REAL OR NOT, HERE’S THE DEAL: ABSTRACT ART IS HERE TO STAY (Aug 2017)​
Published by Bank Negara Malaysia Museum and Art Gallery​
‘Maybe among the observers here, there are those who long for stirring art that gives life to conditions. Those who visit surely have his or her own philosophy about art, What is art? Whom is it for? Is art for community more meaningful than art for art’s sake? Or art for development? Art for the nation? Art as an identifier of race? That which gives forms to the soul?’
Syed Ahmad Jamal (1929-2011)
National Art Laureate Malaysia
The history of western-influenced art in what is now Malaysia goes back well into the 19th century. Although there were already western-style art practitioners in Malaya during British rule, including Sir Frank Swettenham himself, it was not until the establishment of the Nanyang Academy of Fine Art (NAFA) in the late 1930s in Singapore that some form resembling ‘modern’ art was formally introduced into the country.
NAFA, which reopened after the end of the Japanese occupation, saw many of its Malayan graduates return to teach in primary and secondary Chinese vernacular schools all over the country. Before that, art subjects were taught intermittently in some schools; Kuen Cheng Girls School, Kuala Lumpur recently identified as the earliest, dating back to the early 1900s. Art was formally introduced in government schools only in the early 1920s as a subject that could be taken by students for the Overseas Cambridge School Certificate examination.
Significant changes were made in the teaching of art in schools by Peter Harris, the Superintendent of Art Education in 1951, and by Tay Hooi Kiat, as Inspector of Schools in charge of art education in 1952. Training in art was made available at the art department of the Specialist Teachers’ Training Institute in Cheras during the late 1960s. This was as a one-year supplementary course for secondary school art teachers under the Ministry of Education.
In the Philippines and Indonesia, the Spanish and Dutch had respectively introduced, supported and provided training in western-style art during their rule in the 19th century, producing skilful and outstanding talent in naturalism. In Malaya, outside the school system, art training and knowledge were transmitted informally through individual artists or groups. Even Thailand, which has never been under the colonial yoke, introduced western-style art in the early 1920s through its fine-art department under the ministry of palace affairs. In 1943, it had already established the famous Silpakorn University from a modest school of fine art founded in 1933. In contrast, the British Malayan government only began sending Malayans abroad under scholarships to study art formally in the late 1940s.
Among the significant art groups active before Merdeka were the Angkatan Pelukis Semenanjung, later SeMalaysia (APS) formerly of the Majlis Kesenian Melayu, and the Wednesday Art Group (WAG). While NAFA trained its students in the Paris School of Art’s approach, which included aspects of post-impressionism, fauvism and cubism, (together with academic realism) the APS specialised in representational art with an especial focus on the socio-cultural realities of the Malay community. The WAG (named because their art classes were conducted every Wednesday by its founder Peter Harris), on the other hand, had promoted self-expression based on experimentation of forms and materials.
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Two important figures in the 1930s, already working in a combination of naturalist, impressionist and post-impressionist approaches, were Penang-based Abdullah Ariff and Yong Mun Sen. The former was regarded for his watercolour technique and the latter for his post-impressionist oil paintings. Abdullah Ariff was also admitted in the mid 1930s as the only non-western member of the Penang Impressionists art group, formed by the wives of expatriates in the 1920s.
Among the celebrated pioneer artists strongly influenced by a combination of post impressionism and cubism to emerge in the 1950s were Cheong Soo Pieng in Singapore and Chuah Thean Teng or ‘Teng' in Malaya. Though technically skilful, Teng is known primarily for turning batik, an age-old craft widely practised in this region, into a fine-art form by employing the traditional djanting and dyeing method to produced stylised images celebrating local folk and kampung life, instead of the traditional patterns and motifs.
Tendencies towards abstraction were already discernible in the works of those who had returned from their studies abroad. Among the pioneers was Tay Hooi Kiat, who was the first Malayan artist to be given a scholarship by the then British government to study art in Europe. Shortly after, this was followed by Syed Ahmad Jamal. Many of these Malayan artists who were among the early prominent practitioners of abstraction in the country, namely Abdul Latiff Mohidin, Yeoh Jin Leng, Ibrahim Hussein, Jolly Koh, Cheong Lai Tong and Anthony Lau, had already been working under various post-impressionist and expressionist styles before embracing the abstractionist idiom. However, it was their joint exhibition in 1967, called ‘GRUP’, that formally solidified their reputation as the country’s leading abstract artists.
The exhibition caused a sensation, also inviting scorn from the more conservative art practitioners. Syed Ahmad Jamal, who consistently defended and justified abstractionism, especially through his writings, together with his fellow participants in GRUP, were taken to task by the leading lights of naturalism. Their offence consisted of introducing what was deemed, ironically, ‘western‘ ideas (read: alien) that were unsuitable to the local cultural milieu.
The National Art Laureate rationally posited that their adaptation of the abstraction and expressionist approach was a ‘natural’ development from the loose atmospheric watercolour painting styles already practised by many early local painters. He refuted the accusation that abstract art, especially gestural or lyrical abstraction, merely borrowed styles or was a fad from the west, where he and his fellow artists had received their art education. Rather, it was something that was already present in local spiritual traditions, such as the flow, rhythm and the stylised forms of Islamic-Malay and Chinese calligraphy.
Embracing ‘modern’ art, especially the expressionist, cubist and abstract idiom (more than half to a century after its inception in Europe), had been done without the spiritual, ideological foundations or revolutionary zeal that drove many of the European avant-garde to reject and replace established practices. The fact that many of these artists were educators and civil servants (not bohemians, avant-garde or anarchists) who had benefited from government and corporate patronage spoke volumes of the motivations and the context from which they operated. Even so, it does not lessen the importance of their efforts and contribution to Malaysian visual art. Rather than seeing themselves as social-justice warriors or society’s misfits, they regarded themselves as the cultural workers of a liberated nation. They did not take the path of naturalist painters who worked from photographic material or reproduced reality through academic realism — while perpetuating a pastoral view of local situations. The abstract artists did what the Nanyang artists had done earlier, which was to represent elements from local culture, landscapes, peoples and states of mind with a ‘modern’ approach. Through the use of abstraction, a modern form of Malaysian art, one that embraces modern attitudes (including individualism) without jettisoning existing traditional values could aptly encapsulate the sentiment and outlook of a newly independent nation at that time. Syed Ahmad Jamal’s writings indicate the euphoric state and spirit of optimism which he ascribed to their cause.
‘The mood of Merdeka was inspirational; like a catalyst it generated vibrations which sparked off realisations. The activity gained momentum and motion which reached ecstatic heights in the sixties. The manifestations in visual form graphically reflected the tempo and mood of Merdeka - an expansive joyful sense of freedom.’
In his eagerness to position his practice as well as his fellow comrades in art at th forefront of Malaysian art, Syed Ahmad Jamal had presented their form of abstraction as the apex of creative manifestations, representative of the Merdeka spirit, and had even assumed that the numbers were on their side.
‘The Merdeka artists of the fifties and sixties subscribed mainly to the aesthetics of abstract expressionism. The immediacy and mystical quality of the mainstream art of the sixties appealed particularly to the Malaysian temperament, sensitivity and cultural heritage, and with the tradition of calligraphy found the idiom the ideal means of pictorial individuation. Abstract expressionism (and Action Painting) the mainstream force in the sixties was a catharsis, a direct form of release. This super celebration of the mega moment needed a means of release through creative means.’
A simple survey by the art historian T.K. Sabapathy debunked Syed Ahmad Jamal’s claims; the abstract artists were in fact in the minority. It would not be inaccurate to assume that since many of these early Malayan abstract painters were in official positions (administrators, educators and curators), they would naturally dominate the discourse and narrative on Malayan/Malaysian art. Furthermore, since they felt that their practice represented something of a break from decades of schematic approaches to paintings of landscapes, portraits and kampung scenery, they were justified in doing so.
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The 1960s decade saw Malaysian art going places, with numerous exhibitions abroad. Malaysian artists of various disciplines were representing the country in major group exhibitions such as the 4th International Art Exhibition (1962), Commonwealth Art Today, London(1962-3), South-East-Asian Cultural Festival, Singapore (1963), Waratah Spring Festival, Sydney (1965) ‘Malaysian Art Travelling Exhibition’ to Hamburg, Rome, St Etienne, Paris (1965-6), First Triennale Malaysian Art Exhibition, Australia/New Zealand (1969), 10th Sao Paulo Biennale (1969) and Asian Countries in Contemporary Art, Tokyo (1969) just to name a few. However, seeing how, especially the expressionist and abstract art works, came to represent the country in these exhibitions, Long Thien Shih, the country’s Tokoh Cetakan and one time enfant terrible (known for his erotic prints and paintings) in an interview with the local press back in 1968 stated that Malaysian art was at least 50 years behind. This was the observation of someone who had lived in Europe (Paris) for almost 10 years and who received his art training directly from Stanley William Hayter (1901-1988), one of the early members of Surrealism. After World War II, Hayter became associated with the Abstract Expressionists in New York. According to Thien Shih, who had initially produced a body of abstract paintings under Hayter’s method of automatism before switching to symbolism, Malaysia’s mainstream modern art was still stuck at the level of the ‘classical’ modern art of early 20th century Europe and not the post-war abstraction i.e. Action painting or abstract expressionism as claimed.
Thien Shih’s statement was not maliciously intended. He merely wanted to point out that Malaysian artists needed to update themselves with the latest developments in the art world. Redza Piyadasa and Sulaiman Esa kept up the pressure six years later. Their accusation was that Malaysian artists had not been able to articulate convincingly the ideas behind their works nor pursue their practice far enough to contribute to something substantial to the world of art due to their lack of exposure or interest in history and philosophy of art. The manifesto of the Piyadasa-Esa assault was their thought-provoking exhibition ‘Towards A Mystical Reality: a documentation of jointly initiated experiences.
Two years after the GRUP show, the communal violence of 1969 that took place in the heart of the capital shattered whatever ideals they had envisioned for the nation. While other art practitioners kept silent, the abstract painters, who were deeply affected by this disturbing turn of events, reacted with a series of works. Syed Ahmad Jamal, Ibrahim Hussein and Yeoh Jin Leng produced works lamenting the sudden violent passing of the Malaysian dream that had begun 12 years since Merdeka. Redza Piyadasa constructed a wooden coffin with the Malaysian flag painted over it.
From 1969 to 1972, an art group that championed various geometric forms of abstraction appeared in the local art scene. Called the New Scene, this group comprised Redza Piyadasa, Sulaiman Esa, Choong Kam Kow, Tan Teong Eng, Tang Tuck Kan and Joseph Tan. Drawing inspiration from minimalism, constructivism, Op Art and hard-edge painting, the New Scene artists sought alternatives to the aesthetics of expressionism and the gestural abstraction which they claim dominated Malaysian art. They advocated an international form of art that would go beyond the trappings of nationalism. The New Scene artists’ works were minimal, impersonal, geometrical forms stripped of metaphors and any references to external reality. Though the group was short-lived, with many of its members pursuing different paths individually, it was perhaps the only local effort that had consciously pushed abstraction to its furthest in their efforts to replace its subjective and emotionally charged aspects with an intentionally cerebral approach. It also signaled the growing interest in artistic practices inclined towards more contemporary ideas and approaches by the coming generations of local art practitioners.
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The 1970s was a decade of milestones of sorts for the local art scene. There were increasing number of national-level competitions, private exhibitions and a flurry of art activities where contemporary forms of art and other non-traditional approaches such as installation, conceptual art and even performance slowly made its presence felt. As the country gradually shifted from its agricultural background to manufacturing, new challenges came with the benefits of opening the country to foreign direct investments. The establishment of art institutes, namely the Malaysian Institute of Art (MIA), the Kuala Lumpur College of Art (KLCA) and the Institute Teknologi MARA (now UiTM), all in the late 1960s, would contribute to a large number of practitioners and more exciting and diverse art forms in the country later, especially in the 1980s. Among the more prominent art groups to emerge during this period was Anak Alam. Founded by Abdul Latiff Mohiddin, Mustapha Hj Ibrahim,Ali Rahamad@Mabuha and Zulkifli Dahlan, the collective was informally made up of those who broke away from the A.P.S. because they wanted to explore different media and artistic approaches. These included but were not limited to abstraction. To voice their concerns about creeping bureaucratisation and unbridled commercialisation in society, as well as the increasing degradation of the natural surroundings due to industrialisation, members of Anak Alam staged plays and performance art. Sharifah Fatimah Syed Zubir, Siti Zainon Ismail, and Mustapha Hj Ibrahim are among the leading abstract painters to have emerged from this collective.
The 1980s saw a proliferation of contemporary-looking artworks that explored traditional themes, motifs, forms and materials rooted in the local indigenous culture. This could be the result of government policies that encouraged artists to seek inspiration from their cultural heritage in their aspirations to be modern. After the May 13th incident, the establishment took steps to address the causes that led to the deadly clashes in the first place. They identified three main flashpoints: politics, economics and culture.
The policies formulated to address these three areas have strong implications on the direction and development of Malaysian art, especially that of Bumiputra art practitioners, as can be seen in their output from the 1980s. Art and culture symposiums and exhibitions such as the National Culture Congress (1971) Akar Akar Pribumi (1979) and the Rupa dan Jiwa exhibition curated by Syed Ahmad Jamal at Tunku Chancellor Hall, Universiti Malaya (1979), although not without their problems, represent serious efforts in that direction. Important abstract and semi-abstract painters who emerged between the mid and late 1980s include Ahmad Khalid Yusof, Ismail Latiff, Awang Damit Ahmad and Yusof Ghani. These artists continue to draw inspiration and to adapt themes and forms from local culture, while Tajuddin Hj Ismail and Fauzan Omar were more concerned with the formalistic aspects of non-figurative art but still referred to nature for inspiration.
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A decade of turbulence, the 1990s saw the rise of issue-based art, mostly in representational and contemporary forms. A new generation of art practitioners emerged, some trained abroad, others taught by educators who were socially aware, politically conscious and up to date with international developments in art. They injected fresh new energy into the local art scene and broadened the scope of an artist’s concern to encompass a number of socio-cultural and political issues as well as introducing multidisciplinary approaches still in practice today. The types of neo-expressionism found a small number of adherents as the perfect medium to express their angst and alienation. This was delivered through a combination of gestural and distorted figurative forms with strong and erratically applied colours over the more considerate and composed approaches of earlier abstractions, steeped in cultural metaphors and spiritual allusions. Many young artists gravitated towards this approach before promptly switching to figurative art in a short period of time; the early neo-expressionist works by some members of Matahati are good examples to illustrate this point. Opposition to non-figurative art did not subside even after many decades of being part of Malaysian art practices. Despite this, the number of serious practitioners dwindled to the point where one would be hard pressed to come up with 10 names of significance from each of the last three decades.
The tone of veteran local art writer Ooi Kok Chuen’s scathing review of an exhibition by Riaz Ahmad Jamil was highly dismissive. Riaz was regarded by contemporary artist Niranjan Rajah as ‘an explosive painter — the epitome of the amok in action painting!’ in his curator’s essay for the exhibition ‘Bara Hati Bahang Jiwa: Expression and Expressionism in Contemporary Malaysian Art’ at the National Art Gallery in 2002. The excerpts from the original review in the New Straits Times (2 March 1990) reproduced in the said catalogue read: ‘one would have thought that abstract expressionism was dead, buried and forgotten. Yet the irksome regularity in which irksome copies of abstract expressionist art crop up in Malaysian art exhibitions seems to give the impression that we are either caught in a perverted form of mental decay or a time warp, out of synch with time, place and people’.
In short, not only were non-figurative art practitioners expressing something incomprehensibly degenerate, it stood out like an anomaly that just won’t sink in a scene flooded (still!) and buoyed by figurative art. Of course, who in their right mind would be ‘irked’ by the formulaic and conservative approaches of local figurative and landscape painters who continue to, decade after decade (copying photographs and other reference materials) peddle the same trite, romanticised views of the local populations and situations that only serve to reinforce the exoticisation of the self as ‘the Other’ (read: localised form of Orientalism) or to elicit nostalgic longings for an idyllic or imaginary past that never was.
Underlying the many different approaches to contemporary figurative/ representational art today is the element of ‘pop’, with its references to commercial and mainstream cultures. Though popular sentiments and issues are now presented in an odd mixture of the saccharine, fantastical and even horror, it continues to inculcate the fetish with ideas, images and commodities derived from popular or mainstream cultures as well as politics. Its practitioners too are spared from having to vigorously defend themselves from constant vilification, misunderstandings and accusations of artistic charlatanry because what these painters produce requires no great leap of imagination, intelligent guesswork or even (much) emotional input from its viewers.
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It is strange and amusing that only expressionist and non-figurative art have had the proclivity to incite such a reaction. Since its inception more than 100 years ago, abstract art continues to be vilified and condemned. One does not see such levels of vitriol lobbed at the figurative/representational/ objective art in its numerous and equally ‘irksome’ approaches and manifestations (old and new) other than comments about the artist’s lack of aptitude in reproducing the subject matter’s image as accurately and faithfully to disagreements with the artist’s messages or themes.
In the same year, in the exhibition catalogue for the show ‘Recent Paintings by Fauzan Omar’, held at the Australian High Commission, Kuala Lumpur, Ismail Zain, who was one of the two guest writers took the opportunity to repeat one old accusation against the abstract expressionists in the USA some 16 years earlier. He mentioned the article by one Eva Crockett for an issue of ArtForum (June 1974) entitled ‘Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War’ where she ‘exposed’ the meteoritic rise of abstract expressionism from obscurity in the late 1940s as being part of the efforts of a small group of wealthy elites conspiring with the Central Investigation Agency (CIA). The aim was apparently to use abstract expressionism (including American jazz music), representing the unbridled freedom, individualism and opportunities enjoyed by Americans, to counter the socialist utopia presented through the socialist realism of the USSR. Even if it was true, with the abstract expressionists being unwitting pawns in the CIA’s scheme of things, it does not blunt the force of their artistry or lessen the ferocity of their commitment towards their art.
It should have been an indication to the CIA that its country’s former president Theodore Roosevelt’s reactions to the European modern art he encountered at the Amory Show, New York in 1913 was to accuse it of being ‘self-conscious, pretentious and ridiculous’. That exhibition had showcased for the first time to the American public works from the Impressionists to the Cubists. Roosevelt had even compared Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Nude Descending a Stair’ with ‘a Navajo rug he kept in his bathroom. The rug, he said, was infinitely ahead of the painting in terms of decorative value, sincerity, and artistic merit’. Echoing their ideological fellow comrades in other countries, the leader of the local American Communist Party wrote that ‘Cubism was a degenerate and pathological expression of capitalism’. Fast forward three decades later, when shown the works of the abstract expressionists in the travelling exhibition called ‘Advancing American Art’, which was accused of being part of the CIA-funded propaganda war against socialism, President Truman described the works there as ‘the vaporings of half-baked lazy people’. The exhibition of abstract expressionists, most famously Jackson Pollock, also included the works of Georgia O’Keeffe, John Mann, Marsden Hartley, William Gropper, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Adolph Gottleib and Ben Shahn. The American public’s reaction to these works was extremely negative. One George A. Dondero, a Republican Representative of Michigan even declared that:
“Modern art is Communistic because it is distorted and ugly, because it does not glorify our beautiful country and smiling people and our material progress. Art that does not glorify our country, in plain, simple terms, breeds dissatisfaction. It is therefore opposed to our government and those who create it and promote it are enemies.”
The exhibition was promptly recalled and the works, which were acquired by the US government, were sold off cheaply (a Georgia O’ Keeffe painting was sold for 50 US dollars). Abstract Expressionism was also quickly replaced by Pop Art in the 1950s.
Pop Art, wrote John Zerzan (1999), ‘simply reflects the enormous consequences of mounting post-war commodity production and consumption. Shallow, banal, indiscriminate, Pop Art exalts the standardised and makes no demand upon the viewer except his or her money. It has exactly nothing of the inner necessity or passionately sought authenticity of its immediate artistic predecessor.’
Fast forward to the present; one could conclude that things have not changed much. The same old prejudices and misconceptions remain and local abstract art practitioners — contrary to reports of profitable sales, their increasing popularity and growing numbers of its adherents — continue to be a minority in a scene saturated with figurative painters and representational art in its various contemporary manifestations. For many contemporary artists, abstraction/non -figurative/non-objective art, forms part of their repertoire of styles which they could summon to do their bidding when the right context calls for it.
In ‘The Conspiracy of Art’(2005), Jean Baudrillard observed that ‘The adventure of modern art is over. Contemporary art is only contemporary to itself. It no longer transcends itself into the past or the future. Its only reality is its operation in real time and its confusion with this reality. Nothing differentiates it from technical, advertising, media and digital operations. There is no more transcendence, no more divergence, nothing from another scene: it is a reflective game with the contemporary world as it happens. This is why contemporary art is null and void: it and the world form a zero-sum equation’.
For the cynics and the philistines, abstract art (read: modern art) in Malaysia has already run its course. But to some of us who understand and still feel the tug of ‘the inner necessity and passionately sought authenticity’ and long for that ‘expansive joyful sense of freedom’, abstract art will continue to inspire us towards that state of Becoming.
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References
1. Syed Ahmad Jamal, ‘Seni Lukis Malaysia 57-87’. National Art Gallery (1987)
2. T.K Sabapathy (editor) Vision and Idea: Re Looking Modern Malaysian Art (1994)
3. Redza Piyadasa. ‘Rupa Malaysia: Meninjau Seni Lukis Moden Malaysia’ (2000)
4. Niranjan Rajah. ‘Bara Hati Bahang Jiwa/ Expression and Expressionism in Contemporary Malaysian Art’ (2002)
5. ‘Prosiding Sidang Seni Sini 08’. National Art Gallery (2008)
6. Towards A Mystical Reality- a documentation of jointly initiated experiences by redza piyadsa and suleiman esa.(1974)
7. Recent Paintings by Fauzan Omar .6-13 Nov.’90 at the Australian High Commission-Kuala Lumpur (1990)
8. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/17/unpopular-front see also http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html and http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20161004-was-modern-art-a-weapon-of-the-cia
9. Elizabeth Lunday. ‘The Modern Art Invasion-Picasso, Duchamp, and the 1913 Armory Show That Scandalized America. (2015)
10. John Zerzan, ‘Abstract Expressionism: Painting as Vision and Critique (1999) from ‘Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization’. Feral House (2002)
11. Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Conspiracy of Art’ Semiotext(e) (2005)
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