작품 상세

By all accounts, it’s a happy painting, though everything seems poised on the tip of an inverted triangle. After all, an inverted triangle or the tumpal motif symbolism has also come to mean ‘LOVE’. It’s also a perverse mechanism of power structure. An egg-shaped oval is skewered to the inverted triangle, which then becomes a celebratory tulip flute glass and there is an auspicious golden yolk in the ‘egg’. The surrounding strokes are all in an upward trajectory and hey presto, it’s a pyrotechnics of everything nice, a rainbow confetti of butterfly and star shapes. It’s like the pohon hayat, the tree of life: a blessing of the Lailatul Qadr (Night of Power). This is the real mccoy, not the customary ‘bunga telur’ pressed on the hands of every Malay wedding guest. Let’s take a snapshot look at Datuk Syed Ahmad Jamal. Education: Birmingham School of Architecture (did not complete); Chelsea School of Art, the Institute of Education, London University; Malay Teacher’s Training College in Kirkby; the School of the Art Institute Chicago (1963-1964) and University of Hawaii, Honolulu. Major exhibitions: Retrospective at the National Art Gallery (NAG) in 1975; Syed Ahmad Jamal: Artist exhibition in 2009; Historical Overview at the Nanyang Gallery of Art in 1994-1995. Awards: National Art Laureate (1995); Panglima Jasa Negara (which carries the title ‘Datuk’, 1996); Country awards from India (1962), the United States (1963-1964), France (1970), and Australia (1984). Posts: Director – Asian Cultural Centre in Universiti Malaya, and the National Art Gallery Malaysia. Principal – Specialist Teachers Training Institute in Kuala Lumpur. Monumental sculptures: Laman Asean in the Lake Gardens, Kuala Lumpur, and the other, Lunar Peaks (torn down by Kuala Lumpur City Hall). Books: Rupa Dan Jiwa (1992), which was translated into English, and the autobiographical Kunang-Kunang (1999).