This month, we feature artwork from the collection of Khai and Annie Lee.
By Dr Sarena Abdullah
Koay Soo Kau 郭斯高, Wake Up My Dear, 1968, Batik, 90 x 107 cm.
Image courtesy of Khai and Annie Lee
The Galeri Seni Mutiara director Koay Soo Kau is an artist at heart. Although he is mostly known for his support and promotion of the art scene in Penang, he is a staunch artist who has painted since he was in his early twenties in the late 1960s.
Koay Soo Kau’s batik work seen here, entitled “Wake Up My Dear” (1968), is the main signature of his early artistic career. It is one of his earliest works, produced in the same year that he participated in the Penang Art Gallery exhibition. Like Chuah Thean Teng, Koay too explored the traditional batik medium as a new form of fine art.
True to the nature of the medium, the unique lines and crackling technique of batik fills up the whole composition. The two main figures, male and female, are centred on the cloth, situated in front of a kampong house that is presumably on stilts. The painting captures the intimate moment of a wife waking up her husband who was sleeping against the tree trunk behind him. The flattened composition of the man’s sarong reflects how the artist chose the encapsulation of lines, forming various square shapes on the sarong as the focal point of the work. The sarong and feet are purposely exaggerated in contrast to the biomorphic figurative approach of the couple’s bodies and the flamboyant leaves on the left.
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.