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.