steps, and make something that felt… empty. Not bad, just hollow. That’s when I knew I wasn’t being disciplined—I was just repeating.

Multiple Roles, One Thread

Throughout my life, I’ve taken on many different roles. I’ve worked in hotels, led art workshops for school children, collaborated with other artists, and organized festivals. Many of these were short-term jobs—woven together out of necessity, curiosity, and survival. There were days when I’d clean rooms in the morning, teach art in the afternoon, and plan a community event at night. Sometimes all in one day.

But these weren’t just jobs—they were learning grounds.

Working in hotels wasn’t just about cleaning—it gave me firsthand insight into the lives of other migrants. I heard their stories, saw how they navigated life in a foreign country, and gained a deeper understanding of labor, struggle, and survival. That experience shaped my view of dignity and resilience—things that quietly enter my art.

The art workshops I facilitated brought me into contact with schools, organizations, and cultural institutions across Denmark. Each collaboration taught me something new—not just about art education, but about how the system works, how access is granted or denied, and how structure and creativity can intersect.

Organizing the Stateless Mind Festival was a whole other kind of discipline. It wasn’t just about curating content—it forced me to learn how to build something from scratch. I had to search for funding, write proposals, plan logistics, and collaborate with people from different backgrounds. It was overwhelming at times, but it gave me clarity, strength, and experience that no studio practice alone could offer.

These different paths might look fragmented to some, but they’re deeply connected. Each role I’ve taken on has shaped the way I see, think, and make. Adaptability became part of my discipline—not a distraction from art, but a way of staying rooted while remaining open.

The Real Difference

Discipline is rooted in intention and awareness. It grows from paying attention and making conscious choices. Repetition, by contrast, is often based in habit or comfort—doing something simply because it’s familiar.

Discipline responds to change and growth. It evolves as you evolve. It allows space to pause, shift direction, or completely reimagine your process. Repetition tends to reinforce routine and familiarity, even when change is needed.

While discipline leads to depth, adaptability, and long-term development, repetition can lead to either mastery or stagnation, depending on whether it’s guided or automatic.

Discipline involves presence, risk, and listening. It’s active. It demands your attention. Repetition, when unchecked, often slips into automation and unthinking cycles—going through the motions without questioning why.

Don’t Mistake the Surface for the Core

You might look at someone working every day and think: How disciplined. But if they’re just repeating the same gesture without question, they may be stuck in a loop.

On the other hand, someone who shifts between roles, pauses when needed, takes time to walk or do other things, and keeps their work connected to the world—they may appear scattered, but in truth, they’re practicing a much deeper discipline. One that listens. One that grows.

Stay Flexible. Stay Awake.

In my practice, I’ve learned that being disciplined doesn’t mean being rigid. It means being honest. It means making space for change—because real discipline is dynamic. It moves with you.

Let repetition be one of your tools—not your master. Let your practice stay curious, connected, and alive.

Keep listening. Keep shifting. That is the deeper form of discipline.

“Read more about my upcoming exhibition Rhythms of Identity →”

Morning walk in Leipzig, Germany during my art residency at Pilotenkueche, 2022

At Roger Waters concert Copenhagen, 2023

In one of the Greek islands, 2019

Street performance with photographer Maher Khatib, 2010

 

Art workshop in Copenhagen, 2019

Unexhibited collage, 2015

Photo experimentation, 2017

 

Stateless Mid Festival , Venice 2022

 

 

 

Pic: Think Tank (2014) is a collaborative work with Roboticist Malaysia, supported by the National Art Gallery Malaysia.

 

Consistently Inconsistent

Consistency is the altar.
A blur, a brushstroke, a palette — repeated until it becomes a brand.
Style turns into currency. Discovery hardens into comfort.

But what if “signature style” is only boredom wearing designer glasses?

Consistency flatters the buyer, but shackles the maker.
Inconsistency unsettles the buyer, but frees the maker.
Both are strategies. Both are prisons.

To be consistently inconsistent is to refuse the altar.
To let each work shift, stumble, spark, and contradict.
To choose risk over repetition, becoming over branding.

Art is not obliged to soothe.
It is obliged to move.

Threads knot and unknot.
Gestures repeat but never the same.
The artist appears, disappears, reappears in another form.

Perhaps the only true signature is no signature at all —
only the freedom to shift, to risk,
to knot and unknot —
consistently inconsistent.

 

“Read more about my upcoming exhibition Rhythms of Identity →” 

 

Work in progress 2025

 

 

The Emergence of New-ism: Ritual in Flux

 

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.

“Read more about my upcoming exhibition Rhythms of Identity →”

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

Repeat or To Respond: Discipline vs. Repetition – Don’t Confuse the Two

 

With Malika, home video jamming session

By Amir Zainorin

In creative work—and in life—we often confuse discipline with repetition. They can look similar from the outside: someone doing something day after day. But they grow from very different roots. Understanding the difference can mean the survival of a creative practice—and its capacity to stay alive, connected, and evolving.

Discipline Is Alive

Discipline is intentional, self-aware consistency. It means showing up—not just physically, but mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. It’s about committing to your practice with flexibility, curiosity, and a willingness to shift when something no longer serves you. Discipline asks: Why am I doing this? What does the work need now?

For me, discipline has never meant sticking to one form. When I feel bored or stuck with painting, I move to collage, drawing, or writing. Sometimes, I take a walk or go cycling instead. That act of stepping away isn’t a detachment from art—it’s a way of reentering it through a different door. It connects my practice back to the outside world. The city, the street, the body in motion—all of that feeds the work in ways repetition alone never could.

Discipline includes breaks. Silence. Shifting gears. It includes letting go of what no longer works, even if it once brought success. It’s an ongoing relationship, not a contract carved in stone.

Repetition Can Trap You

Repetition is simply doing something again and again. It can be useful—practice builds fluency, comfort, and confidence—but when repetition becomes mechanical, it loses meaning. You’re just moving your hands, not your mind or heart. It becomes habit, not growth.

There have been times when I’ve noticed this in my own routine. I’d return to the studio, follow the same steps, and make something that felt… empty. Not bad, just hollow. That’s when I knew I wasn’t being disciplined—I was just repeating.

Multiple Roles, One Thread

Throughout my life, I’ve taken on many different roles. I’ve worked in hotels, led art workshops for school children, collaborated with other artists, and organized festivals. Many of these were short-term jobs—woven together out of necessity, curiosity, and survival. There were days when I’d clean rooms in the morning, teach art in the afternoon, and plan a community event at night. Sometimes all in one day.

But these weren’t just jobs—they were learning grounds.

Working in hotels wasn’t just about cleaning—it gave me firsthand insight into the lives of other migrants. I heard their stories, saw how they navigated life in a foreign country, and gained a deeper understanding of labor, struggle, and survival. That experience shaped my view of dignity and resilience—things that quietly enter my art.

The art workshops I facilitated brought me into contact with schools, organizations, and cultural institutions across Denmark. Each collaboration taught me something new—not just about art education, but about how the system works, how access is granted or denied, and how structure and creativity can intersect.

Organizing the Stateless Mind Festival was a whole other kind of discipline. It wasn’t just about curating content—it forced me to learn how to build something from scratch. I had to search for funding, write proposals, plan logistics, and collaborate with people from different backgrounds. It was overwhelming at times, but it gave me clarity, strength, and experience that no studio practice alone could offer.

These different paths might look fragmented to some, but they’re deeply connected. Each role I’ve taken on has shaped the way I see, think, and make. Adaptability became part of my discipline—not a distraction from art, but a way of staying rooted while remaining open.

The Real Difference

Discipline is rooted in intention and awareness. It grows from paying attention and making conscious choices. Repetition, by contrast, is often based in habit or comfort—doing something simply because it’s familiar.

Discipline responds to change and growth. It evolves as you evolve. It allows space to pause, shift direction, or completely reimagine your process. Repetition tends to reinforce routine and familiarity, even when change is needed.

While discipline leads to depth, adaptability, and long-term development, repetition can lead to either mastery or stagnation, depending on whether it’s guided or automatic.

Discipline involves presence, risk, and listening. It’s active. It demands your attention. Repetition, when unchecked, often slips into automation and unthinking cycles—going through the motions without questioning why.

Don’t Mistake the Surface for the Core

You might look at someone working every day and think: How disciplined. But if they’re just repeating the same gesture without question, they may be stuck in a loop.

On the other hand, someone who shifts between roles, pauses when needed, takes time to walk or do other things, and keeps their work connected to the world—they may appear scattered, but in truth, they’re practicing a much deeper discipline. One that listens. One that grows.

Stay Flexible. Stay Awake.

In my practice, I’ve learned that being disciplined doesn’t mean being rigid. It means being honest. It means making space for change—because real discipline is dynamic. It moves with you.

Let repetition be one of your tools—not your master. Let your practice stay curious, connected, and alive.

Keep listening. Keep shifting. That is the deeper form of discipline.

“Read more about my upcoming exhibition Rhythms of Identity →”

Morning walk in Leipzig, Germany during my art residency at Pilotenkueche, 2022

At Roger Waters concert Copenhagen, 2023

In one of the Greek islands, 2019

Street performance with photographer Maher Khatib, 2010

 

Art workshop in Copenhagen, 2019

Unexhibited collage, 2015

Photo experimentation, 2017

 

Stateless Mid Festival , Venice 2022