Artist Kemang wa Lehulere is a bold and enigmatic explorer of South African memory, writes Sean O'Toole Among the many secular rites that define an art career , one poisoned ritual stands out - the plodding dance of meaning that audiences demand of artists. Why this? Why that? In short, and here I only lightly paraphrase Eddie Murphy from the days he wore purple leather: why, why, why?Kemang wa Lehulere, a 31-year-old Cape Town artist born to a Tswana mother and Irish father, is all too familiar with this dance. He has had to perform it more and more often since bagging a slew of local and international awards, most recently this year's Standard Bank Young Artist Award in the visual art category."Often times I feel there is a silent demand from the art world to explain oneself," states Lehulere in a letter to his friend and occasional collaborator, the museum director Khwezi Gule. That letter, part of a series of wandering exchanges that encompass art, literature, history, Marx, blackness and the wasted time spent studying fine art at Wits University in the late 2000s, appear in a handsome catalogue accompanying his remarkable new travelling exhibition, History will Break your Heart, currently on view in Port Elizabeth.mini_story_image_vleft1"At times I refuse," elaborates Lehulere on his willingness to explain himself, "and at times I go halfway. I hardly ever go all out. I don't see the need really. But someone suggested that it is generally considered polite to allow viewers into your work, both by making the work 'accessible' but also speaking about and describing the work."I was recently a beneficiary of this politeness when Lehulere visited Grahamstown to supervise the installation of his show for its run during the National Arts Festival."Is this the usual size of your production crew?" I wondered as worker bees fussed over some video equipment inside the 1820 Settlers Monument, the brick ziggurat stranded above this frail settler town in the Eastern Cape."No," he chuckled. Lehulere has an extraordinary chuckle: a pressurised escape of air that is not quite rasping and uniquely his own. "These are very generous students from Rhodes University. Usually I prefer doing things myself." Cue outburst of giggles by four enamoured art students.Lehulere has Brazilian good looks: a head of thick coiling hair, brown eyes and a scrub beard that, seen in the right light, has traces of ginger, an inheritance from his father, David McKibbin.Lehulere's mum, a jazz musician named Letsego Lehulere, met McKibbin through the tenor saxophonist Winston "Mankunku" Ngozi. Apartheid laws prevented the two from pursuing a life together. Following unsuccessful entreaties by McKibbin that they move abroad, he eventually split, settling in England where Lehulere spent holidays until his father's passing in 1995.The early death of his mother saw Lehulere grow up under the tutelage of his maternal aunties in Gugulethu, and his mixed-race heritage inevitably figured in his upbringing. "Look, I think having grown up light-skinned in Gugulethu itself has been quite a challenge, where my identity has always been contested within my own neighbourhood," he told artist Kathryn Smith in 2011. "When I was in primary school, the coloured kids would call me a 'wit k*****'."Lehulere's looks also scuppered his pursuit of an acting career. A cousin of playwright Itumeleng wa Lehulere, he appeared in his 2004 production Echoes of our Footsteps in Grahamstown and Cape Town.Auditions for other roles inevitably generated the same response. "Oh wow, we like you but you don't fit this role because you're not credible as a black person on screen," Lehulere told Smith. He was asked to try out in coloured roles and speak Afrikaans, which he can't.Then he took a short course at the Community Video Education Trust, an association promoting film production skills in disadvantaged communities. He imagined a career behind the scenes, and researched taxi violence for an unmade documentary.These early experiences clarify Lehulere's fondness for performance, his collaborative method and frequent use of script-like text in his elaborate chalk wall drawings. A striking example of the latter won him the 2010 MTN New Contemporaries Award.But we don't speak about any of this biographical stuff. Given that I'm an art critic - a high-falutin' word for "professional nuisance" - Lehulere knows I'm here to find out why his new exhibition looks the way it looks. He also knows he must duly explain why his exhibition is devoted to three prominent figures in this country's arts and letters: pioneer abstract painter Ernest Mancoba, short-story writer and journalist RRR Dhlomo, and, most intriguingly, Gladys Mgudlandlu, a mystical realist painter dismissed by writer Bessie Head as an "exuberant innocent" and "escapist".full_story_image_hleft2Softly, confidently and, yes, procedurally, Lehulere begins speaking about his show. I have an idiot moment early on when I ask if he ever met Mgudlandlu, a fellow resident of Gugulethu.Artist: "No, she died in 1979."Addled critic: "You would have been?"Artist: "Zero."Addled critic: "Oh ja, you were born in 1984."Cue extraordinary chuckle.A basic grasp of South African cultural history is useful when navigating Lehulere's exhibition, but not essential. In some senses his show is an idiosyncratic history lesson, one that continues a recent trend in his work of rediscovering and celebrating black history.Earlier this year Lehulere presented a solo exhibition at Cape Town's Stevenson gallery. Titled To Whom it may Concern, it too featured porcelain dogs, a sneaking reference to Dhlomo's 1930 short story The Dog Killers, about the brutal killing of dogs in a mine compound by mine bosses.But that show was largely about exiled writer and journalist Nat Nakasa, whose grave Lehulere visited in New York in 2013. There he read poetry - "as a gesture of love", he says - and later returned to collect some grass.block_quotes_start History continually disappears, it comes and goes. I guess it is the elasticity of history that excites me block_quotes_endLehulere says he started kicking about ideas for his current show late last year. He initially fixed on celebrating Mancoba, another exile who left South Africa for Paris in 1938. Hans Ulrich Obrist, a London-based curator and influential promoter of Lehulere's busy international career, had just given him a copy of his video interview with Mancoba in Paris shortly before the painter's death in 2002.History Will Break Your Heart includes this footage, as well as a Mancoba print and chewed-up wooden figure. The latter work was originally a generic African sculpture waiting for a buyer at the Pan-African Market; Lehulere mutilated it with a saw - in 2009 he grated books at the opening of the exhibition Dada South? in Cape Town.Alongside his homage to Mancoba and an eccentric installation memorialising Marikana - the work is composed largely of upended gumboots and gold-painted porcelain dogs - Lehulere's travelling show also includes a treasure trove of unseen paintings and works on paper by Mgudlandlu.He paid R90, 000 for them to a trader who in March scooped up an entire job lot of 22 Mgudlandlu works depicting birds, rural figures and landscapes for R434795 at London auction house Bonhams. Their original owner, now resident in Israel, had bought the works directly from Mgudlandlu.Mgudlandlu is both an odd and appropriate choice for a young artist whose work is resolutely post-painterly. Her mother too died when she was young. Trained by her grandmother, her art can be read as a "gentle form of resistance", to borrow a phrase used by Lehulere during a walkabout of his Stevenson show.Lehulere first heard about Mgudlandlu from Unathi Sigenu, a now deceased member of Gugulective, the insurgent collective that enabled the journeyman artist to blossom in a community of shared values and aspirations.story_article_right1"I wasn't really interested," he says. "My head was elsewhere. It was never something I thought I could take and run with."Then in December, a neighbour presented him with art historian Elza Miles's monograph on Mgudlandlu. His auntie, Sophia, recognised the name and recalled how, in 1971, she had visited Mgudlandlu's home. She further recalled the elaborate murals, prompting Lehulere's work-in-progress quest to discover these plastered-over murals with the help of a professional restorer."I am interested in the ephemeral, which is what drew me to this Gladys thing," says the artist, adding that his own method of making temporary wall drawings made him push ahead with his quixotic quest.Lehulere's exhibition includes a short documentary about all this, as well as chalk drawings made by Sophia, based on her memory of what she saw as a child.The result is magical and compelling, Lehulere's exhibition offering a clever montage of fragile memories, found objects and forgotten art works that speak about cultural absences and historical reoccurrences in this country.We are now deep into the "why" of his art. His one video splutters to life, but is skew, prompting more fuss and perplexity among the worker bees. Lehulere ends his effortless dance with meaning with a concise statement."History continually disappears," he says. "It comes and goes. It is not something fixed; it is malleable. I guess it is the elasticity of history that excites me." ..