This month, we feature artwork from Galeri Tunku Fauziah, USM.
By Dr Sarena Abdullah
Latiff Mohidin, Pago-Pago, 1965, Oil Paint, 60cm x 80cm. Image courtesy of USM.
Abdul Latiff Mohidin (born 1941), known as Latiff Mohidin, is not only known through his abstract and expressionist artworks but also through his poems. Born in Lenggeng, Negeri Sembilan, Latiff received his formal primary education at Kota Raja Malay School in Singapore and later attained a scholarship to study art at the Academy of Arts in Berlin from 1960 to 1964. This was followed by etching studies in Paris.
This artwork entitled Pago-Pago belongs to his Pago-Pago series, a large body of work produced between 1964 and 1969. T.K. Sabapathy in Pago-Pago to Gelombang: 40 Years of Latiff Mohidin (1994) suggested several possibilities for the title—perhaps coined from the amalgam of pagoda and the slang pagar (pronounced ‘pago’), not referring to the ‘fence’ but to the wooden beam across old Malay houses.
Traces of Latiff’s reflections that led to this series can be seen from when he was still an art student in Germany; there were already abstract forms of pagodas, stupas, and lingams of the Southeast Asia region in a few his early artistic exercises. Nevertheless, it was only after his return to Malaysia and his subsequent travels around Southeast Asia that a consistent amalgamation of these forms were seen through his expressive language of gestures, forms, colours, and strokes, creating bamboo shoot-like pagodas and biomorphic forms that are intertwined and composed from these various interlocking motifs. In Line: From Point to Point (1993), his drawings, etchings, linocuts, and countless detailed studies of the simple forms of snail shells, leaves, flowers, bamboo shoots, butterfly cocoons, and sea-shells attest to the development of this series.
It is clear that Latiff draws his influences from the most ordinary forms around him, particularly the natural, organic, and architectural forms local to the Southeast Asian region. In 2018, Latiff Mohidin’s Pago Pago exhibition was featured at Pompidou Centre in Paris— becoming the first Malaysian, and even Southeast Asian, artist to have exhibited at the centre.
Sarena Abdullah, Ph.D is an art historian at the School of the Arts, Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM). She is the author of Malaysian Art since the 1990s: Postmodern Situation (2018) and co-editor of a publication of Southeast Asian Art entitled Ambitious Alignments: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art 1945-1990 (2018). She has written extensively about Malaysian art on various academic journals and platforms.