Teoh Kai Suan

The artist Teoh Kai Suan’s oil paintings were featured in an exhibition on the Muse floor at Artseni Gallery, Starhill, Kuala Lumpur, in June this year. Teoh, 40, is a graduate from the eminent Kuala Lumpur College of Art and uses his artworks to express his unique perspective on Malaysia’s rural life.

Using imagery imbued with the idyll of romantic rural life, Teoh sets about encapsulating the noble concept of Balik Kampung, or a return to the kampung, except for Teoh it is a Kampung of the mind, of nostalgia and wish fulfilment.

Unlike the depictions by the illustrious actor and film maker Tan Sri P.Ramlee (born Teuku Zararia bin Teuku Nyak Puteh, in Penang1929), Teoh’s kampung is a calm, un-chaotic, romantic snapshot, while his humour is gentle and homogenous unlike Ramlee’s boisterous rambunctiousness - but just as endearing. In Teoh’s canvases couples dance across the hard trodden earth of the Kampung floor; families, rotund and serene pose for snapshot portraits beneath Rousseau trees. Young kite flyers sprint, stylistically - she clutching her handbag while he holds aloft the kite which is their excuse for being together, both gaze at the viewer. Throughout Teoh’s work the viewer is always present - acknowledged by the characters Teoh has painted. A motorcycle rider squints to see the spectator, while the female dancer purses her lips to blow the observer a kiss. Whether soaking in a river or flying a kite Teoh’s characters benignly engage with the gallery audience.

Teoh’s almost voyeuristic entry into rural (Ulu) Kampung life is reminiscent of the cartoonist Lat’s (Mohammad Nor bin Khalid, b. 1951) work. Lat’s Kampung Boy (1977) charted Lat’s birth and the first few years of his life, based on his recollections of rustic life in Perak. Teoh brings us an altogether different perspective of rural kampung life, in the neighbouring state of Kedah - a more sedate, placid portrayal, enlivened by his vibrant choice of colour. Lat’s humour prods the memory by depicting life in any rural village almost anywhere in the world, except for the fact he is portraying his personal reality, of his own kampung. There is universality to Lat’s character’s antics, a resonance and reflection of rural life the world over.

Teoh too has this ability of capturing moments, snapshots, of rural life, though there is also a stylistic over-layering reminiscent of those Maoist posters seen during China’s Cultural Revolution era. Like the Chinese posters Teoh depicts a promised land, a rural idyll free from the yoke of stress and striving, a land of equality and the common good. The happy, smiling, poster faces spoke of a new order and a break with tradition, where Teoh injects a limitless, timeless quality into his Malaysian nostalgic revelry, embracing kampung tradition.

While having similarities to the art of China’s Cultural Revolution, Teoh’s work is evidently manifest as an Asian incarnation of a western art figurative tradition, dating back to painters like Diego Velazquez and Francisco de Goya. Both of these artists portrayed sitters with a fuller figure, not the wraith-like models of 21^st Centaury.

Teoh continues in this tradition of artists specialising in depicting plump/rotund, larger than life people, just like the Colombian painter Fernando Botero (b.1932, Medellin, Colombia). Botero presented his works in an exhibition in Singapore 2004/2005 also bringing corpulent figures dancing their way across his canvases and statuary. Botero, has become renowned for his paintings of overweight and larger than life figures. Having adopted a conscious style with his The Bridal Chamber or Homage to Mantega, in 1958, Botero has, for nearly half a centaury, depicted the larger figure in all its style and glory.

Echoing Botero and reflecting Latin American artists like Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, Teoh encapsulates the notion of simple, rural home-life. Men wearing sarongs and Japanese slippers serenade along with their children, Chinese eyes wrinkle in smile, cheeks flush with sheer joie de vivre. All is well, and all is right in Teoh’s tranquil pastoral Eden. There are not the marks of toil and strife we notice in Rivera’s work, nor in his fellow muralist Siqueiros’ visuals. Teoh does not ask his audience to get up and react against tyranny but rather to revel in an idea, the idea of Balik Kampung – the return home, back to the ideal family living in the ideal world, back to nature and back to calm sanity, away from the artificial construct of the city and its depersonalisation, its isolation and its neglect.

Teoh’s narrative continues to blend Asian imagery with western figurative tradition and romantic idyll. In many respects we have much to thank Teoh for, his canvases - yes, his hard work - yes, but much more than that - his reminder of what is really important – home and family, thank you Teoh Kai Suan.