“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.
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