Dear friends and colleagues
It has taken seven years, but I have finally done it: I went to JB.
JB is what we call Johor Baru the town just over the water from Singapore
I have known Zakii (Ahmad Zakii Anwar) who lives there for many years and have always been meaning to make the journey. But, somehow, I never got around to it. But last week I got over to his studio.
I found that for the first time in many years he is painting in oils. Why? ‘I needed a challenge,’ he said. ‘I am doing it the traditional way: fat on thin.’ They are small paintings of figures: he talks of how, to him, they are very much like some still lives he painted earlier. Sexy, but distanced: when he felt they became too sentimental he spattered some paint on them to re-assert the surface. He has spent two months on the pair of them already.
We wander out into his old garden house which he had converted into a room where he can show me the paintings that he has kept for himself. Among them is a painting of a rhino – the sixth he has done. It’s in acrylic of course. He tells me he begins by pouring and dripping paint, building up a surface. It is a very tactile way of working, as is the way he draws with charcoal. (see Tuesday in The Tropics No. 3.)
Garden House
Detail of Rhinoceros painting
We wander back to the main house – the studio is on the top floor – sit on the verandah and talk.
He is a large man, softly spoken and thoughtful. His house is built on the site of his parent’s house, where he grew up. When he was a child that was a wooden house, surrounded by other wooden houses – a kampung or community. Now it is a suburb of cement block houses – and a few tall condos have already gone up. Yet nature, nevertheless, remains exuberant here. The rich greens of trees, shrubs and climbers surround us. Inside and outside are less separated here. He has two fish ponds on the verandah. Cats wander in and out. Like many cats in Asia they have kinked or deformed tails.
He spends half his time in KL (Kuala Lumpur) where he has a larger studio. It is open to the air, so he has had to cage it. When I went there once monkeys were jumping through the trees outside, chucking leaves and branches around in their normal rampaging way. They would do the same to his paintings if they could get in.
I am fascinated by his collection of objects: not just Islamic calligraphies but also wooden carvings from the region, batak and others. In all my travels I have seen no other artist in Indonesia, Malaysia or Singapore who collects them. Yet until recently there were wonderful carvings being made in Nias, Kalimantan (Borneo) Flores, Timor, the Batak region round Lake Toba… Even some contemporary carvings have a vigour to them, but “tribal” art as elsewhere is fading. I guess artists here are uncomfortable about the association with the “primitive”. They are happier with the more “sophisticated” art of wayang – shadow puppets. Even the one artist of Batak origin who I know well keeps no carvings, though he recollects his family had some. When I told him how interested I was in such things he looked askance at me, very surprised.
Zakii also collects kris – and here I am lost. Kris are the ceremonial daggers of the Malay world and perhaps as much collected there as paintings. They are made by those who have spiritual powers, not just craftsmen, and are seen as imbued with mystical power. They chant as they forge. The quality of any particular kris depends on this aura or power. Sadly, I can’t sense it, but I am very intrigued when people talk about it, as Zakii does, with enthusiasm and discernment.
That he hangs his sketches on the wall is also unusual. Drawing is generally undervalued here: collectors don’t like paper; not many artists see it as an important medium. Zakii clearly does: these small drawings have an intimacy and freshness to them.
We go for lunch together and then I head back over the causeway to Singapore. It is a very small thing, maybe three hundred metres, but such a barrier. Relations between Singapore and Malaysia are historically difficult. (Note the big pipes on the left: Singapore has spent decades building reservoirs so they will no longer be dependent on Malaysia for fresh water.) We drive across. Less than a minute and, unless there is a queue at customs you are back in Singapore.
Best wishes and many apologies for being a day late.
Have a good Wednesday!
Tony