Au Sow Yee’s three-part video series The Extreme Journey of Perwira and the Calm Sea: In 3 Acts (2019–22) begins with a karaoke session. An introductory xylophone sequence announces the unfamiliar Song of Departure: a mash-up of lyrics and melodies from a Taiwanese conscription tune and cinematic theme songs. In conventional karaoke fashion, synchronized textual cues (in Japanese, Chinese, and English) accompany a montage of images, and from the song’s main refrain, we learn of its premise as well as its protagonist: ぼくらのハリマオ | 我們的 Harimau—in English, “our Tiger” (fig. 1). In this mediated performance between language and transformation, we glimpse the first contours of Au’s disorienting journey through the many versions of the biography of the Japanese “Tiger of Malaya,” Tani Yutaka (1911–1942).
Born on November 6, 1911, in Fukuoka, Tani Yutaka moved with his family to Terengganu, Malaysia, where he settled and learned to speak fluent Malay (supposedly, to the detriment of his handle on Japanese). During a brief return to Japan in 1931–32, Chinese rioters razed Tani’s family’s barbershop, killing his youngest sister, Shizue, in the wake of the Mukden Incident of 1931. This tragic turn in Tani’s biography set forth the quasi-historical Tiger of Malaya: the vengeful Muslim-Japanese intelligence agent who returned to Malaya, stole from the British and ethnic Chinese to distribute their wealth to rural Malays, and assisted the Fujiwara Agency in covert operations.
Like many heroic narratives, there are contestations to his identity that threaten to refute his claim to the title. Notably, even though he is among Malaysia’s heroes, Tani Yutaka remains relatively obscure. It may be due to the tragicomic nature of his death—one theory is that he succumbed to malaria—but it is more likely that he evades easy political and national identification because of his biography. Instead, the story of Tani Yutaka thrives in Japan as a simplified narrative of the country’s imperial successes in the South Seas through his enticing model of the noble hero traversing the treacherous jungles of Southeast Asia—a performance that oriented Japan to the south and against Western and ethnic Chinese powers in magazines, cartoons, television and cinema.1See Leo Ching, “Champion of Justice: How Asian Heroes Saved Japanese Imperialism,” PMLA 126, no. 3 (2011): 644–50. Tani’s enduring legacy in contemporary Japan can be attested to by perhaps the most bizarre of these examples: when, posing as an adorable mascot of Japan’s imperial history in Malaya, he was reimagined as a villager in the popular video game Animal Crossing.2“Tybalt,” Nookipedia, https://nookipedia.com/wiki/Tybalt.
Today, as Taiwan enacts its own southward gaze with the New Southbound Policy, Au’s locus of production has become laden with these legacies of the Cold War.3The New Southbound Policy (NSP) was introduced in 2016 by the Tsai administration with the goal of establishing Taiwan’s legitimacy as a member of an international community with countries in Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Australasia. For more on the NSP and Southeast Asia, see Karl Chee Leong Lee and Ying-kit Chan, eds., Taiwan and Southeast Asia: Soft Power and Hard Truths Facing China’s Ascendancy (Routledge, 2023). The expression of its latencies emerges in her practice as strongly in her obsession with ambivalent biographies as in her investigations of the filmic traditions and industries that bolster or obscure their dislocation. This obsession, in part a reflection of the artist’s own diasporic condition as a Malaysian Chinese resident of Taiwan, imbues her works with a charged sensitivity toward figures who can be neither fully claimed nor entirely dismissed.4Conversation with Au Sow Yee, Malaysia, July 26, 2024. More specifically, it is a critical approach to the evolution of image technologies that has characterized Au’s practice from the start, a perspective that recognizes the pivotal role that cinema played during the mid- to late twentieth century as a platform for ideological warfare, postwar nation-building, and remembrance.5Poshek Fu and Man-Fung Yip, eds., The Cold War and Asian Cinemas (Routledge, 2020).
In her 2017 work Castle, Valley, Anonymous Island and Their Return to the Moon (fig. 2), Au reanimates the story of Jim Thompson (1906–1967), the Thai silk tycoon whose mysterious disappearance in Malaysia’s Cameron Highlands in 1967 has been speculatively traced to his associations with the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In The Kris Project (2016), she imagines an alternative scenario in which the founder of the Cathay-Keris film empire, Loke Wan Tho (1915–1964), survives the plane crash that led to his death upon departing Taiwan in 1964. In these works, Au recovers and collages footage from disparate archives to disorient between fact and fiction. These examples reveal another crucial aspect of Au’s practice: that it is not simply a matter of retelling but rather of mapping a Cold War network and the fluid geopolitical identities and alliances that are held in tension within the biographies of these mysterious historical figures.
The Extreme Journey of Perwira and the Calm Sea orchestrates this hallucinogenic transition between different times, geographies, and chimeras as we journey with Tani Yutaka across the sea and through the jungle, space, and a tiger cave, lured by the promise of adventure. When displayed in Au’s solo exhibition Planet Traveler and Its Broken Song at Project Fulfill Art Space in Taipei in 2022, the videos in the three-part series were distributed within the space in varying screen sizes and heights (figs. 3, 4). The experience was one of disorientating encounters, of rounding corners in dimly lit rooms and of sneaking past an animation of a sleeping tiger, who occasionally wakes up to trigger a version of Tani in his various chronotopes. The viewer’s own journey comes to mirror Tani’s in that one experiences the aesthetics of a transmutable and groundless modern life, a space-in-flux within which we are all bound. And Au declares its artificiality by concluding each video with flashes of its instruments of seeing and imaging. At the end of Electric, Cosmos and the Seance (2022), the drunken revelry of a party between Tani and his companions is rudely interrupted by a confessionary panning shot of a studio, where we see a green screen, a costume of a tiger, and then a diorama of a jungle that later forms the backdrop of her third film To Harimau: See You on the Other Side (2022). To enter too deeply into the hero’s journey, Au implies, is to forgo a necessary distance from its technologies of mediation.
我們的 Harimau, 我們的 Harimau, 我們的 Harimau . . . The song’s repetitive drone is not so much a musical choice as it is a manifestation. Far more than an expression of interest in symbolic interpretations, Au’s practice attunes us to the production of the “our” in “our tiger,” the hero who inhabits entangled times and worlds. By following The Extreme Journey of Perwira and the Calm Sea, this essay identifies in Au Sow Yee’s films a process of defining the perwira as an aesthetic phenomenon: a product of a Cold War imagination—and one that persists as a distracted, filmic formula representing our ongoing search for identity in a post-heroic age.
The Heroic Journey
Prior to proposing a post-heroic aesthetic turn, it is useful to return to existing formulations of the figure of the perwira to understand what exactly Au is confronting. Her first act in The Extreme Journey of Perwira and the Calm Sea is to reclaim Tani Yutaka a hero of as much interest to Malaya as he is to Japan, responding to the overwhelming control of Japanese media over representations of Tani imbued with the language of imperial power. In the title of the series, Tani is a perwira—a Malayan “warrior” and national hero who resurges in various guises across history to represent the changing ideals of postcolonial Malaysia’s elusive cultural self. Embedded within the etymology of heroism in Malaysia is this feudal past: the hero as rebel and resister to colonial forces, resurrected in the postcolonial world as an agent who sets forth a new national order.
In conferring this title upon Tani, Au engages with a dynamic tradition of reconstructing the Malayan perwira, such as Hang Tuah: the 15-century Malay warrior whose loyalty to the Malaccan sultanate became emblematic of Malaysia’s anti-colonial national identity. Indeed, a disproportionate section of Malaysian academic and popular discourse has been dedicated to this potent symbol through a tedious cycle of representations, discoveries, and refutations of Hang Tuah’s lineage, a cycle that in turn mirrors the changing ethnonationalist sentiments of the multiethnic state and its fluctuating ideals.6For example, see Rusaslina Idrus, “Multicultural Hang Tuah: Cybermyth and popular history making in Malaysia,” Indonesia and the Malay World 44, no. 129 (2016): 229–48, https://doi.org/10.1080/13639811.2015.1133135; Kassim Ahmad, Dialog Dengan Sasterawan (Pustaka Obscura, 2014); Mohd Nasif Badruddin, “Did Hang Tuah meet Leonardo da Vinci?,” New Straits Times, December 5, 2015, https://www.nst.com.my/news/2015/12/115660/did-hang-tuah-meet-leonardo-da-vinci; and Roshidi Abu Samah, “Where’s Hang Tuah’s grave?,” New Straits Times, December 18, 2015, https://www.nst.com.my/news/2015/12/117829/wheres-hang-tuahs-grave. In 1956, the mythic figure served as a nostalgic anchor in the titular film directed by Phani Majumdar (1911–1994)—Malayan cinema’s first film to be fully shot in Eastman color. Hang Tuah’s unwavering allegiance to the sultan and the kingdom served as an allegory for the role of heroism in safeguarding sovereignty during an uncertain political moment, a reflection of Malaysia’s nascent independence from British colonial rule.7Idrus, “Multicultural Hang Tuah,” 232.
In a rapidly transforming Malaysia of the late 1980s, Hang Tuah embodied the anxieties of a modern nation that could no longer rely on simplistic heroic narratives to define its postcolonial identity. Anwardi Jamil’s 1988 film Tuah took a distinctly introspective approach to the legendary figure, marking a departure from earlier celebratory and heroic portrayals. In this version, Hang Tuah is no longer presented solely as an unflinching symbol of loyalty and righteousness but rather as a character caught between conflicting duties and personal struggles. The film explores the psychological toll of his fierce loyalty to the sultan, most palpable in the film’s reimagining of the infamous episode in which Hang Tuah is ordered to kill his closest friend, Hang Jebat, who has rebelled against the sultan. In this version, Tuah’s actions are depicted not as heroic but instead tragic, framing him as a figure trapped by the rigid codes of feudalism—and raising questions about the nature of power and loyalty. Today, his multimedia representation wields just as much agency in meaning-making within hegemonic state narratives because it offers artists, activists, and cybercitizens the terrain upon which to make alternative histories.8Idrus, “Multicultural Hang Tuah.”
To declare Tani as a perwira, Au draws him into this rich, vernacular cinematic tradition steeped in myth and metaphor. The artist’s symbols and physical lexicon are just as alluring—the appearance of the phallic keris (dagger) speaking to an “authentic Malay masculinity” or the physicality of Tani, who resembles the boyish, mustached perwira of Malayan folklorewhose triumph over a larger opponent embodies a reversal of power through wit and strategy, not violence.9Khoo Gaik Cheng, “What Is It to Be a Man? Violence in the Time of Modernity,” in Reclaiming Adat: Contemporary Malaysian Film and Literature (UBC Press, 2006), 163. But one senses Au’s awareness of these idioms as having been no more than illusions, exploding clumsily across the screen as dated, tokusatsu special effects characteristic of Japanese action films or, at times, as only a translucent mirage.10In an interview by the author on July 26, 2024, in Kuala Lumpur, Au described her fascination with tokusatsu effects in hero-genre films, including those she discovered in the cinematic archive of Tani Yutaka. The cursory glance above at formulations of the perwira reveals how Au’s reframing of Tani within Malaysian cinematic tradition was to situate him in his related context, where she can play out his contingent relationship to a Malaysian postwar heroic imagination. His return, as evoked in a text sequence from Au’s prelude, bears the baggage of “the sadness of a million years, as if possessed by an evil curse.” It is a return that unsettles, reframing the hero as a site of ongoing negotiation and flux.
A Post-Heroic Malaysian Cinema
What was the curse that befell Tani Yutaka? As the same sequence explains, it is an ever-transforming body that marks the cursed hero. It was in reckoning with Yutaka’s glitchy identity that a more transnational lens on the heroic figure, one beyond the perwira, began to appear necessary in my viewings and re-viewings of Au’s films. There are significant affinities between what Au is here addressing with the perwira’s global cinematic equivalents—from Hollywood to independent cinema—and these inflections on Malayan cinema merit renewed attention. For one, there is the concern within the burgeoning, transnational study of heroic tropes, with the hero’s transformation to self-actualization; when describing the psychology of the mythical hero’s journey, founder of heroism science Joseph Campbell pathologizes the hero as necessarily incomplete or unrealized.11Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (1988; Anchor Books, 1991), 183. Elsewhere, the scholar Scott T. Allison emphasizes the hero’s transformation as an essential biographical turn resonating across multiple examples: “Without a change in setting, the hero cannot change herself, and without a change in herself, the hero cannot change the world.”12Scott T. Allison and George R. Goethals, “The Hero’s Transformation,” in Scott T. Allison, George R. Geothals, and Roderick M. Kramer, eds., Handbook of Heroism and Heroic Leadership (Routledge: 2017), 381. In such archetypical heroic narratives, the hero’s transformation is the motive that drives their journey through unfamiliar settings, providing the necessary psychological resolution that elevates them to heroic status.
In The Extreme Journey of Perwira and the Calm Sea, Au denies Yutaka such resolution. Appropriating cinematic tricks including dioramas, theme songs, and green screens, Au dismantles the very grandeur these artifices once sought to evoke, using them not to progress but rather to diminish. Here, they appear awkward, almost absurd, as if they are uncomfortably aware of their own artificiality. In doing so, she aligns with those auteurs who are less beholden to the hero’s political wielding, gesturing toward the perwira’s disintegrating teleological idiom and its aesthetic innovation. These are the traits of the “post-heroic cinema” that film historian Thomas Elsaesser proposed in 2012 as an “imaginative test-bed” for European cinema to address Europe’s loss of a heroic narrative, and the realization that much of the “progressive social projects” that defined it “was also based on imperialism, slavery, and colonialism, on exploitation and exclusion.”13Thomas Elsaesser, “European Cinema and the Postheroic Narrative: Jean-Luc Nancy, Claire Denis, and Beau Travail,” New Literary History 43, no. 4 (2012): 708. To Elsaesser, in order for a post-heroic European cinema to liberate itself from these tautologies, “it would also have to rethink itself in cinematic terms and no longer assume the screen to be functioning as either ‘window’ or ‘mirror’: the two abiding epistemologies of classical popular cinema.”14Elsaesser, “European Cinema and the Postheroic Narrative,” 711. The post-heroic traits that Elsaesser identifies in his selected films are the flawed heroes whose victories are not material or decisive, but instead philosophical, psychological, or deeply personal.
In the case of Tani Yutaka, the weakness of his archive is the potential of his cinematic transformation. Its state: a memorial gravestone in Singapore’s Japanese Cemetery Park and several shifting, fictionalized portrayals on Japanese media, among them, the television series Bandit Harimao (1960–61) and the movie Marai no Tora (Tiger of Malaya, 1943), both of which Au references. By taking up Tani Yutaka—a figure haunted by his own impossibilities for national recuperation—Au transforms Elsaesser’s post-heroic aesthetic from a response to narrative exhaustion and the collapse of grand civilizations into a productive framework for examining unresolved historical tensions. Unlike European cinema’s disillusionment with heroic narratives after their historical fulfillment, Malaysian cinema never fully consolidated its heroic mode to begin with; its heroes remain caught between a network of Cold War spectralities, feudal loyalties, and competing ideals. In Au’s hands, however, the perwira’s inability to fully realize his heroic mode might itself be generative. The “post” in post-heroic cinema might function differently in postcolonial contexts, not marking the end of heroic narratives but rather their perpetual deferral.
Toward this, Au participates in the canon of Tani’s mythologization by inventing a new chimeric form for the present: an anthropomorphic drummer with a tiger’s head in an astronaut suit with an “ambiguous sexual identity.” This textured figure inhabits the longest and most lively work within the series, Electric, Cosmos and the Seance, which begins in the jungle and on the shores of the South China Sea—two environments ripe with the specters of Malaysia’s Cold War history (fig. 5). In this work, we see Au’s most cogent development and articulation of a post-heroic aesthetics for Malaysian cinema. A fight scene is stripped of violent special effects, with comic, homemade props for weapons used in their place. In the first half of the video, we likewise find the flailing potency of the heroic telos enacted through sound and its chaotic rapture. Non-diegetic sonance of satellite communication and distant drumming introduce the video, immediately defamiliarizing the natural order. These scenes jump to reveal the chimeric Tani as the source of the drumming, cutting between medium and close-up shots to match the increasing veracity of his performance. The syncopated rhythmicality of this sequence functions to dislocate Tani from the jungle as the background morphs into outer space; the jungle can no longer sustain the uninhibited, queer identity of the chimeric Tani.
In its lack of linearity and sense of social purpose, The Extreme Journey of Perwira and the Calm Sea forgoes one of the most important features of the heroic formula: the figure who operates as a self-sustaining and independent agent of will. Instead, Tani’s catapulting across times and worlds with no apparent resolution relates the disruption caused by an accelerated, nonlinear heroic journey that parallels developments in our spectatorial experiences. In Tiger Cave (2020), Au confronts the unstable surfaces of digital aesthetics in the disintegration of her animated tiger, whose CGI rendering melts into skin before disappearing gradually into a flat red screen. This striking sequence recalls Elsaesser’s formulation of a post-heroic European cinema as not only shedding its formulation of nationhood and community, but also necessarily reforming itself in cinematic terms. He writes: “It would deploy the screen as a surface that is neither transparent nor reflecting back, but whose elements are in constant movement and flux, distinct and singular, yet capable of forming new ensembles, configurations, and attributes-in-common.”15Elsaesser, “European Cinema and the Postheroic Narrative,” 711.
Aesthetically, we may reasonably ask what Elsaesser is proposing: If there is no community to ground us, is the image of the post-hero as obsolete as its predecessors? Contemporary Malaysian cinema has certainly not spared its impulse for the heroic. In June 2022, Mat Kilau: Kebangkitan Pahlawan (Mat Kilau: The Rise of the Warrior) broke records to become the highest-grossing film in the history of Malaysian cinema, telling the story of the national hero and defender against the British colonists in the Pahang uprising between 1891 and 1895.16Mumtaj Begum, “‘Mat Kilau’ is the No. 1 Malaysian film of all-time, earning RM53mil in 13 days,” The Star, July 7, 2022, https://www.thestar.com.my/lifestyle/entertainment/2022/07/07/039mat-kilau039-is-the-no1-malaysian-film-of-all-time-earning-rm53mil-in-13-days#:~:text=’Mat%20Kilau’%20is%20the%20No,in%2013%20days%20%7C%20The%20Star. The painful predictability of its controversies around the film’s representation of non-Malay characters, again, testifies to the specter of postcolonial division and its familiar anxieties and insecurities about the representation of non-Malay identities and cultures that persist in the country today.17Ainin Wan Salleh, “‘Mat Kilau’ inaccurate, says academic who wants honest narrative,” Free Malaysia Today, August 2, 2022, https://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/nation/2022/08/02/mat-kilau-inaccurate-says-academic-who-wants-honest-narrative/; and Yvonne Tan, “National Epic and Origin Myth: The Spectre of Hang Tuah” (PhD dissertation, Goethe University Frankfurt, 2020). Reconciling this with the post-heroic aesthetics of Au’s The Extreme Journey of Perwira and the Calm Sea, I argue, requires understanding contemporary art’s retelling of heroic narratives as sparks of aesthetically complex engagements with our nostalgia for mythologies within our ongoing struggle with their cooption by those who wish to reduce them to singulars. If Au’s perwira navigates tangled terrains of postwar myths and cinematic artifice, it is because these terrains are not his alone to traverse—they belong to a broader, shared condition of diasporic dislocation and the fractured inheritances of the Cold War. Au’s post-heroic aesthetic emerges not from the exhaustion of narrative possibility—as in Elsaesser’s European context—but from the recognition that Malaysian cinema’s heroes have always inhabited spaces of productive tensions, moving between competing systems of meaning, vernacular memory and imperial technique.
Ultimately, the sticky and unshakeable power of Au’s perwira is why we should recalibrate our thinking about heroic aesthetics. This does not require us to turn our backs on their cinematic legacies and conventions, a proposition that Au supports by her frequent return to the cinematic archive and which drives the powerful aesthetic effects of The Extreme Journey of Perwira and the Calm Sea. We cannot deny that the hero remains a useful symbol for the will to demand an equal and just society; nor should we be embarrassed by the justifiable reasons for our sentimental attachment to the perwira and heroes in their most simplified and epic forms. These beliefs can coexist in recognition of the urgency to understand how these ideological shape-shifters are mediated by instruments of seeing and power today and in the future.
- 1See Leo Ching, “Champion of Justice: How Asian Heroes Saved Japanese Imperialism,” PMLA 126, no. 3 (2011): 644–50.
- 2“Tybalt,” Nookipedia, https://nookipedia.com/wiki/Tybalt.
- 3The New Southbound Policy (NSP) was introduced in 2016 by the Tsai administration with the goal of establishing Taiwan’s legitimacy as a member of an international community with countries in Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Australasia. For more on the NSP and Southeast Asia, see Karl Chee Leong Lee and Ying-kit Chan, eds., Taiwan and Southeast Asia: Soft Power and Hard Truths Facing China’s Ascendancy (Routledge, 2023).
- 4Conversation with Au Sow Yee, Malaysia, July 26, 2024.
- 5Poshek Fu and Man-Fung Yip, eds., The Cold War and Asian Cinemas (Routledge, 2020).
- 6For example, see Rusaslina Idrus, “Multicultural Hang Tuah: Cybermyth and popular history making in Malaysia,” Indonesia and the Malay World 44, no. 129 (2016): 229–48, https://doi.org/10.1080/13639811.2015.1133135; Kassim Ahmad, Dialog Dengan Sasterawan (Pustaka Obscura, 2014); Mohd Nasif Badruddin, “Did Hang Tuah meet Leonardo da Vinci?,” New Straits Times, December 5, 2015, https://www.nst.com.my/news/2015/12/115660/did-hang-tuah-meet-leonardo-da-vinci; and Roshidi Abu Samah, “Where’s Hang Tuah’s grave?,” New Straits Times, December 18, 2015, https://www.nst.com.my/news/2015/12/117829/wheres-hang-tuahs-grave.
- 7Idrus, “Multicultural Hang Tuah,” 232.
- 8Idrus, “Multicultural Hang Tuah.”
- 9Khoo Gaik Cheng, “What Is It to Be a Man? Violence in the Time of Modernity,” in Reclaiming Adat: Contemporary Malaysian Film and Literature (UBC Press, 2006), 163.
- 10In an interview by the author on July 26, 2024, in Kuala Lumpur, Au described her fascination with tokusatsu effects in hero-genre films, including those she discovered in the cinematic archive of Tani Yutaka.
- 11Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (1988; Anchor Books, 1991), 183.
- 12Scott T. Allison and George R. Goethals, “The Hero’s Transformation,” in Scott T. Allison, George R. Geothals, and Roderick M. Kramer, eds., Handbook of Heroism and Heroic Leadership (Routledge: 2017), 381.
- 13Thomas Elsaesser, “European Cinema and the Postheroic Narrative: Jean-Luc Nancy, Claire Denis, and Beau Travail,” New Literary History 43, no. 4 (2012): 708.
- 14Elsaesser, “European Cinema and the Postheroic Narrative,” 711.
- 15Elsaesser, “European Cinema and the Postheroic Narrative,” 711.
- 16Mumtaj Begum, “‘Mat Kilau’ is the No. 1 Malaysian film of all-time, earning RM53mil in 13 days,” The Star, July 7, 2022, https://www.thestar.com.my/lifestyle/entertainment/2022/07/07/039mat-kilau039-is-the-no1-malaysian-film-of-all-time-earning-rm53mil-in-13-days#:~:text=’Mat%20Kilau’%20is%20the%20No,in%2013%20days%20%7C%20The%20Star.
- 17Ainin Wan Salleh, “‘Mat Kilau’ inaccurate, says academic who wants honest narrative,” Free Malaysia Today, August 2, 2022, https://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/nation/2022/08/02/mat-kilau-inaccurate-says-academic-who-wants-honest-narrative/; and Yvonne Tan, “National Epic and Origin Myth: The Spectre of Hang Tuah” (PhD dissertation, Goethe University Frankfurt, 2020).
