The papan soerih are illustrations of the various symbols and emblems that make up the three grades in this exercise to reimagine an archive of the Perhempoenan Orang Melayoe, founded sometime in the early 1930s by Wenceslao Q. Vinzons as a masonic organisation following from a speech that he delivered on 12 February 1932 at the 20th Annual Oratorical Contest of the College of Law, University of Philippines. In his speech he appealed for a pan-Malayan unity that spans the Malay Archipelago and the Pacific islands, arguing, “when we in the vision of United State work in concert to adopt a common language and overcome our frailties, so that by our renewed racial vitality we may give birth to a new nationalism, that of Malaysia redeemed.” While not much is known about the Perhimpoenan Orang Melayoe, surviving accounts spoke of the organisation drawing inspiration from freemasonry and even elected a ‘Sumatran prince’ as its vice president. The Perhimponen also adopted the Malay language as the ceremonial language for all its rituals. Inspired by masonic tracing boards, each of the three papan soerih corresponds to a rank in the graded hierarchies of the Perhimpoenan. Meant to be read from the right to left like a jawi manuscript, they serve as teaching aids during the initiation rituals of the Perhimpoenan, taking the postulant on a journey of cultural discovery and political awakening. Like masonic tracing boards, they contain symbols and concepts related to Vinzon’s vision, serving as object lessons to help impart esoteric knowledge. Drawn primarily from art historical and visual cultural references of the Malay world, the tracing board imagines a mnemosyne atlas of Melayoe, exploring not only its cosmopolitan resources but also offering a new gendered reading into these resources as they are reassembled into a new body of occult knowledge.

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Simon Soon (b. 1983) is an artist, art historian and curator based in Kuala Lumpur. He is a senior lecturer at the University of Malaya and a team member of Malaysia Design Archive. In his artistic practice, Simon extends his research into open-access knowledge sharing, digital sources for histories from below, and global flows in the art and visual cultures of Asia. His artworks have been exhibited at Dhaka Art Summit (Bangladesh), Para/Site (Hong Kong), and The Back Room (Malaysia). Simon works chiefly in collaboration. The design of the tracing boards for this exhibition emerges from a three-month long period of conversation, archive diving, and imagination between Soon and Munirah Mansoor on the visual history of the Malay world.


Munirah Mansoor (b. 1994, Singapore) is a visual designer who is exploring areas of her cultural roots from a Malay-archipelago perspective. Her focus is on observing and rethinking historical stories after a personal revelation on what could have been or what have not been unearthed archeologically, which makes current narratives remain that as a myth. For her final university project she worked on Hikayat Nusantara, which imagines a legend from a non-fictional fact that all of the archipelago lands were once geographically united. She began working on relevant projects after joining Studio Vanessa Ban for a period, where she also assisted in designing the identity of the exhibition As The West Slept (2019).