작품 상세

The period 1988-1989 for Datuk Ibrahim Hussein was one flushed with things Japanese: The Japan Foundation Cultural Award and the double solo exhibitions at Takashimaya in Tokyo and Osaka. This work awash with red-orangey hues of sunset was done after this Japan escapade. Even before his visits to Japan, Ib, as the artist is more popularly known, has a vintage 1969 work, Kabuki (in the Universiti Sains Malaysia collection) and Kimono (1996). Though intrinsically Japanese, the approach and treatment are dissimilar. Presumably static, the garden in this work brims with a life of its own, with an array of miniscule lines in parallel pursuit or criss-crossing and demarcated by colour bars. If the lines coagulate into a form, the image is undiscernible. It is ostensibly landscapist, with different lifeforms perhaps: there are no visible figures here, or is there? Ib had spoken about the emotional impetus behind his works, and professed to a predilection for movement, which translates as life, whether in time or in space. Datuk Ibrahim Hussein is world-class based on three major accolades. 1) He was given the global Crystal Award by the World Economic Forum in 1997; 2) He was the first Malaysian to have taken part in the Venice Biennale under the Smithsonian Institute Workshop programme in 1970; 3) He was chosen together with Andy Warhol and Salvador Dali in a best-of-the-world tripartite exhibition in Kuwait in 1977. Other international awards include the Order of Andres Bello of Venezuela (1993), the Order of Bernardo Higgins (Chile's highest honour to a foreigner, 1996), the Japan Foundation Cultural Award (1988), and the XVIII Prix International D'Art Contemporain de Monte Carlo (1984). On the local front, he was accorded a Retrospective by the National Art Gallery in 1986, awarded the Anugerah Tokoh Melayu Terbilang (2007) and had been conferred the Datuk title three times. He organised the first, and most successful, Langkawi International Festival of Arts in 2000, after setting up his museum and foundation (2000) in Langkawi. With the help of his wife, Sim, he organised the Club Mediterranee Asian Arts Festival in Cherating (Pahang) in 1988 and Bali (Indonesia) in 1987. Ib had his art tutelage at the Byam Shaw School of Drawing and Painting and the Royal Academy in London (1963-1966). He also received a double scholarship of Fulbright and John D. Rockefeller II Fund that saw him in the United States, with two solos in New York to boot.