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

 

 

 

Ink on bandages, 2025

 

Nothing to Something: A Life Made Through Art

My artistic practice did not begin with clarity. It began with loss.

But even before that, it began with something unexpected: a chance encounter. I did not come from an art background, nor did I plan to become an artist. My early life had little to do with galleries, studios, or exhibitions. Through meeting an artist by coincidence, a new path opened — one I had never imagined for myself. Quiet, almost ordinary, that moment planted a seed.

In the early 2000s, I experienced the erasure of a personal archive — drawings, writings, photographs, and certificates, all swept away. What followed was silence, a rupture that forced me to ask what it meant to make art at all. Out of that absence, I began again. At first tentatively: portraits of my mother, collages made from torn magazines, small acts of remembering. Art became a way to hold on, to stitch what was lost into something that could still speak.

Over time, the language of my practice shifted. What began as representational and memory-driven became increasingly abstract, poetic, and material-focused. I turned to what remained: old passports, rubber stamps, and maps. Later came gauze, bandages, atlases, rotan sticks, sound, and broken vessels. These were not just objects — they were carriers of lived experience, of migration, bureaucracy, belonging, and fracture.

My practice has since evolved into an ongoing dialogue between the visible and the invisible, the personal and the political, the past and the present. The works I create are layered, unstable, and open-ended. They resist finality. They do not explain. They ask to be met.

I listen more closely now — to how materials speak, to how sound vibrates through absence, to how silence, repetition, and chance shape a work. Performance, participation, and installation have become essential components. Whether I am writing on gauze strips with overheard phrases, constructing drums from x-ray films, or imagining a clay vessel collapsing on melting ice, the gesture is the same: to remain present with what unfolds.

Today, my practice is not about becoming someone new. It is about honoring what is already here — the trace of memory, the texture of place, the breath between identities. I do not begin with certainty. I begin with noticing — with what is fragile, unfinished, already slipping away. From there, something emerges: not resolution, but presence.

 

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

Elastic Acts: Letting Go, Letting Nature Perform

 

Elastic Acts: Letting Go, Letting Nature Perform

by Milo V. Poulsen

The performance hasn’t happened yet.
But Amir’s already stepped away.

Not in silence, but in elasticity.
Not in retreat, but in recalibration.

There’s a shift unfolding—not loudly, not with fanfare. But with the quiet confidence of someone who has realized that sometimes, the most radical gesture is to not gesture. Amir Zainorin, whose body has long stood at the center of his performance practice, is now letting go. Not of meaning, or presence—but of control.

In a new work forming for one of his upcoming exhibitions, Amir is preparing a stage. But this time, he won’t be on it. The elements—those old collaborators we tend to overlook—will take his place. Time, weight, temperature, light. The kind of performers that don’t need an audience. The kind that don’t wait for applause.

Nothing will be done to the materials. They will simply be allowed to behave. To react. To unfold. To perform.

And in that quiet refusal to intervene, a new kind of presence emerges. A choreography of vanishing. A dramaturgy of slow collapse. The act becomes the non-act. The artist becomes the witness. And performance becomes a condition—one that doesn’t begin or end, but hovers, like condensation or breath.

This isn't disappearance.
It’s diffusion.
It’s elasticity.

Identity too, Amir seems to say, is not fixed. It stretches, it reforms, it rests. It resists the neat definitions we try to stamp on it. Just as this new work resists the demand to show. To explain. To climax.

The performance hasn’t happened yet.
But already, it’s happening.

 

About the author
Milo V. Poulsen is a writer of uncertain origin. Her work drifts between poetic reflection and conceptual mischief, often appearing where performance dissolves into presence. She prefers to remain offstage, letting the text do the talking.

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

 

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

 

 

Subject to Change

  

 

Amir Zainorin - 'Me, We' by Sharon Chin

November 10, 2010 at 4:43pm

Amir Zainorin - ‘Me, We’ 

Amir is someone I’ve yet to meet in person. I know him only through email, blogs, Facebook and a parcel containing catalogues and a DVD of his work he sent to my house. Yet from these thin, mostly electronic, threads we are weaving a conversation, the beginnings of understanding, and perhaps a friendship.

What do I know about Amir? He grew up in Kelantan and Johor. He studied in the US, returned to work in Malaysia and now lives in Denmark with his wife and son. It’s no surprise that his art deals with identity and representation – living and working in different places can turn your sense of self into putty. Even crossing the street or buying bread becomes a cultural experiment!

The questions of identity are the eternal ones: Who am I? Who are we? At the same time, these questions have an everyday urgency, like buying bread. Somewhere in between there lies a political dimension, where this ‘who’ becomes a ‘what’ – What am I? What are we? In that political space, identity is associated with power.

 What is it like to be Malaysian right now? Interesting would be one way to put it. Scary would be another. Since the March 2008 general elections, we have been living in times of huge political change. The political dimension has expanded to touch every aspect of life. You couldn’t escape it even if you wanted to – the roads will likely be jammed tight because of some by-election.

 Issues of identity have become especially heightened and complex. Old certainties are now up for questioning – the social contract, the monarchy, even the federation itself. It is as though we are waking up from a collective dream, dazed and confused, but more energized than we have been in decades. Our political masters feel the ground shifting beneath their feet. In order to rally support to new political needs, desperate games are played that draw lines deeply in the raw, soft sand of our identities. Being told what we are (Bumiputera, Si botol, Si mata sepet, Dan lain-lain) makes us much more manageable, just like in the colonial days.

It is into this space, that Amir brings his art and his questions: Who am I? Who are we?I won’t betray the spirit of Amir’s work by limiting its scope to this specific moment in Malaysian identity politics. He clearly states: ‘Even though I am a Malaysian citizen, I don’t see myself as a ‘Malaysian artist’. I am just an artist, born in Malaysia with a big interest in what is going on in the world. My influence is global, not only based on my roots in Malaysia.’ However, by locating it here, we can see how Amir’s search is not about trying to establish answers. Instead, it’s concerned with enlarging the space of how we can look at and make meaning of ourselves.

He starts with a view of himself – a self-portrait. The video Mind My Hat shows him donning variously the headgears of the Sultan, Tok Guru Nik Aziz, a Jew, Yap Ah Loy, Uncle Sam and many others. Watching it on Youtube, I wondered about the lo-fi quality – you can clearly see where the images have been digitally altered to replace Amir’s face with that of the abovementioned subjects. It uses the rough cut n’ paste techniques of most internet ‘mash ups’, that is, digital videos, music or images that consist of original content altered in some way. Amir’s self-portrait treats images, including his own, like disposable shells – each one recognizable for an instant, then falling away to reveal nothing but another image, and another. We may well ask ourselves what such disposable images are doing in a gallery, a place where we expect images (paintings, photographs, etc) to be precious… valuable…

 The question brings us to the subject of Pop Art. There is tendency in Malaysian artists and intellectuals to confuse Pop Art with a technique or ‘style’, rather than recognize it as a particular moment in the development of modern art in Europe and America. Campbell soup cans, bright colours, Andy Warhol, silk-screened images of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley selling for millions of bucks – this is what Pop art means for many people. In an essay for one of Amir’s previous solo exhibitions, Mad(e) In Malaysia, Badrolhisham Tahir says as much: ‘Amir is known as a Pop artist. This is what many don’t understand and want to know more about.’ He goes on: ‘Sometimes a public story can become a powerful myth and even though we know how Amir became an artist, the public story has so much power, it becomes believable.’ Unfortunately, Badrolhisham doesn’t delve much deeper into the relationship between Amir’s ideas and Pop art, allowing the myth to hang in the air as part of the artist’s constructed identity.

Pop Art developed around the 1960s, at a time when western society was being reshaped and defined by its relationship to mass media (by late 1950s, TVs were to be found in almost every American home), fame and consumerism. Things other than objects could become commodities – such as human values or images. The perception of something could be more valuable than the thing itself, hence the rise of branding and advertising. When it came to determining value, fame (i.e. when something is widely known or reproduced) was just as, or more important than, exclusivity. Warhol explored these ideas in art by becoming an art machine, manufacturing images in the same way a factory produced canned soup. He commented on the system by being fully complicit in it. Decades after his death, his work continues to command astounding prices.

 Today, we are living in a different world, one defined by instant connectivity and information technology. We can now broadcast ourselves every moment of every day, using digital text, images, video and sound. Amir’s ideas about how mass produced images influence the way we perceive identity, value and power are indeed related to those that gave rise to Pop art. In the series of digital prints, he creates new stories and narratives by digitally piecing together images found on the internet or taken on his digital camera. The images come from modern art, history, advertising, news, the landscape, family portraits, etc – it doesn’t matter. They are all flattened to create new, instant and disposable fairytales for a generation of Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter users.  

Like Warhol and the other Pop artists, Amir also plays these ideas off the art world. One work consists of Facebook updates collected from his network of friends over a period of 3 months. During this time, he updated his own status daily with thoughts about art. He has arranged these to produce a large digital print that reads ‘Status’. Placed in a gallery, these little fragments of selves literally and symbolically claim their status as art. Another work, Mr Prime Minister, looks like an average painting, but in fact, it has been out-sourced to a company in China that specializes in copies of famous masterpieces. Skilled labourers produced the painting according to a digital image created by Amir in Photoshop. These funny, quietly subversive works make us rethink how we view and value art.

 Given that so much media content is disposable, how do we reconcile the fact that words and images continue to exert such power on us? It was only recently that cartoons of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) caused uproar across the world, erupting in violence and even death. Closer to home, the right of non-Muslims to use the word Allah has been fiercely debated. Again and again, this modern technological age will bring us into close encounters with those who are different from us. We will see and hear things that shake our beliefs, values and worldviews. How do we negotiate between what we must hold sacred and what we can hold in common? Or perhaps it is better to say: what we can hold sacred and what we must hold in common? Who am I? Who are we?

Yes, words and images hold immense power, but let’s not forget, so do actions. In a performance held at the entrance to the Danish embassy, Amir turns the usually de-humanizing process of visa application into an opportunity for human conversation and exchange. Meanwhile, his online project Like A Prayer asks people of any (or no) faith from all over the world to submit a prayer via email, which is then posted on a blog for everyone to read. Similarly, I see his three interviews with Malaysian art icons Redza Piyadasa, Jeri Azahari and Rahime Haron as acts of listening and recording. It is interesting to observe how actions are not subject to same games of representation and power. Through his interventions into real and online life, Amir illustrates that actions not only communicate, they open up pathways – roads for us to make meaning in art, in our lives and in the world.

Sharon Chin

Nov 2010