Road trip to Nanyang

The name Nanyang simply means South Seas, or South East Asia (in Mandarin). The term refers to those lands reached from China via the South China Sea, but in art terminology Nanyang has also come to mean a fusion of Western and Eastern artistic styles (especially in Singapore) into a new style - the Nanyang style of art.

Our idea (such as it was), was to travel down to Singapore, meet some nice people and collect some information about the Nanyang Academy of Arts. And that we did, in a roundabout way, for life has a strange way of changing your plans. To quote Robert Burns……

But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane [you aren't alone]
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft a-gley, [often go awry]
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promised joy.

Or, in English, the best laid plans of mice and men, often go astray.

We had thought of going directly to Singapore, by bus, feet up watching copious films. We  changed to driving down, and staying with our friend in Johor Bahru and chatting endless chats. Eventually, with a little nudging from friends, we added a diversion to see an exhibition in Malacca to the itinerary, stayed over for two nights, and the road trip was never the same thereafter.

With the niggling thought of beginning to write about the Nanyang (Southern Seas) style of Singaporean art we (the intrepid Dusun team), climbed into our brilliant red motor vehicle - comparable to the Bat car, or Green Hornet’s ‘Black Beauty and, on Sunday, 27th July, as the Selangor sun was customarily blazing, we launched out from Kuala Lumpur towards the ancient port of Malacca. Malacca, if you recall, is famed for its mix of Chinese and Malay peoples, architecture, dress style and foods in a unique style called Baba/Nonya, also called Peranakan (descendent). 

That sensually intriguing port (of Malacca) had been variously a Malay fishing village, a Singaporean sultanate refuge, a Portuguese, then Dutch and finally a British colony, and now a prized possession of the Federation of Malaysia. Intrepid Chinese seafarers, adventurous Chinese settlers and brave Chinese sea commanders all thought highly of Malacca. In modern times, Malacca preserves lashings of authentic Chinese heritage, amidst remnants of Portuguese and Dutch styles, as well as the general tat of tourist paraphernalia.

Malacca’s Li Chi Mao Art Museum is a repository of the works of Prof. Li Chi Mao, born in Woyang County, Anhuei Province, China, in 1925, and is considered a national treasure in Taiwan. The museum (art gallery) honouring him is situated on Lorong Hang Jebat, Malacca, and was hosting an exhibition of art relating to that city by five exceptional Chinese Malaysian artists - Yip Sek Quai, Chua Chay Hwa, Tan Puey Tee, Lau Mao Seng and Yeo Eng Hin. The exhibition was called Malacca’s Decade of Changes. It was a ‘joint painting’ exhibition.

And what, other than being Chinese Malaysians, you might wonder, was the significance of this exhibition in relation to the afore mentioned Nanyang style from Singapore. Well, as it turns out, three out of five artists exhibiting at Li Chi Mao were former direct students of the Nanyang Academy. Husband and wife team Chua Chay Hwa and Yeo Eng Hin graduated from Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, in Singapore, 1978 and 1977 respectively, and went on to follow the links created with France, by Nanyang teacher Georgette Chen, by attending the Ecole Des Beaux Arts in Paris. Lau Mao Seng graduated from Nanyang somewhat earlier - in 1967. Tan Puey Tee is a retired school headmaster and self taught painter, while Yip Sek Quai graduated from the Kuala Lumpur Collage of Art, itself having connections to Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, as the founder of Kuala Lumpur College of Art (Cheah Yew Saik) was, himself, a graduate from Nanyang.

As you might expect, from such a dynamic five person exhibition, there was a profusion of styles and images at Malacca’s Decade of Changes. A proliferation of fused Western and Eastern styles from Impressionism (Chua Chay Hwa) Expressionism (Lau Mao Seng - slated to feature in Dusun Quarterly soon) Cubism (Yip Sek Quai), as well as a blend of watercolour and Chinese ink painting from Tan Puey Tee. Yeo Eng Hin (featured in Dusun Quarterly 1 2013) rendered remarkable cityscapes in his own inimitable style, playing with texture and spectator/artist interaction. There is little doubt that the exhibition was a resounding success. How could it be otherwise with such experienced artists presenting their works for an eager public. Surrounded by intriguing artworks, we debated origins of Nanyang, its style and its forebears deferentially, and just a tad intensely as the audience was represented by many factions of the Malaysian art world - auction houses, galleries, artists and art critics (well, me). For me, the stars of the show were the ebullient, vibrantly energetic neo-Expressionist canvas-board oil pastels, vigorously created by Muar artist Lau Mao Seng.

Yet the surprises were only just beginning.

Opposite our, far from salubrious, hotel in Jalan Tun Tan Cheng Lock, Malacca, rested a small, yet fascinating, gallery of modern art - the Shih Wen Naphaporn Artist Studio. Owner, painter and all round good fellow Chiang Shih Wen (graduate of the already mentioned Kuala Lumpur College of Art) and his stunning artist wife Naphaporn Phanwiset, guided us around their artworks and what made the gallery tick, metaphorically that is. 

Chiang Shih Wen’s artworks are heavily reminiscent of Dali’s Cubist Self Portrait (1923) and the Russian painter Lyubov Popova’s ‘Painterly Architectonics’ (1915 to 1919). Brightly coloured strips of Malacca’s Chinese, Dutch and Portuguese architectures tend to excite the visitor’s eyes, giving a remarkable visual flavour of Chiang Shih Wen’s Malacca. Taking trouble to execute detail, Chiang Shih Wen meticulously adds the text of Malacca sign boards to his imagery in multicoloured, scintillating, street scenes. As well as the obvious likenesses to various approaches to Cubism, there is something of the Fauve about that painter, forging his own painterly style in his fascinating home town. 

In the studio, wooden trays of ‘Rembrandt’ oil colours and pots of workmanlike brushes shared space with Taoist/Buddhist figures, Yves Saint Laurent Belle D’Opium and L’Oreal Studio, as you might expect from an area shared by male and female artists. 

Naphaporn Phanwiset (Chiang Shih Wen’s wife), had recently been painting images of luscious, exotic and maybe even erotic fruit, reminiscent of Lim Kim Hai (more of him down the page). Not long ago, Naphaporn Phanwiset had produced a peach painting. It bore all the well rounded and sensual hallmarks of a budding Georgia O’Keeffe. A table cloth with all the sexual suggestiveness of an 0’Keeffe, was mounted by very feminine peaches and masculine standing bottles. The painting seemed to revel in its potential lewdness. It was a triumph of feminism and female boldness. The question became rhetorical as the viewer might consider ‘how could she not paint fruit when her husband had, and their very good friend Lim Kim Hai (aka The Apple Man) does’, but Naphaporn Phanwiset, with O’Keeffe potential, has stripped away Lim Kim Hai's classicism, replacing it with a budding sensuality which one hopes will only grow and bare even more mouthwatering fruit, actual and metaphorical.

Master painter Lim Kim Hai was with us on that day, in Chiang Shih Wen’s gallery. Having taken our farewells of the gallery, we stepped back into the Malacca humidity and squeezed along the minuscule, ramshackle, pathways to Lim Kim Hai's studio gallery, also doubling as a repository for his collection of fine antiques, further along Jalan Tun Tan Cheng Lock. 

Like Chua Chay Hwa and Yeo Eng Hin, Lim Kim Hai is a graduate of that famous Nanyang Academy of Fine Art. Also like them, he headed to Paris after graduation but stayed on until 2002, when he finally settled in Malacca to resume his painting. Lim Kim Hai is somewhat unfairly known as ‘The Apple Man’, due to the many canvases he has painted of that very European fruit. I say unfairly, because he has only been painting apple ‘portraits’ since the 1980s, and exclusively since 1990. Before his concentration on the one subject (apples), Lim Kim Hai had learned to paint, exquisitely, in a classical European (detailed) style.

Lim Kim Hai’s studio/gallery is at the rear of his huge collection of Malaysian antiques. Number 42 Jalan Tun Tan Cheng Lock (named after the founder of Malacca’s Chinese Association) was formerly the Dutch Heeren Street and is at the very core of the Unesco World Heritage Site of Malacca. Coming off the street, the first ‘room’ presented a wealth (literally) of antique furniture and silk carpets. The carpets reminded me of those I had witnessed in carpet showrooms in Northern India. Beautiful silk carpets with a unique silk sheen and delicate coloration. Gaps amidst the wall clad fruit cornucopia, indicated the spaces where paintings had been recently sent to Singapore, for a group exhibition. Wooden, antique, furniture brought the Chinese feel closer. Chairs for house and clan leaders differed from those of the lesser members of the family, but we were not there to ogle Lim Kim Hai’s antiques, as beautiful as they were, but to see his studio.

At the very rear of the antique gallery, Lim Kim Hai’s spacious studio piqued our curiosity. We were lucky to witness three canvases, in three different stages of completion, one standing on a terracotta tiled floor and the other two on wooden easels, one larger, one smaller. The artist explained his process, from initial background colour (in this case colours, brushed together to represent a golden hue), to the first tentative drawings of apples, through to his first colours and a near-finished work, replete with apple ‘portraits’. To my wife (she being a painter) he explained his painterly techniques and the lack of linseed oil, the use of varnish and turpentine (not white spirit). To me he explained that he kept his ‘subjects’ in the fridge. A moment of unease came over me until I realised that he didn’t mean dead bodies, but apples. With that he produced a bag of ’pommes’ (French), being kept fresh in his fridge, and laid them out for us to see the subjects of his current paintings.

The following morning, after July rain and tears in our eyes, we reluctantly left Malacca and dropped in on Muar, in the neighbouring state of Johor. Muar is an ancient city, believed to be older even than Malacca and, like Malacca, had been variously visited by the British, Dutch and Portuguese over the years. We were there to follow up on the brief meeting we had with veteran Nanyang artist Lau Moa Seng, in that Malacca exhibition. 

The Malacca rain had followed us into Johor state, and its northern capital Muar. Through the rain we weaved with that infamous Butch Cassidy and the Sun Dance Kid song making the dampness a little more romantic than it really was. We found Eng Bee Book Co, amidst gardens that would put most Malaysian plant nurseries to shame, and were warmly welcomed by Lau Moa Seng and his enthusiastic family.

Picking our way through what was, in reality, not a book store but a wonderland art store, ducking under suspended flying frogs (more resembling Garuda than any frogs I had yet to encounter) and further marvelling at curious examples of colourful rocks on wooden plinths, we eventually came to the store at the rear of the building. And what a store it was, more like Warehouse 13 than a shop store, and in that virtual Chinese Aladdin’s Cave were life-sized wooden artist’s mannikins. imported from China. Unnerving male, female and child mannikins stood on huge shelving units, sternly, woodenly regarding us with eerily blank expressions.

In the main section was a corridor. To the left of that corridor, about four foot from the ground, was a long segmented rack, from which Lau Moa Seng began to pull canvas boards of his stunning paintings. It was estimated that there were well over two hundred oil pastel ‘painted’ canvases on those racks, all with a sombre black background from which sparkling colours would catch the viewer’s eye.

Muar life was represented, vividly, on those energetic canvas boards. They were the byproduct of many years of vigorous, vivacious Expressionistic fervour, as Lau Moa Seng sought to capture his neighbours and his neighbourhood in his hometown of Muar. Each canvas board was a lightning ‘sketch’, capturing the moment and, in many ways reminiscent of Georgette Chen’s works. Georgette Li Ying Chen was Lau Moa Seng’s teacher at the Nanyang Academy, in Singapore, she taught there from 1954 to 1980 and was using pastels exclusively during the 1960s. Lau Moa Seng graduated from the Nanyang Academy in 1967.

Lau Moa Seng explained that canvas board, alone, was suitable for his zealous way of working. Framed canvas was too flexible, unable to resist his animated way of working. He needed a surface resistant to his robust strokes of oil pastel, and small enough to be completed at one sitting en plein air.

Loaded with art books, art materials and a mind full of superb oil canvas board ‘paintings’, we bade farewell to those amazing people at the Eng Bee Book Co, and travelled south, to Johor Bahru. It was there that we reconnected with our dear interior design friend from the MIA (Malaysian Institute of Arts - founded by Chung Chen Sun, a Nanyang Academy graduate, in 1967), left our car and travelled on by bus, across the causeway, on to Merlion Island (Singapore), for research about the Nanyang Academy.

Foo Kwee Horng, a former assistant to Professor T. K. Sabapathy (along with Redza Piyadasa, a writer on all things Nanyang, and an inspiration to all art historians in Malaysia and Singapore) met with us and, through a couple of meetings, gave me information re the Nanyang Academy. It was a positive time in Singapore, the SAM (Singapore Art Museum), the Singapore National Library and the meetings that we had. 

It was exciting to be in ‘Nanyang City’, the birthplace of a style, ideas, concepts of Western and Eastern art that began a fusion with the founding of the Nanyang Academy in 1938, and that historical trip to Bali in 1952. Nanyang resonates in Singapore and Malaysia to the present day. Our trip was a ‘look see’, in preparation for a much longer exposition. I pondered on that while Pei Yeou, my artist wife and graduate from MIA, drove us via Port Dickson, back to Selangor.

That Nanyang Touch

I was at the Nanyang Touch exhibition, housed in the Chinese Assembly Hall, Kuala Lumpur. Amidst swaying crimson Chinese drapes, Dr Cheah Thien Soong, president of Cao Tang Men Eastern Arts Society and master Nanyang Chinese ink painter, was waxing lyrically eloquent in Mandarin. His dignified white pony tail nodded as he talked. It was a testimony to his comfortable earnestness, in that hall, in this year of the horse (Ma), now galloping past it's 2014 zenith. It was Nanyang Touch, the Cao Tang Men Eastern Arts Society exhibition, and the hall was bedecked with Chinese dignitaries, Chinese ink painting artists and their brush-stroked, absorbent paper works hung as testimonies to diligence.

The red lanterns were raised, but without Yimou Zhang filming were restricted to stills. The insistent flash of digital photography, illuminating earnest speakers and idle gawkers alike, caught us all like rabbits in the glare, but we all became enlightened, in many other ways, during those hours of the exhibition.

The Chinese Assembly Hall, tucked away at Kuala Lumpur’s No.1, Jalan Maharajalela, was acutely reminiscent of a bygone era. There were shades and echoes of 1930s Art Deco amidst its Neo—Classical structure, but now anachronistic, ageing, worn by so many operas, rumbustious speechifying and the annual Gong Xi Fa Choi bon homie. In another age, and in another ‘motherland’, red cheeked, moon faced young maidens might have peered from the balconies, at spring or moon festivals, proud of their heritage, culture, their simple good fortune at being born into a race of such exceptionally talented people.

It was to honour both Dr Cheah Thien Soong and his hard working, persistently artistic students, that the illustrious and the talented were gathered, seated, intent on Mandarin speakers on the crimson stage. Dr Cheah Thien Soong, in this the year of the horse, was represented in Chinese ink, painted, sitting proud on his black stallion mount, like Sun Wu, smiling broadly for his audience. Dr Cheah Thien Soong is chief, a general of the arts, he is a Nanyang innovator, inspiring yet another generation of creative beings.

Dr Cheah is a former Nanyang (South Seas) Academy of Fine Arts (Singapore) student. Nanyang, if you will remember, led the way from the 1930s, to somewhere in the 1980s/90s, as a most original and perhaps even profound school of art. Taking its name from the region it was in, Nanyang had been one of many such, predominately Chinese, art schools springing up as Chinese immigrant artists fled their homeland, and settled in Singapore during the 1930s. Nanyang, founded by artist and teacher Lim Hak Tai, was the only one to survive the Japanese invasion, and gradually became a haven for visiting Chinese artists, giving lectures. After secession from Malaysia (1965), both Singapore and Nanyang grew exponentially.

Other than being the premier art school in the region, the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts was responsible for developing a unique fusion of Western (Paris) and Eastern (China) styles of art, emerging from out of what was loosely called the Shanghai School. Singapore in those years between 1920s and the 1950s was a melting-pot of cultures, with Western artists and Chinese artists visiting and exhibiting. Oil on canvas, and ink on paper, were equally valid and valued in the Nanyang Academy. It is rumoured that it was a trip to Bali (1952), by Cheong Soo Pieng, Chen Chong Swee, Chen Wen Hsi and Liu Kang, that hastened the metamorphosis of styles, bringing a greater awareness of the region to those Chinese artists, who were so impressed with the brightness of colours, and the general ambiance of that Hindu island.

Nanyang broke with Chinese tradition for the ink painting artists, and stirred up a renewed vigour for the oil painters who, perhaps, were subconsciously working through echoes of Western Post-Impressionism, and in particular those semi-erotic images delivered to a Victorian world by Paul Gauguin, imaging his South Seas. Elements of local (Indonesian, Singaporean and Malaysian) flora and fauna began to insinuate themselves onto absorbent ink papers, deviating from the strict signs, symbols and metaphors associated with traditional Chinese ink painting. Georgette Chen, educated in Paris, New York and Shanghai, brought her own fusion of Eastern and Western styles to Nanyang when she moved to Singapore (from Penang) in 1954.

The Malaysian Institute of Art (MIA), Malaysia’s first school of art, from which my own dear wife graduated, was founded in Kuala Lumpur (1966) by  Chung Chen Sun, who himself was a graduate of the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts. Dr Cheah Thien Soong, one of my wife’s teachers, graduated also from the Nanyang, in 1962, and in 1990 began teaching at the Malaysian Institute of Art to continue the innovations began in Singapore so many years previously.

In that Kuala Lumpur Assembly Hall, the fusion of local imagery and authentic Chinese brushwork was nowhere more evident than in those magnificent images of red-headed hornbills, bustling marketing women, bedazzling bright blue and green peacocks and the majestic jackfruit, plump, hanging, barely able to contain the gravity begging the pair to spread their seeds in the waiting, fecund, earth.

In the Nanyang Touch exhibition, Malaysia was seen with fresh, excited eyes, rendered with practised dexterity and presented to an anxiously waiting public with aplomb. Ink brush painting was revealed as more adroit, more adventurous than ever could have been imagined in Shanghai. That tentative grafting, began in the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in Singapore, had quite literally borne fruit in those two hanging Artocarpus heterophylli (Nangka) which served as symbols of a bright new future for that Nanyang Touch, which Dr Cheah Thien Soong strives each year to preserve and prosper.

To say that the exhibition was a success was to underestimate the whole enterprise. It was a superb undertaking by a skilled team, lead by an enthused leader committed to his art and to the crafts of his culture and heritage. In its links to the forerunners of Malaysia’s art eduction system, Nanyang Touch reminds us all of the debt that Malaysia owes to both the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts and to the Malaysian Institute of Art, their teachers and their graduates.

Mirroring Jeganathan Ramachandram

Aandavan

Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.

Khalil Gibran

Is ‘mirroring’, that reflecting of ourselves back to ourselves, ‘Darshan'? If the ‘god’ is within us, or if we are made in the image of a ‘god’, then is mirroring being in the presence of god, or Darshan (in sanskrit)? Are we seeing with ‘reverence and devotion’ in order to receive the grace and blessings of the supreme and omnipresent, through mirroring? Through mirroring are we averting our eyes/mind ‘heavenwards’ or ‘skywards’ in the act of ‘Akash’, or grounding the spiritual? In the ‘Vedas’, specifically Shrimad Bhagavatam (1.2.32), it mentions that “The Lord as Supersoul pervades all things, just as fire permeates wood, and so He appears to be of many varieties, though He is the absolute one without a second.” I will leave you to ponder these questions.

Mirroring The Centre….the science of positive vibrations, this is the current exhibition on at the Indian Cultural centre, Cap Square, Kuala Lumpur. It is a solo exhibition, and the 10th such of the well respected Malaysian Indian artist, and poet, Jeganathan Ramachandram.

Though this fresh exhibition is concerned with intricacies and intimacies of Hinduism, science and Sakti (energy), in true Platonic philosophic style the artist/poet Jeganathan also presents his viewers with enough layers, in the philosophical as well as in the textual depth of his paintings, to fascinate and enthral even the most casual glance. We are given the choice, whether to skim the surface of his canvases, and accept the paintings for the obvious beauties they are, or delve to whichever layer of meaning we are capable, or incapable, of ‘reading’, and gain either a fleeting or a more measured and extremely profound extrapolation of signs, symbols and metaphors, enough to enrich our soul. But, of course, like life, what you take away mostly depends upon what you bring to the party/launch.

I am old enough to have been a ‘flower child’, a ‘hippy’, listening to The Beach Boys sing Good Vibrations (1967). In the 1960s American street vernacular, it was all about ‘vibes’ (radiating aura or feelings). Beach Boys’ songwriter Brian Wilson heard the notion of ‘vibes’ first from his mother, but many young Westerners were interested in Oriental philosophies and theologies, the lure of India and exotica of Hinduism.  Jeganathan reminds us that Western science has laid claim to the ‘discovery’ of atoms, their movement - vibration, yet it is something that Hinduism had been aware of for centuries. Om, an oft repeated mantra, is regarded as being three separate sounds aa-au-ma, and is symbolic of the three major deities (the Trimurti) in Hinduism - Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver and Shiva the destroyer. Om is an intonation of the constant sound (vibration) of the world. Om, it is believed, when intoned correctly, is able to vibrate to one’s very soul (Atman).

Like the Indipop duo Colonial Cousins’ (Hariharan and Leslie Lewis) song Krishna Ni Begane Baaro (Krishna come soon) where Krishna, Rama, Jesus etc are invoked to save the world, Jeganathan brings a host of deities into his own exhibition, perhaps revealing them (simply?) as incarnations of the same soul (Atman), the same cosmic, eternal, vibration which we, humans, mirror. Buddha is shown (painted) as The Moment, in his blue splendour and saffron robes, sitting serenely by another canvas, that of Jesus. We are reminded of John the Baptist, referring to Jesus as ‘the Lamb of God’ (Look, there goes the Lamb of God), for within Jeganathan’s painting The Messenger, the bearded ‘god’ figure, replete with halo and cherub, holds and pets a lamb in his arms. Ganesha is represented in more than one painting, Krishna is there, and Murugan too gets a look in.

The exhibition resounds with vibrating spirituality. Jeganathan has always had a leaning towards the more aesthetic and the devotional. Ursula k.Le Guin wrote ‘I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth’. Jeganathan is not an atheist, and though an artist, strives for truth in Hindu science, poetics and revelation through painting. 

His recent paintings glow. Jeganathan has achieved a scintillating glimmer to these works, an almost phosphorescence, which was revealed under UV light at the opening of his exhibition. Not in form, but in many other respects Jeganathan’s glowing spirituality approach to this series is reminiscent of the Dali acolyte, the American born Robert (Bob) Venosa. Venosa’s ‘Mirch Technique’ of bright tempera and oil painting (rendering pigment in layers, allowing light to pass through, reflecting off a white gesso surface on a prepared panel) is a revival of Renaissance painting. Jeganathan’s technique is different, but the brilliant, near candescent effects of this group of paintings are lustrous like those of Venosa.

Despite the urgings from some quarters, I see no similarities between the English artist and creator of the Hymn Jerusalem - William Blake and Jeganathan Ramachandran. If we were looking for painters as Renaissance men (all rounders) we might have pointed more towards Rabindranath Tagore, or Salvador Dali (painter, sculptor, writer, author and creator of his own museum) or to Jean Cocteau, artist, poet and film-maker or, should we feel the need to extend beyond Modernism - Dante Gabriel Rossetti. But little of that helps us understand the painter poet, poet painter who is the exceptional man that Jeganathan Ramachandram really is.

To understand the man, the reader or the viewer needs to read Jeganathan’s sublime poetry and gaze upon his scintillating artworks. There his soul is laid bare, his intentions clear, but profound. Find time, do visit this, or any of his many exhibitions, take a closer look at Jeganathan’s output. Understand that he mirror’s himself, and through himself, us. To gaze upon his paintings we comprehend better the connection that we all share, as we are in turn connected to the many universes, mirroring them, mirroring us, vibrating together, harmoniously and with truthful beauty too.

Catalonia Summer

In summer I landed in Barcelona, navigating the transport system to bring myself back to the small town of Figueres, in the province of Girona, and the friends I had made there. The delicate Catalan light effused with the memory of summery scents, fresh mottled apples, ripened strawberries and creatively misshapen brilliant red tomatoes, presented itself unashamedly to me. 

I had travelled continents, traversed the intricacies of transportations to return to that very special region of Spain - Catalonia, partly French partly Spanish. Skies, under which the poet Lorca wrote and Hemmingway drank, gave up a serene Mediterranean dark phthalo blue, through which barely a titanium white cloud had drifted. I ducked sweet olive branches and once more made my way into ancient Catalonia more used to the Surrealistic eccentricities of the beloved Salvador Dalí i Domènech.

Thirteenth century Figueres, birthplace of Dali and luscious figs, sprouted green, fresh. Amidst manganese violet, madder and cooling blues the town presented antique stone facades, squares, statues and a promenade - la rambla arched with shading trees. I was awed, delighted in contrast shadow, keen streaks of sun. Majestic monuments reflected the dry heat of Orwell’s Catalonia, and its welcoming golden sun.

Figueres market brought all the colour and flavour of the comarca of Alt Empordà in one delicious arena. While housewives and tourists sampled cheeses, dates, meats and fresh fruits witnesses strawberry pits on children’s fingers stained with the colour and sweet, flavoursome juices.

Hotel Duran, gourmet haven for all that is Dali and Gala, sheltered me in its Dali room. I drank late night chocolate drinks and delicate pastries Se·ñor (Mr) Duran proffered. He talked endlessly and encouraged me to devourer a delicious midnight Crema Catalana. I stayed there, surrounded by the paraphernalia of Dali, his litho prints, newspaper cuttings, and photographs with the Durans.

In the cooling evening, gold ochre nuts (from leafy Hazel) littered cobbles near the majestic 11th century Romanesque bridge, in the antique town of Besalú. Sanguine, the colour of a poet’s blood, moss green and ebony olives succulent in their virgin oil, sat in a partially open bag as I perched on an ancient rock. I was looking at the monastery, and church, of Sant Pere (St. Peter). I had journeyed past lemon fields of Van Gogh sunflowers to that medieval town, stopping briefly to wallow in the acres of golden flowers, then sat by tumbling waters and remained dazzled by the splendid vistas that Catalonia had to offer. My driver was non other than that former family friend of the late Salvador and Gala Dali, and my new friend Se·ñor Duran.

The Catalan coast is truly brave. It is ridden rough-shod over by the sea, forming coves, caves and moulding hearts exuding bravado in their welcoming of strangers. I headed for the sea side town of Cadaqués, the beloved coastal town of Salvador Dali, Picasso, the American visionary artist Robert (Bob) Venosa and Walt Disney. I uncharacteristically sipped lemon beer (cerveza de limon) while watching sea vistas; witnessing the fuchsia sky closing toward sunset. Red sea vessels echoed the tiles of distant roofs, prominent amidst the green of plentiful olive trees.

It was in Cadaqués that I met Joan Vehí. He had been  Dali’s good friend, frame maker and, eventually, the photographer whom we have to thank for so many images of Dali, his family and his life. Vehí, bald, creased with years but still smiling his magical smile, regaled me with remembrances of his contacts with Dali, the portraits, the craziness, the honesty and the loyalty of Dali. Sitting with an architect friend,Ignacio Puras Abad, in the cafe Rosa Azul, Cadaqués, I took Catalan coffee.

For a moment, I dreamt a sighing dream of home, of Constable country, of tumbling clouds rolling over the Essex/Suffolk border. But I was in Spain and comforted by the trailing vines of gorgeous grape and the sweet, pulpy blackberries of Port Lligat, rambling near Dali’s former home. In Port Lligat, I had stood in front of Dali’s painting of Gala as a Leda, approached by the swan Zeus (a replica for tourists), a Catalonia seascape in the background. Others gawped and gaped, hastily taking photographs. I watched the delight of fellow tourists.

I walked from Sant Martí d’Empúries to L’Escala, to Roses and around the uniquely charming small city and Roman citadel, of Girona. I sauntered down shaded alleyways, climbing cathedral steps, gazing at rivers from tentative bridges, and soaked up the Mediterranean atmosphere, easing into the casual lifestyle of coffees and pastries, olives and local Cava.

Back in Figueres, I went to see the gothic Church of Sant Pere, then seated opposite the Dalicatessen Cafe, in Career Sant Pere, and adjacent to the Dali Museum I looked at those still waiting in line for tickets to the Dali Museum. It is in that very Dalicatessen cafe, in a large gallery set aside for such purposes, and owned by Martí Dacosta, that exhibitions are held.

Then, almost as quickly as it had begun, my sojourn in Figueres, Catalonia and Spain, was finished. With more than a little sadness, Se·ñor Duran drove me the full length of Figueres town, past La rambla, and past the farmer’s market to the waiting train station. He bade me a teary farewell. I returned to Malaysia, my home, but had left a large part of my heart in Figueres.

Dusun Quarterly no 2 Summer 2014

Three Years of Dusun - Asian Arts and Culture E-Magazine

Covers for the e-magazine Dusun, Malaysia's best known and best loved Asian Arts and Culture e-magazine, now in its third year.

Dusun has grown from covering exclusively Malaysian Arts to covering the Arts of Asia, with regular features from Singapore, The Philippines and Cambodia.

Dusun aims to cover all the Arts of Asia, over time, and welcomes contributions about Asia and or by  people of Asian descent. Dusun is a free e-magazine, and therefore cannot pay for contributions and hopes that contributors endure the spirit of Dusun, as a 'giving back'.

Malaysian Murals - Gilding the Lily

The case against public murals in Malaysia.

To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,

To throw a perfume on the violet,

To smooth the ice, or add another hue

Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light

To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish,

Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.  

The Life and Death of King John, 

Act 4, Scene 2, William Shakespeare

Recently there has been a rash of murals in public places, in cities, across Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur has largely limited this paint daubing to the banks of the rivers which converge to form the name of that city. Penang, under a misguided attempt to woo tourists, and appease tourist ministers, has begun a mass titivation and re-painting process, with the inclusion of public statuary and public art (murals). Ipoh too has caught mural fever, and has hastily painted the side of very public buildings to cover whatever innate charm they may have had if left un painted. These public paintings present the general public with a fait accompli, an ’artist's view' of what they think should be grabbing our attention.

While I agree that many painted images, including some murals, are amazingly beautiful to look at, skilfully executed and perhaps done with the best of intentions, there are many good reasons why the art of mural painting had died down, until it's renaissance in the mid twentieth century. The realisation that it was more difficult to upkeep a mural than a portable artwork is one reason why murals declined, but I feel that another reason is the innate beauty of walls and their interaction with their environment, and with nature, as opposed to we public being subjected to the mind, eye and hand of the muralist, however well intentioned. It has also been mentioned that in the early 20th century, and later, murals appeared in Mexico and in places in North America, with the least literacy. 

It could be said that murals are as much as an imposition as billboard advertising, in public spaces. Mural painting is an anti-aesthetic, it is the difference between a book and a film of the same story. A book (usually the product of one person's storytelling) engages your imagination, works with you, whereas a film (the vision of a whole team of people) sets out everything for you, tells rather than engages. That is what I fear murals do. It is the very people who prefer plastic Christmas Trees over real ones, or artificial flowers over ones whose petal drop, or prefer to wander around listening to an iPod instead of the life about them. People, effectively, willingly disengaged from the natural world, and yet imposing their aesthetic upon others.

There is a beauty, an authentic aesthetic to an outside wall often chipped, with broken bricks, plaster starting to decay with black mould or green moss. It may be an end to a house where the next door building has been demolished, revealing where staircases had once stood, rooms were coloured etc. but there is an unplanned, naturally occurring beauty to that.

There is a simple, and yet timeless beauty, in ageing buildings such as Britain's Elizabethan Shakespeare's cottage, The Egyptian Pyramids, Ancient British Stonehenge, Cambodia's Angkor Wat, Jordan’s Petra, Java’s Borobudur etc., and no one is suggesting they be mural painted, tarted up, made smart and acceptable for tourists visiting. No, they are left to their natural beauty for visitors to capture for themselves, the original and authentic ambiance of those places mentioned. Then why must older inner-city buildings be subjected to a marring of their natural beauty, by murals. 

Shakespeare wrote the phrase - to gild the lily, to take something which is naturally beautiful and cover it with a metal made precious by man. The innate beauty of the lily is destroyed, that naturally occurring beauty disappears to be covered by something of less beauty but of more financial value. This is what murals do, they cover an evolving authentic beauty with paint. They take away our imaginations and replace them with someone else's vision, to make reference to something else entirely, to the detriment of the natural beauty of the surface they are painted on.

Many would argue against this, I know, and cite successful mural programmes that reflected the culture of the area (as in the Northern Ireland murals), or attempt to engage tourism, (the Penang and Ipoh murals). But isn't that really just gilding the lily. Instead of finding a way to engage in a dialogue regarding naturally occurring, or evolving, beauty, we are subjected to the artifice of dubious mural beauty thrust into our sight, whether we appreciate it or not.

My thesis, therefore, is for city planners to learn how to appreciate the innate beauty in the buildings we already have, rather than seek to cover that beauty with a dubious and transient aesthetic. To, in fact, unnecessarily gild the lily.