Saturday 31 October 2020
Monday 19 October 2020
Mohammad Iqbal's Eyes & Circles
The Beloved likes.”
Circles – Hafiz
You are in Dhaka’s more salubrious district of Dhanmondi. Innocently, and with slight trepidation, you follow Bangladesh artist Mohammad Iqbal up a flight of unprepossessing wooden stairs. As you enter his atelier you are greeted with one of his superb figurative paintings covering most of the wall before you. In truth it is taller than you and stretches to the length of you lying down (twice). It is mostly blue. The painting’s creator is smiling. The doctorate-holding artist understands the effect that his painting must be having on a first time visitor. Frankly, it takes your breath away. It’s the size; the subtleties of colour, the eyes of five conjoined faces that gently gaze at you as you enter, a hint of longing in their eyes. There are no obvious circles in this painting, save the dark circles of irises (limbal rings) of the painting’s well-defined, and oversized, eyes and faces.
In a recent exhibition (his 45th solo exhibition) at Gallery Kobe Hankyu, Kobe, Japan (known for showing Japanese artists such as Tadanori Yokoo), Iqbal presented thirty-two new paintings, acrylic and oil on canvas. It was a series titled ‘Holy Circle’, began in 2010. Iqbal’s former association with Japan includes the gaining of a PhD (in Fine Arts) from Tokyo University of the Arts, and the numerous exhibitions he has shown there. Japan is a draw to the artist. It is a utopia of intimations concerning Iqbal’s use of imagery, aside from those that are drawn from his home country, Bangladesh.
The visitor to Iqbal’s atelier will notice the obvious Japanese obsession with overly large eyes, such as those of neglected and impoverished children, with whom Iqbal has a particular interest in depicting. Everywhere in Iqbal’s figurative paintings oversized eyes are seen, such as in the series ‘Expression’. One such is ‘Expression 5’ (painted in 2018) with a close-up of a head, predominately in black with highlights of red. It is an oil wash with acrylic and oil on Japanese ‘Washi’ paper (Wa meaning 'Japanese' and shi meaning 'paper') with large, lugubrious eyes reminiscent of descriptions by Charles Dickens or his Japanese equivalent Natsume Sōseki. Enlarged eyes is a characteristic of Japanese modern visual graphic culture and has it been (successfully) argued that Japanese manga (comics) and anime (animations) derived their distended eyes from the great Japanese visual artist and film-maker Osamu Tezuka who, in turn, owes a debt to Walt Disney.
The size of eyes in the modern visual culture is not a Japanese longing for eyes like Westerners, as you might think, but a device enabling the artist to better convey meaning and a wider range of emotion for characters through the use of overly large eyes. Cicero (106-43 B.C.) once said, 'Ut imago est animi voltus sic indices oculi' (the face is a picture of the mind as the eyes are its interpreter), and the prominence of larger than natural, soulful, eyes in the works of Mohammad Iqbal is reminiscent of Cicero, of Japanese modern visual culture and perhaps a nod to the graphic fish-shaped, oversize, eyes found in Basholi paintings of the 17th and 18th centuries around India’s Jammu and Kashmir.
In creations such as Iqbal’s ‘Dreaming of a Safer World’ series, the artist has painted enlarged eyes in the foreground figures, giving an air of melancholy to his images. At times there is almost blankness as in a dreamer recently awoken, not with bleariness but a slight pensive perplexity that is yet to transform. In the third of the series there is sadness. The first head (of three), above a predominately white abstract form, seems close to tears. The other two characters try to mask the trepidation in their eyes but succeed only in rendering abject meaning to their faces.
Throughout the years, Iqbal has given his eager audiences canvases a plenty and eyes a plenty including his 2018 series ‘Silent Revelations’ where his customary, yet impressive, ‘portraits’ ‘reveal’ a range of emotions through much larger than life faces and eyes which are at times mournfully expressive. Some ‘portrait’ faces are as large as the artist and require a stepladder to paint. Iqbal, because of his interest in portraying a wide range of emotive figures, has spent time with the people on the fringes of society, such as ‘Bauls’, and learning about their spiritual Bengal mysticism. He captures the faces of these rural dwellers in his series ‘Journey of the Mystics’, often using mixed media on Japanese paper. The beginning of this series was shown in Gallery Chayamachi, Osaka, Japan in 2015, while the series continued into 2016 with ‘Journey of the Mystics - 7’, now held in a private collection in Bangladesh.
Bauls, according to UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) are ….
“…mystic minstrels living in rural Bangladesh and West Bengal, India. The Baul movement, at its peak in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has now regained popularity among the rural population of Bangladesh.”
Earlier I mentioned ‘Limbal Rings’, circles of eyes. In his latest Japanese exhibition (‘Holy Circles’), with a meme developing since 2010, Iqbal has continued and expanded from octal expression to the more overt use of circles or rings prominent in his paintings. It is no coincidence that Iqbal’s ‘circles’ are brought back to the land of Zen Buddhism and Japanese notions of a drawn visual symbol (ensō (円相,’Circular form’, ring or circle).
Ensō, as it appears in the Japanese symbolic form, is frequently not entirely closed unlike the circles in Iqbal’s paintings. In this sense ensō remains imperfect, symbolizing the perfect beauty of imperfection and allowing for movement or development. A closed ensō circle is perfect, the ultimate, and reminiscent of the Western image of ‘Ouroboros’, the image of a serpent biting its own tail to form a circle (oura, meaning “tail,” and boros, meaning “devourer.”). Ouroboros originated with ancient Egyptians iconography, about1600 years BC, entered the Western tradition via the Greeks and was adopted as a symbol of alchemy in Gnosticism and Hermeticism.
The potential for perfection of Iqbal’s rings seem counterpoised against the plight of his children with enlarged eyes. In his 2010 painting ‘The Holy Circle – 1’ his audience is presented with a five foot by 9 foot (approx.) oil on canvas. Effectively, the canvas is painted into two sections. The sections are not equal. To the left is what appears to be a square, leaving a rectangle on the other. The ‘square’ is lighter in colour than the rectangle that contains a single, quite well defined, (anonymised) face. The square hosts a painterly sketch of a group of (anonymised) children in various stages of dress or undress. One child has red on its leg. A circle of white and red is off centre from the group and the square. The rectangle and the square are linked by a partially transparent black amorphous shape containing a thin wave of red, which appears to link the left hand group to the bald child’s portrait on the right.
In his ‘e-portfolio’ (.pdf) Mohammad Iqbal ‘talks’ about the birth of Bangladesh from out of the ashes of East Pakistan (formerly East Bengal).
“I was four years old in 1971 during the Bangladesh war of independence. The fear and suffering of the war have come back to my mind seeing the consecutive war and conflict in recent time. The dead bodies of the innocent children and the faces of the survivors - handicapped or orphans make regular headlines in the mass media. This recollects my childhood memories of the frightening 1971 war. Losing their parents and family, many orphan or street children are growing up in today’s world.”
Tranquillity in the Time of Uncertainty: My dispute, My Painting
Mohammad Iqbal 2020.
In light of the above, it is impossible not to correlate the images in ‘The Holy Circle – 1’ with the artist’s memories, recollections and internalised imagery with the very painful birthing of his country. The circle has red over a large part. The children are saved from conflict, but at what cost. The children grow with that blood tie to their past, which is forever echoed in the blood red disc of the Bangladesh flag set against the green of lush vegetation and fondly called ”the Red and Green”. The original flag of Bangladesh was created in the very place in which Mohammad Iqbal studied, and now teaches.
In a 2020 on-line art exhibition, Iqbal presented the latest in his ‘The Holy Circle’ series, number nine. It is a facial ‘portrait’ of a youth. The youths lips are pursed and lipstick red. The eyes in the portrait are characteristically larger than life, and blue. There is a barely disguised longing in those eyes, a brief sign of hope too. The eyes catch the viewer as half the subject’s face is illuminated by a cool white light that echoes a brightening sky in the background with its clouds set against a blue sky, but marred, as is the majority of the canvas, with a dark brick red. The rest of the face melds towards blue and out back into that red. There are indications of abrasions on the subject’s face, tying this work into the artist’s meme on abuse, war and the injurious lives of many children, seen in many of Mohammad Iqbal’s paintings.
In Iqbal’s ‘Holy Circle – 9’ the ring of blue/white, although appearing to be full, complete and perfect is actually blemished by a semi-circle of red, as witnessed in his ‘Holy Circle – 1’. That ‘blemish’ of blood, pain and anguish is reminiscent of the pain of birth. The ‘ensō’ circle is incomplete, but far from being negative instead brings a glimmer of hope (the brightening of the face in ‘Holy Circle – 9’ by the white light) as does birth. Like the ‘ensō’ circle, Iqbal’s ‘Holy Circle’ is hope in its imperfection, giving a chance for movement or development.
In Mohammad Iqbal’s atelier dark, mystical framed images of Baul life gaze at you. Children with doleful eyes regard you. Elders with Merlin-like beards beguile you. Behind a wooden easel, a large painting containing one large man-sized face and four smaller faces, all in shades of grey and black, their eyes caught by sudden light, shine for you. There is a hint of recognition, something deep, perplexing, profound and then it is gone.
A catalogue of a former exhibition ‘ Silent Revelations’ sits on a table next to another simply called ‘Mohammad Iqbal’. Behind the table is a painting with its back to you. On that backing board sits the legend - ‘Memories – 4, Medium: Acrylic on Japanese paper & Canvas, Size 91 x 91 cm, Year 2017. There is an irony as you feel an intimacy with the artist who delights in revealing his paintings and a little of himself, to you, and yet the ‘Memories’ painting shies its face away.
You leave, walking down that staircase a little heavier in your mind. You are beset by Iqbal’s imagery, his mastery over his mediums and with notions of expressive eyes and meaningful circles. Out, back on that Dhaka street, and just as the artist closes the door there is something of yourself left, upstairs in his atelier, just as there is something of the artist which follows you as you hail a rickshaw.
Thursday 8 October 2020
Kajang Art Heritage
For most people 2020 has been a difficult year. You would be forgiven for thinking that all is doom and gloom. It isn’t. In Kajang, a small ex-tin mining and ex-coffee estate town in Malaysia (known for its wide variety of ‘satay’), hope thrives. A fresh multi-ethnic enterprise is taking shape, fostering the eruption of broad smiles beneath the mandatory pandemic facemasks.
One Malay dictionary has defined the word ‘kajang’ as objects made from leaves of nipah, bamboo, mengkuang or palm leaves, used (traditionally) for roofing or for small hut awnings. Local indigenous tribes people (the Temuan) had explored the area now know as Kajang since16th century, and had discovered bamboo and palm leaves that they then folded to make roofing. Hence Kajang.
John OH founded Kajang Art Heritage. He is also founder of the Contemporary Malaysian Water-colourists’ Association, and a pioneer Malaysian artist, active in the early '90s. With friends of ‘Art’ he has provided a venue for creative people to connect and to share ideas globally. This idea has gestated. It is now delivering not just information and memories of the local past, but is also well on the way to engineering a Malaysian arts hub. In collaboration with Satay Putera Kajang, the Malaysian Advanced Photography Group’s April Chin, James Yuen, Irene Wan and Andy Chow with the " I am an Artist, I talk Art " initiative the notion of bringing art and arts to the general population has materialised. It leaps forward with Herculean bounds as the " I am an Artist, I talk Art " series of videos interviews glean attention from YouTubers internationally.
The antique shop-house offered to Malaysian Chinese artist John OH and the Malaysian Advanced Photography Group, has helped to explore ideas for possible creative usage. Gallery owners, writers, artists, artisans and collectors were all invited to participate in the idea of an eventual ‘art hub’ in Kajang, beginning with notions for a first exhibition to meld conceptions of craft and art. Next was to construct how to present this to the general public, and eventually expand to the reality of an ‘Art Street’. Mr OH mentioned “The main objective of this project is to create a platform for young and emerging artists to interact and dialogue with the public. Also to scout new talented artists in Malaysia.”
To develop this notion of art promotion, a coterie of artists were invited to take part and, within three days, eleven artists had confirmed their participation. Next contractors and interior designers were appointed to refurbish the two top floors (spread over two buildings), leaving the wonderful wooded floors and the single ground floor. Care was taken not to modernise the buildings too much but, with patches of exposed brick and plaster, enough of the originals were left to reflect the town’s heritage aspect.
Entrepreneurs worked with art friends to bring art and artists to the general public with the notion of a Kajang Art Heritage. The Malaysian Movement Control Order (MCO) enacted due to the raging pandemic, has prevented many career artists and other creative people from selling their work. Globally, and locally for Malaysians, art galleries have closed, presenting difficulties which online buying as not yet been able to solve. The idea was mooted to turn a two-storey 110-year-old former shop-house into an art gallery/workshop centre for artists and generally interested in culture, to meet, to exhibit, to discuss and to promote art and culture.
Despite the weighty pressure of the Covid 19 pandemic, or maybe because of it, Malaysians across the country rallied together in Kajang to promote heritage and a wide spectrum of the arts. Fine artists; craftspeople; photographers, cartoonists and one delightful cello player came together in the explorative exhibition - Merdeka Art Fest, shown over the period of festivities celebrating the country’s independence from Britain. That spectacular show, housed in the Kajang Heritage Centre (which incidentally serves fine coffee as well as fine art, and local satay as well as pyrography) was a great success, for over 3,000 people attended the displays, proving this enterprise to be a good springboard for the overall arts endeavour.
It is with thanks to the inspired and inspiring artists, the craftspeople and the photographers who not only created marvels to observe but readily gave up time and their creations for the first showing of that exhibition Merdeka Art Fest as well as with thanks to Kajang Art Heritage. Timed superbly for the week Malaysia celebrates independence and unity there was little doubt that such a visually appealing enterprise would be a success.
Countless individuals came together in the spirit of community to make the exhibition the accomplishment it was. As it was a fresh space, much time and energy was needed to prepare it to house creative works ready to interact with audiences. Walls needed preparation, creations needed hanging, and often re-hanging to achieve the desired effect, or fixing in the correct position to be observed. The marvel of exhibition creating is not just in the positioning of the work on show, but also in the coming together of a team capable to doing so. With so many experienced people involved with the enterprise it is not surprising that the exhibition, egged on by Malaysian Advanced Photography Group (which since has become ill named as in its widest of art briefs now caters to a wide range of creative people and not just photographers), has been so remarkable.
As the initial enterprise of a newly minted creation, the show, indeed, was a runaway success. That multitalented, multi-ethnic and multi-religious show brought creative people together with others who may not have had an inkling for ‘art’, but have gone away having an experience they could not forget. Even the playful younger members were able to join in, to interact, draw and paint, and perhaps in doing so absorb some of the creative atmosphere around them.
Now that the pictures have been taken down, the constructions moved and the cellist silenced, we all eagerly await the next outing.
Wednesday 7 October 2020
Papia Ghoshal, bohemian
Papia Ghoshal (popularly known as Papia Das Baul) is a bohemian, if not by birth then by choice.
This free spirited mystic woman lives in the capital of what was Bohemia – Prague, as well as in her birth country India (Kolkata), and in Britain too.
Her life is one crammed with creativity, poetry, fine art, filmmaking, acting, performance, music and singing. In Prague, she has formed ‘Baishnav Tantra’ an Indian folk music group dedicated to rare original traditional ethnic Indian music, which is no surprise considering her studies in Indian classical music, Rabindra sangeet/folk music, and her Master’s degree in Indian music, and yet is still very much a bohemian in outlook.
What is it to be a ‘bohemian’? Aside from residence in what was Bohemia (now Czechia, formerly Czechoslovakia with Bohemia in the west, Moravia in the east, and Silesia in the north), being a bohemian has become a badge of separation from the ‘norms’ of ‘normal’ society.
Bohemianism, in popular parlance, is a result of the practice of an unconventional lifestyle. A bohemian lifestyle frequently involves music, art and literature and all that entails. It is argued that bohemians are nomadic, wanderers who seek notions of the spiritual. Those (bohemian) traits have been projected onto artists, poets, writers and salonists (gallerists) in places like Paris, during the 1830s and into the first decades of the 20th century. People such as the writer and poet Guillaume Apollinaire; the artist Amedeo Modigliani; the poet, artist and filmmaker Jean Cocteau; fellow artists Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso; writers Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and salonist Gertrude Stein all became associated with the unconventional bohemian lifestyle.
Later bohemian was applied to the residents of sections of New York’s ‘Latin Quarter’ (at Charles Pfaff's beer cellar), and literary salons across Manhattan. This was possibly due to the popularity of Fitz-James O'Brien's short story - "The Bohemian" in Harper's Magazine (1855). Later, bohemian was applied to London too, with the ‘Bloomsbury Set’ (Virginia Woolf; E.M. Forster; Vanessa Bell; G. E. Moore; Roger Fry; Lytton Strachey; Clive Bell; Leonard Woolf; Sir Desmond MacCarthy, and Arthur David Waley. After the First World war, bohemian was applied to North America’s Greenwich Village’s inhabitants, later to the post World War 2 ‘Beat Generation’ of Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac et al (the ‘hipsters’), and in the 1960s to the San Francisco ‘hippies’.
The term “bohemian” has been likened to ‘gypsy’, mainly due to the lifestyle of gypsies (from Bohemia) settling in Paris. It is said that in the country known as Bohemia (Central Europe, a kingdom in the Holy Roman Empire) Ferdinand I (1545), King of Bohemia had banned gypsies (artistic and creative wanderers originally from the North West of India), and in 1697 Emperor Leopold I, King of Bohemia was to do the same. Having few places to stay in Europe the gypsies or Romani (Roma) tried and tried again to make a home in Bohemia. In the 1760s (in Hungary and Transylvania), Empress Maria Theresa began aiding gypsies to settle, and was continued by her son Joseph II (1780-1790) particularly in Moravia.
Henry Mugger in his book ‘Scenes de la Vie de Boheme’ (Bohemians of the Latin Quarter, 1851, the basis for Puccini’s 1896 opera “La Boheme”) was very keen to distance the Parisian bohemians from the settled gypsies. Mugger wrote…
“The Bohemians of whom it is a question in this book have no connection with the Bohemians whom melodramatists have rendered synonymous with robbers and assassins. Neither are they recruited from among the dancing-bear leaders, sword swallowers, gilt watch-guard vendors, street lottery keepers and a thousand other vague and mysterious professionals whose main business is to have no business at all, and who are always ready to turn their hands to anything except good.”
(Henri Murger. “Bohemians of the Latin Quarter.”
Just as the term bohemian is a misnomer so, in fact, is ‘Gypsy’.
As wanderers, the peoples who often call themselves Roma, or Romani became objectified by various names including ‘Tartars’, ‘Heathens’, ‘Saracens’, ‘Greeks’, ‘Turks’, ‘Jews’, ‘Jats’, ‘Athingani’, ‘Atzinganoi’, ‘Romiti’, ‘Bohemians’, "Fools Styled Greek Bohemians," ‘Pharaoh's People’, ‘Egyptians’, ‘Luri’, ‘Zingari’, ‘Zigeuner’, and ‘Zotts’. The name ‘Egyptians’ became shortened to ‘Gypsies’. But while Gypsies may be bohemians, yet bohemians are not necessarily Gypsies.
Nevertheless, while you might intimate that Papia Ghoshal conforms to the eccentricities of the modernist term ‘bohemian’and, while some consider that there are correlations between ‘bohemians’, ‘Gypsies’ and Baul (such as proposed lifestyle and mode of dress) Papia Ghoshal maybe a bohemian in the lose sense of that term, but though she travels, is not a gypsy, but a ‘Baul’. She has adhered herself to ‘Baul’ philosophy (from Bengal, India). She sings songs of Baul and songs emanating from Bengal’s most famous son, Rabindranath Tagore, too.
The colourful (alkhallas) patchwork clothed Baul (derives from the Sanskrit “Batul,” or “vatula” which means mad, or afflicted by the wind) are akin to gypsies and/or bohemians and are itinerant, nomadic, wandering bards/minstrels who frequently perform with the Ektara (a popular simple one stringed musical instrument, Ek-one, Tara-string). They are nonconformists who praise love and dance out of the sheer joy of being alive. Tantrism; Buddhism; Hinduism, Islam and Sufism have all been associated with the Baul of Bengal.
As part of a Baul performing troupe Papia Ghoshal is very much the Baul answer to Janis Joplin (dubbed the Queen of bohemians), with her husky but sensuous vocals and heartfelt facial mannerisms. Dressed in traditional Baul patchwork, red scarf wrapped around her neck, nose ring glittering as she plays and sings, this bohemian painter/performer/poet enwraps and beguiles her attentive audiences. Often her paintings, originally created using watercolour and menstrual blood in the tantric tradition, are projected behind her though, in truth, she needs no additions to her magnetic self and her pounding musical accompaniment. On stage, she twirls like semazens (Sufic Mevlevis) but unlike those ‘Twirling Dervishes’ she is highly sensuous, a woman grounded in ‘shakti’ and moves as easily as the ophidian (Gerua) who accompanies her in life.
Kanak Champa Chakma: reinvigorating Bangladesh Modernism (in Artiureqa Vol 1, issue 2, India)
“Art transports us from the world of man’s activity to a world of aesthetic exaltation. For a moment we are shut off from human interests; our anticipations and memories are arrested ; we are lifted above the stream of life.” Clive Bell, p25, in The Aesthetic Hypothesis, Art, Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1914.
I was fortunate. During my short sojourn in Dhaka between February and March 2019, I was fated to meet with Kanak Champa Chakma on a number of occasions. This eventuated in me being invited to her studio, for a delicious homemade lunch and to see her stunning artworks in varying stages of growth. This gave me a slight glimpse into the life and art of this accomplished Bangladesh artist.
While heeding the advice from a renown Dhaka writer not to reference outside of the culture, in this instance there is no denying the need to mention the influence of Paul Gauguin’s powerful, original, colouration and simplicity of line on the works of Kanak Champa Chakma. The artist, herself, would be the first to admit to her fascination with what Roger Fry had determined as the ‘Post Impressionism’ of Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin (1848 - 1903), as had Syed Manzoorul Islam, writing for Kanak Champa (The Sights and Sounds of Kanak Chanpa’s World), in Kanak Chanpa Chakma, published by Duncan Brothers, in Dhaka, 2005.
In the last years of the 19th Century Gauguin, and others, had been seeking fresh ways to look at art, painting especially. In ‘Ivory Apes and Peacocks’ (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915), James Huneker, writing about Paul Gauguin, mentioned that ‘He was weary of a Paris where everything had been painted, described, modelled, so he sailed for Tahiti, landing at Papeete.” In 1891 Gauguin, travelled to Tahiti, then to the Marquises archipelago, to satisfy his curiosity for ‘the primitive’, a life unspoiled by its brush with European ‘civilisation’. He was disappointed. Modern life had reached there first. In 1901 he had to travel deeper into those, and adjacent isles, to find a fresh way of looking at this art.
Before his return to the Pacific isles, Gauguin had written “Think also of the musical role colour will henceforth play in modern painting. Colour, which is vibration just as music is, is able to attain what is most universal yet at the same time most elusive in nature: its inner force.” (Paul Gauguin, Letter to Fontainas, 1899).
Gauguin’s ‘inner force’ of colour has echoed through the ages, influencing other artists such as Wassilly Kandinsky (1866 - 1944), renown for his own colour theories. Before his untimely death (in Atuona, Hiva Oa, the Marquesas Islands, in French Polynesia, 8th of May 1903), in 1897 Gauguin had painted a large canvas, ‘D'où Venons Nous Que Sommes Nous Où Allons Nous’ (‘Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?’) spanning some 139 cm × 375 cm (or 55 in × 148 in). That large painting has been highly influential on the works of other artists, and one can image how influential this might have been for Kanak Champa Chakma with her use of dynamic colours et al. Her work can be seen to reinvigorate the idea of a Bangladesh ‘Modernism’, while looking back to Gauguin and examining her ethnic Chakma roots through pictorial forms.
Kanak Champa is no outsider looking in, no middle class European filled with romantically poetic notions of the ‘Primitive’, as was Gauguin, but an artist who concerns herself with the plight, history and culture of her people - the Chakma ethnic tribe, who represent the largest of the 45 ethnic minority communities in Bangladesh.
Kanak Champa (Chakma), however, is not the first female artist to have brought touches of School of Paris to the Indian subcontinent. The briefly lived Amrita Sher-Gil (1913 - 41), wallowing in Parisian bohemia, responded to Gauguin’s paintings of the women in Tahiti by painting ‘Self-Portrait as a Tahitian’ (1934), in which the artist sensually appears with a hint of wildness and ‘primitiveness’, in her self-portrait. It is claimed that the half Indian, half Hungarian Amrita Sher-Gil had introduced Modern Art, and thus also knowledge of Paul Gauguin and his style, into India where she returned in 1935 settling, for a while, in Saraya, a village in India’s Gorakhpur district. She died in Lahore, now part of Pakistan.
Kanak Champa’s own response to Gauguin was not that of Sher-Gil. Kanak Champa has not adopted an adversarial position towards Gauguin nor, necessarily, has attempted to subvert the male ‘gaze’, supplanting that with another, an opposing a ‘feminist’ one. Instead Kanak Champa imbues her artworks (of tribes people) with the sort of honestly only one uniquely familiar with their culture can portray. Kanak Champa, in her choice to channel Gauguin, differs from that of Sher-Gil. Kanak Champa uses Gauguin to reveal the indigene while presenting, and representing, a mystic ‘otherness’ in her choice of neo-Symbolist imagery. Thus Kanak Champa demonstrates her unique intimacy with her subject, her mastery over the mediums she chooses and her acuteness in presenting both to a beguiled audience.
K.G.Subramanyan (in his talk for the 4th Ravishanker Rawal Memorial lecture, on Art & The Matter of Identity, 2007) suggested that….
“…visual art today functions in an indefinite location. Although an artist puts a lot of planning and effort into making an art object, the viewer is relatively a stranger to its message. Even the qualities of its image, in the absence of a common cultural background or the instabilities within the one that is. So in today's world art is becoming more of a commodity and less of a communication, for all the fan-fare and publicity that accompanies the launch or the opening of an exhibition.”
Observing Kanak Champa’s early paintings, such as ‘Way of Peace’ (1998), you may be forgiven for assuming there might be a fondness for a symbolism closer to home - that of India’s Abanindranath Tagore (1871-1951). He was a pioneer of the ‘Bengal School of Art’ and that ‘renaissance’ Indian Rabindranath Tagor’s nephew. Abanindranath Tagore’s evocative Symbolist paintings such as the ‘Untitled’ watercolour (Maiden) created in the 1920s, or his ‘pastel on board with oil’ portrait of his grandson, ‘Mohanlal Ganguly’ (1926), resonate with the more ‘romantic’ aspects of European Symbolism woven into aspects of ‘traditional’ Indian painting. If you consider Abanindranath Tagore’s work to have some influence over Kanak Champa’s own, you would be incorrect.
Kanak Champa’s pictorial ‘task’, as it were, is to wrestle with Subramanyan’s negative imaginings concerning ‘Modernism’ by bringing alive the naturalness of the Chakma (and other) tribal indigenes, without resorting to overdue romanticism, which European Symbolism has a leaning towards, while preserving all the indigenous mystique of her subject matter. It is to her credit that Kanak Champa does this successfully, allowing her audience to see what she sees, at least at one remove, with all the beauty and intrinsic spiritualism of the tribal peoples. This is achieved through her astute choices of colour, form, composition and a textuality which adds physical and psychological depths to her canvases.
Though still in tune with a revitalised Gauguin, Kanak Champa has moved on to use impasto and scraping techniques for her canvas’ physical depth, alluring and beguiling her audience(s). She frequently exhibits heightened colour choices, more in tune with ‘The Fauves’ (‘les fauves’ or the wild beasts, 1905 to 1910) who came after Gauguin, with distinct suggestions of a dynamic use of ‘Expressionism’. In her home studio I had seen works which varied from a predominantly duo-tone canvas (roseate and blue) to another where a green had been pushed back so as not to challenge the power of the blue and the female figure before it. I also witnessed a long canvas, worked with yellow which edged towards the golden, where five figures dominated the foreground, and yet another two figures shared the mid and background. Delicate introductions of red and white, dour tones of grey-brown only sought to emphasise that gold/yellow, demonstrating the artist’s familiarity with colour theory. But there again, and naturally as an artist, her work is unique.
When I look at my attempts to ‘situate’ Kanak Champa within the framework of Modernist painting, I inevitably fail. I fail because all such attempts must remain futile. No such direct comparisons could possibly exit. I may cite Gauguin, Post-Impressionism, Symbolism, Fauvism and Expressionism only to eventuate in realising that any such combination of styles and forms only highlights the originality of Kanak Champa's work. I use Abanindranath Tagore and Amrita Sher-Gil to ‘localise’ possible stylistic influences, demonstrating that the Indian subcontinent too has produced artists of note in similar vein. Ones who had worked towards an Asian Modernism.
Kanak Champa, I have to confess, is an original. In her approach to her art, in her approach to her subject matter and in her choices of revelation, or obturation, she excels in rendering her own narrative and the stories of those frequently marginalised by a mainstream society.
The Blue Lotus magazine Special issue (from Cambodia) 2
https://issuu.com/martinabradley/docs/the_blue_lotus_magazine_special_2
