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| Sun Mother by Li Zijian |
It is naive, perhaps, to believe that I could render justice to anywhere near the feeling one gets when visiting this exhibition. I cannot do the exhibition justice, for there are so many splendid worlds of art on show, and there is not time enough to go into the detail which would be needed to adequately review this year’s annual undertaking of an institution which takes both ‘Awakening’ and ‘Education’ seriously enough to want to impart both to citizens of this country. Thankfully, Soka Gakkai Malaysia has made a small, handy, book available, giving valuable insights into the exhibition, amidst a selection of images taken from the exhibition.
This intriguing exhibition - ‘Awakening of Love; The Female Figures as Subjects in Art’, currently running at Soka Gakkai Malaysia (in the Hong Wen Exhibition Hall) until 10th December 2017, develops along four main themes. They are - Myths and Legends and the concept of nobility (1), Motherly Love, and nurture (2), Devotion and Passion (3) and Individual Uniqueness, or the ‘true self’ (4). It is a large scope, for some daunting, but is skilfully accomplished through displaying some fifty two artworks, taken from the Soka Gakkai massive collection of art, in various mediums from ink on Xuen paper paintings to varieties of sculpture in wood and other materials.
As well as being an exercise in theme (Awakening of Love), the exhibition successfully reminds its public of the ability of Soka Gakkai to draw upon its collection to produce such a wide variety of stunning, and thought provoking, artworks. This is, or rather should be, the purpose of huge collections of art, to assist we, the general public, in becoming more familiar with artworks, and artists, aided by thoughtful presentations and knowledgeable curation headed, in this instance, by a Malaysian Institute of Art graduate.
Being (practically) a life long admirer of the works of Salvador Dalí, it would have been no surprise had I rushed to gawp at his ‘Venus with Drawers’ a small, pale blue ‘Pâte-de-Cristal and silver sculpture, which was standing towards the entrance to the exhibition. I did not rush to that Dalí. Instead, my attention was taken by two ink on Xuan (or Shuen) paper hangings, their intricacies, their similarities and their differences, and the real beginning of the show.
It is entirely appropriate that an exhibition enquiring into ‘Female Figures as Subject in Art’, within a Chinese setting, reveals (mostly) artists of the Chinese diaspora. This remind us of the differences between our cultures and notions of beauty (inner and outer), by firstly presenting ‘Western’ idealisations of the female form, encapsulated in notions of the Venus/Aphrodite mythos (Arman and Dalí), then countering these with a more traditional Chinese mythos with its materials and subjects, leading, naturally, into Eastern artists drawing from their knowledge of Western materials to depict their Easterness.
To the left is ‘Hua Mulan’ by Chen Yanning, an ink and colour on Xuan paper (1987) painting, the other ‘Wang Zhaojun’ by Huang Yao, is another ink and colour on Xuan paper (1982). The character Hua Mulan, (known to many through the Disney animation Mulan) appears in the ‘Ballard of Mulan’ (from the fifth or sixth century AD), seen written on the upper part of Chen Yanning’s ink painting. A daughter, skilled in the martial arts, disguises her gender and takes her father’s place in battle, fighting twelve years as a man. Alternatively Wang Zhaojun (also known as Wang Qiang) has come to symbolise physical beauty, as well as a spirit of goodwill bridging different cultures. She is dressed in red, holds aloft the Chinese musical instrument, a Pipa, and rides a camel. Her epic journey to Xiong Nu, her growth from maid of honour to wife of a king, her personal sacrifice, her trials and tribulations are marks of her, and our, tenacity and fortitude. Though both paintings are of a similar material, the styles vary enormously. Mulan is painted as strong yet demure, her face almost angelic and detailed. Wang Zhaojun, astride her camel, is more cartoonish with a very loose Chinese calligraphy suiting the needs of the illustration.
The exhibition is full of surprises. In completely different style and materials from those already mentioned, Li Zijian’s ‘Sun Mother’ at 164 by 264cm is one of the larger works gracing this exhibition. We stood before it, knowing that the artist Li Zijian hails from Shaoyang City, Hunan, China and, in the year this artwork was painted (2000) was engaged in a world tour called ‘Humanity and Love: Li Zi Jian World Tour’, which touched Malaysia too. ‘Sun Mother’ is part of the artist’s quasi-realist oeuvre which includes scenes of Tibet, shepherds high in the mountains, and portraits like that of Secretary-General Kofi Annan, from the United Nations. I was particularly drawn to this painting, not just because of its size, but its subject matter and use of the artist’s composition to direct the audience’s eye to one standing figure who’s eyes seem to follow the viewer around the room.
That subject’s serene face is realistically painted, while others of the grouping remain half finished, in a painterly style. From her face, the viewer notices that other areas of the large canvas are either detailed or roughly painted. We are led, from her face, across to the left hand side of the canvas where our attention is caught by bushes of red hibiscus flowers, called ‘Bunga Raya’ in Malaysia, (the national flower). Following a northern track from that bush we are led into the green splendorous idyll which is the Malaysian pastoral countryside. Various tones of yellow catch the sunlight on the costumes of young women. They are enjoying each other’s company, and are evidently rejoicing in the company of their children too. The whole is reminiscent of various scenes from Jules Breton’s paintings of women working in the rural French countryside, but with an emphasis on harmony and the delight in the company of women.
Further around the exhibition hall, ‘Loving Me, Loving You’ (2014), is an oil on canvas by Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore, graduate Heng How Lin. Heng capitalises on his previous, tender, ‘Mother and Child’ series. The artist gravitates to warm, earthly colours to depict the natural love a parent has for a child. It seems entirely natural that Heng, in his four decades as an artist, should graduate to a more painterly artistic stance which seeks to involve his viewer more within the embrace of his work.
Like his ‘Mother and Child’ (2014), in ‘Loving Me, Loving You’ Heng awakens latent energies within us which enmeshes with closeness, love and the embraced play between parents and children. It is a form of love which the Ancient Greeks understood, for they named it ‘Storge’. It is familial love, the automatic, natural, and life long bonding between children and parents. In his painting, Heng denotes the vibrance of that instantaneous movement of picking up children, encountering tender embraces, demonstrating that that utter closeness (of the parent child relationship) is, and can be, like no other. With the painterly ‘movement’ in ‘Loving Me, Loving You’ there is the beginning of the feeling of Pablo Picasso’s ‘Trois femmes’ (1908) or distant echoes of Boccioni’s Italian futurism, with all that canvas movement stopping short of losing the subject within Abstract Expressionism.
And so, back to that small Dalí, the ‘Venus with Drawer’ (La vénus aux tiroirs blue - Daum) dated 1988 and made from crystal, standing only 43 cm tall. The Daum website tells us that
‘Pâte de cristal is a rare and ancient glassmaking technique, which dates back to 5000 bc (pieces have been found in the tombs of pharaohs).in 1900 Daum rediscovered this technique that had been long forgotten, then further developed it in 1968.
The process of melting glass coupled with the lost wax technique that Daum has developed, ensures a perfect reproduction of the original piece just as the artist had imagined it. today, Daum is the only crystal maker in the world able to produce this exceptional material so perfectly.pâte de cristal is a mutable substance, which has translated every whim of the imagination of the master glassmakers for over a century, in this way, no two pieces are identical, because the fragments of groisil blend and merge at will as the crystal melts.’
Dalí has mischievously titled his piece ‘Venus with Drawers’, after the name of the original statue ‘Venus de Milo’, which is itself a misnomer. The original statue is not of ‘Venus’ but of Aphrodite, for it is ancient Greek, not Roman, and was created by Alexandros of Antioch, then found on the Greek island of Melos, in 1820. Throughout his lifetime, Dalí had been fascinated with the Aphrodite/Venus mythos, right from his earliest experience of making a clay study of the Venus de Milo as a child to his various ‘Venus’ incarnations include sketches dating back to 1934 and a half-sized plaster statue, made in 1936, replete with drawers and pom poms. In one drawing (Drawers of Memory, 1965) we are awakened to the concept of drawers as memory, hidden secrets. Perhaps awaiting an awakening.
I have teased with a small selection from the exhibition, in the hope that these words might encourage you, the potential viewer, to visit.
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