Take, for instance, the typical Chinese character for peace (安), which depicts a woman (女) who stays within the house by covering it with a top radical (宀). To express how women in Malaysia are often segregated in public spaces because of Islam, the duo hacked the Chinese character for space (间) to insert the radical for a woman instead. This is just one of 30 characters Li and Hui designed for Women’s Words, a tiny red dictionary created with fellow Malaysian writer and researcher Tan Zi Hao. Created for a feminist art event in Malaysia, it’s just one example of how TypoKaki has been using typography and design to explore Malaysian culture since 2012.
Tag: Malaysia
Malaysia’s Graphic Design Rebels Join Forces on Politically Charged Posters
When they heard of an upcoming protest in Malaysia, a band of graphic designers rallied to do what they do best: design posters for a cause.
Calling themselves the Grafik Rebel Untuk Protes & Aktivisme (Malay for Graphic Rebel for Protest and Activism) or GRUPA, the hastily formed design collective released 110 protest posters online before a recent rally to push for government reform in Malaysia and the resignation of its prime minister. Organized by civil society movement Bersih (Malay for “clean”), this latest rally is known as Bersih 4.0 and came about amid allegations of a corruption scandal involving 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB), a state investment fund, and the country’s prime minister, Najib Tun Razak.
MH370: Uncovering how open cities are
Even as the Malaysian airliner MH370 remains missing, its disappearance has unwittingly uncovered the vast multi-city surveillance system hovering over us whenever we fly.
It starts when we enter the immigration zone and our passports are checked against a database. The failure to check Interpol’s passport database—an international policing program—allowed two passengers to board the plane on stolen passports.
During the flight, the plane was then tracked not only by Malaysia, but also British satellite operator Inmarsat. Thailand’s military radar also detected it. However, this was revealed much later, showing how reluctant countries are to share defensive information for fear of compromising a nation’s technological powers (or lack of).
In the search for debris, several countries offered their satellite images—China, France, Thailand, Japan—again unmasking the constellation of eyes above our cities.
How do we understand privacy as well as national boundaries with the existence of such surveillance technology today? The search for the missing plane shows how it takes one tiny disruption in the system to expose the porousness of borders between countries.
Unlike the flight’s effortless and stealth path across various territories, the search for it has been confounded with complex protocols between nations on deciding which country will lead the search and how it will be conducted. The anxiety amongst nations in this search for MH370 perhaps confirms how open cities really are today.
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Written for Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi’s Cultural Theory class at D-Crit in response to “Introduction: Enacting Modernity” by AbdouMaliq Simone