Of Cats and Men The recent paintings of Lam Le Siang

Lam Le Siang’s recent oil paintings first strike the viewer’s eye and mind as a whimsy, an idyllic and nostalgic pastiche of a Malaysia that never was. However, the delicate illustrative resonance of images quickly beckons to the audience’s eye, calling the enquiring mind to closer inspect these potential gems of narrative neo-realist Art, hinting at the revelation of untold narrative, and sub-textual treasure.

Lam Le Siang’s pictures construct no indigenist or orientalist metaphor but present his unique personal stance on Asian social realism, albeit retrospective illusion with a certain amount of narrative nostalgia.

The overriding charm of Lam Le Siang’s works is discovered in the immense detail that he presents to his audience, the devil they say is in the detail and Lam Le Siang’s works are as detailed as an Anthony Green (R.A.) painting, as humorous as a Beryl Cook and as poignant as Norman Rockwell’s work.

In Lam Le Siang’s oil paintings we can almost smell the fragrance of the bath soap as a mother bathes her infant son in the family’s galvanised tin tub, squatting with cotton towel on one arm, a jade bangle on the other and simple wooden clogs on her feet. We can sense the warm balminess of the afternoon as the young schoolboy kicks off his blue rubberised Japanese slippers, seats himself on a wooden crate and idles the rest of the day away leaning against a tree, mother hen and chicks scrapping for morsels as father cock, with his resplendent red comb cautiously watches over them – the distant kampung quiet and serene. Remembering that Lam Le Siang is an artist of Chinese Malaysian descent maybe it is poignant to remember that for the Chinese a cockerel represents courage and reliability, is there a narrative here hinting of this boy’s future?

Tinged with a loving exoticness, reminiscent of Henri Rousseau’s naiveté, Lam Le Siang is able to reveal the simple and honest truth of a Malaysia fast slipping through history’s grubbily materialistic fingers. There is less of Moore’s Utopia or Huxley’s Island in these paintings than there is of Lam Le Siang’s authentic rustic life, very much lived within the rural suburbs adjacent to the Malaysian kampungs, some decades ago.

Lam’s exploration of what is clearly a personal, recent, past through thoughtful controlled colour and skilled brushwork present the onlooker with a pensive, thoughtful narrative crammed with detail and dripping with symbols to tease an open mind. His clear illustrative ability reveals a graphically narrative story-telling aptitude which intrigues the viewer as he begins to read these everyday idylls of quasi-rural works.

Through Lam Le Siang’s visual narratives man is depicted as being alongside nature, while simultaneously being apart from it. The young boy with the Japanese slippers is surrounded by a pastoral scene of leaves, a tree, flowers and chickens but the kampung in the background reminds the viewer that the boy is not at one with the nature around him, but rather belongs to another, distant place. A well made regular wooden fence, split only by a man-made path, draws the distinction between the place for man and the place for nature. The boy may be away from home but the ability to ‘balik kampung’ (return home) is always there along a clear and distinct path.

In other paintings the domesticated cat acts as an intermediary between man and nature. In one painting a young girl peers over a brick wall, a ginger and white cat stands on the wall looking down into the outside nature. Two parrots sit on a tree branch mimicking a human kiss; the girl draws her fingers towards her pursed mouth as if to whistle. The cat and the wall effectively distance the girl from the trees and the birds. According to this man is divided off from nature through his own constructs – a brick wall, able to observe but not able to become at one with nature. The cat is both nature and man, in the sense of its allegiance to and dominance by man, and yet is able to stand separate from man, between him and nature - a being effectively of two worlds.

In another skilful painting the boy peers from a house through a partially (blue) curtained window looking intently at two birds in his garden. One (white) bird sits on the washing line watched by a white and chocolate cat, the other (blue) bird perches on a post and watches the cat. There is a feeling that man is walled up, cut off from nature. His feline go-between rests and watches nature in the sanctuary of the human environment amidst the other domesticated beings – plant pots containing orchids and a bucket of lilies, where domesticated plants are permitted to grow away from the chaos of nature which extends outside of man’s domestic sphere. The boy has the look of longing.

In a third painting mother and son, she in a batik sarong and he in shorts, both sit on a wooden bench under an atap lean-to. Mother has her head turned as if looking at a yellow bird outside on a banana leaf - the scene brings to mind the old Jamaican calypso song ‘Yellow Bird’ by Norman Luboff, Alan and Marilyn Keith –

(chorus)Yellow bird up high in banana tree, Yellow bird him sit all alone like me, Did a lady fren’ leave your nest again, That is very bad, makes me feel so sad, You can fly away, in the sky away, Your more luckier than me.

A pale ginger and white cat brushes against the mother, is it reiterating its allegiance to the human race? Separating itself off from the wildness of chaotic nature? Mother and boy have quizzical looks upon their faces, as if yearning for a past Eden where and when there was no schism between man and nature, a longing for that golden age somewhere in the collective subconscious when all lived in pastoral harmony. Are the mother and son wishing that they too could fly away with the yellow bird as the song goes on to sing? Does the yellow bangle on the mother’s wrist signify her royal status within the home? Or is it another metaphor for harmony and peace? The stretching cat has little interest in the yellow bird as it seems more intent upon its human allies.

Not wanting to deviate from this narrative, but the Chinese symbol for cat is Mao, and in some circumstances this represents long life, or a happy old age, and maybe another indication of the purity and homogeneity of a past rural life. But the painter may subconsciously and unwittingly refer to his 1950s childhood in rural Malaysia, a time of uncertainty, as the word Mao is also part of Mao Zedong – in counter balance to the harmony is there a hidden reference to communism and the upheaval it wrought to the kampungs of the 1950s, lurking in Lam Le Siang’s pastoral idyll?

In Lam Le Siang’s three paintings including cats, nature is there to be observed by man – girl watches cat and birds, boy watches birds and cat, mother and son watch a yellow bird and mother is nuzzled by cat , but there is one painting where man is watched, observed as an intruder by on-looking nature. In a rural setting a man serenades his love. She, tight fitting top and batik sarong, lounges amidst leaves and other foliage, her water pots forgotten as her lover strums his guitar and croons to her. While surrounded with Rousseau like flowers the couple, flowers in their hair, seem oblivious to three birds watching them with intent. One, a crane or egret, appears resentful of the intrusion while the other two yellow backed and white fronted birds peer almost hostilely on. These human intruders appear unwelcome in the remnants of Eden left to nature and her children, but the human couple seem blissfully unaware of their infringement. The romantic couple seem busy creating an idyll of their own, as if enacting some scene from a popular film, but nature, the authentic idyll, remains un-amused.

Another reading recalls that, historically, two birds in a floral setting symbolise happiness in Chinese symbolism.

I have mentioned only a small section of Lam Le Siang’s works, those that deal with the rural life, there are others that depict a family going into town, and a mother and child in a kedai kopi (coffee shop). These delicately crafted paintings remain as illustrations of a world which is slowly slipping into that distant country of the past - without Lam Le Siang and other interpretive visual historians Malaysia’s simple and honest past may well disappear

Demise of a POPular ARTist

In May this year (2007) son of Malaysia Redza Piyadasa innovator, artist, art critic, art historian, writer, curator and educationalist died.

As an artist he was always concerned about the bigger picture, and gained a reputation as a concerned deep thinker and quested for his identity and that of his country in the revelation that became post-colonial Malaysia.

Piyadasa existed as an energetic and singular man of Singhalese origins who was born into Malaysia’s diverse and multicultural society. Like Muhammad Haji Salleh in his collection of poems titled Rowing Down Two Rivers (2000), Piyadasa's dichotomy was to struggle with the fact of his western education while also being committed to post-colonial Malaysia. In Piyadasa’s visual narratives and writing he sought to locate his artistic position as a Sri Lankan Singhalese in multicultural Malaysia. Piyadasa’s quest became to subvert his western artistic influences - primarily those assimilated from Pop Art, into a new mode of expression to convey his eastern narrative.

In The Republic Plato had argued that Art is diegesis (storytelling), as opposed to the commonly held view of Art being mimesis (copying), and that artists interpret life and nature, and re-tell according to their personal narrative. This is may be deemed true of late 19th C and 20th C western Art - far from Plato’s time (approx 428BC – 348BC), i.e. from the advent of Modernism (approx 1890) onwards.

Whereas prior to Modernism much Art had been concerned with the re-presentation of the visual, with Modernism Art re-focussed upon its own narrative, or storytelling function, as well as imagination, to became more ‘knowing’ with creative critical self-awareness and narratives interpreted visually in diverse ways. Yet modern art went beyond the mere pictorial and sought to engage philosophy and politics as well as other social discourses. The modernist narrative developed sub-text often by referencing the visually familiar.

Modern artists enquired into innovative methods of narrative expression and began experimenting with varying techniques of displaying visual art - from Picasso’s images acquired from African Masks (1908 onwards), to the referential narrative of Art by the Pop Artist Peter Blake’s reference to the British Thomas Gainsborough’s famous portrait The Blue Boy, in which Blake wore blue denim, badges and held a fan magazine devoted to the popular music icon Elvis Presley (1961).

Redza Piyadasa was born in Kuantan, Pahang, in Colonial Malaya in1939. While Malaya grew into Malaysia Piyadasa schooled in Abdullah School, Kuantan, and was awarded the Cambridge Overseas Certificate (grade 1) during the year of Merdeka - Malaya’s independence from Britain (1957).

After a full year’s study, in 1959, while staying at the Brinsford Lodge hall of residence, Piyadasa achieved a certificate in education from the Malaysian Teacher Training College (MTT), Wolverhampton, England, and returned to Malaysia.

Four years later Piyadasa returned to England, but this time to London to study at the renowned Hornsey College of Art, formerly the Hornsey School of Art - famous for having the Pop Artist Allen Jones and Printmaker Chris Orr among its students.

From 1975 to 1977 Piyadasa engaged in post graduate studies at the department of Art at the University of Hawaii, Manoa in Honolulu specialising in Asian Art history and sculptural studies and gained a Master of Fine Arts degree.

Studying Art at the North London Hornsey College of Art during the explosively innovative mid-1960s Piyadasa became exposed to the growing late modernist/early post-modernist western Art philosophies. This included the controversial Pop Art phenomenon which had began in Britain with artists Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton, and shortly after burst flamboyantly onto the North American Art scene.

Pop Culture, Popular art or Pop Art, a term attributed to the new art by Lawrence Alloway during the early 1950s, had moved into its second phase in Britain by Piyadasa’s first year of study at Hornsey (1963). Like Dada and Surrealism before it Pop Art initially shocked the public by a blatant use of popular imagery in paintings and sculpture such as a creative use of ideas and images from advertising and the comics, therefore blurring distinctions between concepts of High or Low Art.

During the 1920s Raoul Hausman and the Dadaists created visual revolution with collages drawn from a host of printed sources while Man Ray experimented with air-bushes and new ways in photography. In the late 1920s the Surrealists were to expand this repertoire with new visual juxtapositions and abstractions in order to create a sur – reality which forced the audience the re-look at the world around them and their relationship to things in their world. Pop Art addressed similar issues to Dada and Surrealism but unlike the previous Art movements Pop Art was unique in its references to modern and popular arts – film, photography, comics, popular music, wrestling and television.

The young Art student Piyadasa, in his first year at Art College, would have been aware of British artists Paolozzi and Peter Blake, and of the American Andy Warhol creating silkscreen images such as Ten Lizzies – multiple silk-screened images of Elizabeth Taylor, then a popular cinema star.

Piyadasa may even have known Warhol’s earlier vibrant works which incorporate Dick Tracy, Superman and the cartoon hero Popeye into paintings and silkscreen prints, especially as Andy Warhol was featured in an exhibition at the London Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) October 24 - November 23, 1963 – Piyadasa’s first year at the north London Art College.

In Piyadasa’s first and second years in Hornsey Art College (1964) Andy Warhol had created the stunning Shot Orange Marilyn - a photographic silkscreen image of Marilyn Monroe with lurid pinks, blues and yellows on an orange background. Many of Warhol’s prints were portraits of famous stars, some in black and white, such as the variations on a theme of Elvis (1963) while as time passed Warhol’s prints had an increasing use of vivid, stylistic, colour like his portrait of Jackie Kennedy - Jackie (1964), Warhol’s Self Portraits (1967), the colourful American Indian series Warhol completed during the 1970s and Beethoven Suite created just before Andy Warhol’s death in 1987

Like many people born into a captive, subaltern, colonial society and later growing to adulthood in post-colonial times Piyadasa became engaged in an artistic quest to understand and visually represent Malaysia’s cultural diversity. On return from the British Art School Piyadasa made a sculpture of plywood and mirror painted with acrylic painting as if a Malaysian flag were draped over a coffin. This structure – May 13, 1969 was Piyadasa’s comment on the tragedy of the May 13^th, 1969 disturbances in Kuala Lumpur - this work was shown at the Manifestasi Dua Seni Satu at the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka in 1970. As well as being a profound political comment about the inter-ethnic riots and what happened as a result of civil unrest in Malaysia, Piyadasa’s May 13 may also be seen as a comment on the images he had digested during his British Art school years.

From the naissance of American Pop Art the American flag had been fair game for political commentary. From Wally Hedrick’s Peace, oil on canvas, 1953, to Jasper Johns first Flag, encaustic (wax based paint) and collage on canvas 1954 and Claes Oldenburg’s Flag Fragment, enamel on plaster 1961 and Jasper Johns subsequent White Flag 1955 and Three Flags 1958, flags in art became representative of protest and even subversion. So when Piyadasa paints an acrylic flag in memoriam and protest, he also continues a western art tradition hailing back to the founding fathers of Pop Art.

Six years later Piyadasa created A Non-Visual Art Situation, acrylic paint on plywood, 1976. The plywood background was painted a stark white to contrast with the stencilled legend - THIS ART SITUATION IS NOT TO BE INTERPRETED VISUALLY.

Just as some Art Historians have mentioned that Jasper Johns works are Neo-Dada, this work of Piyadasa seems Neo-Surrealist. In 1929 the Belgium Surrealist Rene Magritte painted an image of a smoker’s pipe, in oils on canvas and called the piece Ceci n’est pas une pipe (this is not a pipe) or, alternately called Le trahison des images (the treachery of images). In Magritte’s work the audience is asked to remember that a painting of a pipe is not the pipe itself but merely a representation of a pipe, so it seems with Piyadasa’s work. Piyadasa asks the audience to think about what they are confronted with, not just to accept the visual reality before their eyes. Piyadasa refers to his work as an ART SITUATION, a fundamental truism, for the work was situated and was contextually within the remit of the designation of being Art. The work’s situation prevents the text from just being words on white painted plywood, so as with Dada, Surrealism and Pop Art text becomes the Art - a textual as well as a visual stimulus. Both Magritte and Piyadasa call to mind the allegory of Plato’s cave where the occupants, due to limited knowledge, accept shadows (semblance) for reality.

But for many Piyadasa’s greatest achievement in Art are his Malaysia Series executed during the 1980s and 90s - a number of pictures mixing portrait photography, silkscreen and collage techniques in a similar mode to Andy Warhol’s American Indian Series constructed during the 1970s. Where Andy Warhol chose to depict North American Indians, Piyadasa focussed upon ethnic Malaysians. Drawn from old photographic images and painted with stunning hues and colours, there are great similarities between Warhol’s and Piyadasa’s last works. Yet in many of the works of the Malaysia Series Piyadasa weaves essences of batik to ground the work in Asia, so that along with the portrait images of Malaysian families, or Malay women, Piyadasa leaves his audience in no doubt regarding his re-looking at multiculturalism and ethnicity. This Malaysian series won Piyadasa a coveted Prince Claus Award in 1998, which is awarded to “artists and intellectuals of great creativity and innovative spirit.”

Malaysia, and indeed the world of Art, has lost a great soul who championed modern Art and who was in the vanguard of innovation and change in the arts scene in Malaysia.