By Appointment

2020’s thematic issue, EASTS 14:1 Care in Translation: Care-ful Research in Medical Settings in collaboration with Catelijne Coopmans and Karen McNamara highlights how healthcare is interwoven with medical settings across Asia. By interrogating care, we are glad to introduce the Malaysian artist Chia Yu Chian (1936-1990), with whose painting, ‘By Appointment’ was curated as the cover image for the very issue:

By Appointment’ is part of more than thirty works that constitute Chia’s ‘Hospital series’. He painted it in 1980, after a one-month stay as a patient at what is now the Universiti Malaya Medical Centre. Having been admitted with a bleeding stomach ulcer, Chia started to go around different parts of the hospital with his sketchpad as soon as he felt better. After being discharged, he turned many of these sketches into paintings, adding scenes of the experiences of patients and the work of hospital staff to an oeuvre in which slice-of-life moments and instances of social drama featured centrally.

Bridget Tracy Tan (2009), a Director at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, has described the Hospital series as “a lucid combination of daily observations as well as acute sensitivities to the eventfulness that connote the experience of being in and visiting a hospital”. ‘By Appointment’ combines everyday-ness and eventfulness by showing in vivid colours a multitude of people and artefacts around a reception counter: we see the doctors’ duty roster, some filing cabinets and a poster exhorting the waiting patients to be “Quiet Please”. It provides a window into medical care in 1980s Malaysia, broadening the perspective from doctor-patient interactions (which Chia also painted as part of his series) to a view of what gets folded into ‘care’ as it materializes in the spatially and temporally located here and now. In portraying a group of nurses facing and serving a crowd, the painting also speaks to the way care-work is gendered, and more indirectly to how interactions in medical settings engender expectations and valuations of care. Finally, ‘By Appointment’ and other works in Chia’s Hospital Series draw attention to the question of who is looking, and from which perspective. The artist does that, according to Tan (2009), by “giving us just enough information in his compositions to figure out the context of the goings-on, but also managing to maintain a sense of the confidential…”.

Like Chia in his painting, the contributions to this Special Issue combine everyday-ness with eventfulness. The stakes of repairing equipment, collecting data, evaluating care options, and negotiating the best treatment, are made visible in accounts of ordinary and extra-ordinary moments in which medical care is prepared for, provided and/or received. Equally, these contributions are concerned with care as a relational assemblage made up of human and non-human elements, and they present scenes, stories, perspectives and artefacts that contain and evoke a sense of place and history consequential to care. The uneven use of, and access to, medical technologies within and across countries in Asia plays a part – as do the political-economic features of healthcare systems, gender relations, the ongoing calibration of nation states in an interconnected world, advances in medical possibilities and best-practice standards, patient advocacy, privatization, travel, and other transformations constantly afoot. Finally, these contributions, like Chia’s painting, thematize in various ways the researchers’ perspectives, framing and participation in the life worlds they care for.

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