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