Profile 3


EAST AND IN THE WEST SIDE BY SIDE, SOMETIMES PARALLEL, SOMETIMES CRISSCROSSING


‘technique is everything’. As an artist, one needs to be equipped and basically one has to learn it all until one feels one could draw and paint almost anything … It goes without saying that over the years, as you go along, you try to develop your own techniques or styles. By the end of 1969, I was given two grants to learn the various print-making techniques from the best teachers at Atelier Lacourière-Frélaut in Paris and at Pratt Graphic Centre in New York. Once I was back home in 1971, I tried setting up the first complete printmaking studio in Kuala Lumpur. Unfortunately, it did not happen, and as of today, I was not able to work on printmaking as much as I would have liked.


AAN: While in Berlin, you had the opportunity to get better acquainted with famous Western authors like Grass, Hesse, Rilke, Rimbaud. What impact did they have on you? Was one author more influential? LM: Actually, the Blechtrommel (the Tin Drum) by Günther Grass was the first German novel I read in Berlin in 1962. I need to emphasise that at the time, Grass had inspired many of us young artists – not only for his satiric new magic realism in literature, but also for his talents for creating litho drawings and table sculptures. As for Rimbaud and Baudelaire, they definitely had tremendous impact on my poetry. I learned Dark Images and Dark Beauty from them. As for Rilke, it


looking for more experimental writings. I found the Latin- American writers more vibrant, daring, and adventurous; I thought they were less psychic and more concerned about their struggles against the mystical and complex histories of their countries. Te poets you mentioned – Neruda, Paz, Marquez and Borges, Vargas Llosa and Fuentes – were all vigorously writing about many things in all kinds of creative forms, thus freeing themselves from hundred years of colonial literary structures. At the time, these were the most exciting readings. In the beginning of the readings, all I wanted from them was a ‘splash of experiment’, but in the end, Octavio Paz and his ‘Realists cum Magician friends’ had given me an ‘ocean of imagination’ instead. What an undertaking!


Neo Pago (1967), acrylic on canvas, 153 x 122 cm, private collection


took some time for me to go deeper into his poems, especially his lucid transcend poems. So I read Georg Trakl’s poetry instead, and much later, I read a lot of Hesse’s astral novels during my travelling and vagabond days in the early 1970s. All these authors were equally important to me.


AAN: While abroad, you also read a number of famous Latin- American poets: Neruda, Octavio Paz, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, to name just a few. What did you get from these poets that you could not find in your readings of famous European authors? LM: In the early 1970s, I was


AAN: What convinced you that something different could be done and could exist besides Western painting and Western movements? LM: Just like other arts – traditional and modern – I think visual arts exist in the East and in the West side by side, sometimes in parallel and sometimes crisscrossing. We are forever taking and giving from and to each other. Directly or indirectly, lots of artists from the East and from other parts of the world are contributing to Western contemporary arts. Tere is always something new or different and that is precisely what makes the world of art more exciting.


AAN: You were quoted as saying ‘painting is the act of silence’. Can you elaborate? LM: It was just a remark I made in relation to the ‘act of reading poetry loudly, or of declamation’.


AAN: How did you come to coin the term Pago Pago, which is the title of your touring retrospective? LM: I first coined the term from the word ‘pagoda’, while I was sketching and painting lots of shapes of pagodas in Bangkok in 1964. Later, I also realised that in my ancestral village in Sumatra, the word ‘pago’ when repeated twice, sounded like the words ‘pagar pagar’, the shamanic Malay word for four-cornered roofs, or fences.


AAN: Did your stay in Berlin in the 1960s and your visits to the ethnic museum in Dahlem to see the relics of pagodas trigger a new direction, or a new approach, in your work? LM: My Berlin years are really precious and most meaningful to me. After all, it is in this city that all my curiosity and creativity in art and in life started. All the knowledge I gained – not only in visual art but all arts – be it dance, music, architecture, theatre, literature, nature, philosophy, etc, all began in Berlin. Looking back now, I consider myself lucky to have lived and witnessed how the arts in this vibrant, yet isolated city, grew with confidence. I arrived in Berlin in 1960, about 10 months before the wall was erected.


Continued on page 4 I THINK VISUAL ARTS EXIST IN THE


London Regent’s Park 4–7 October 2018


Media partners


FL18 AAN HP.indd 1


14/08/2018 15:16 SEPTEMBER 2018 ASIAN ART


Drawing by Ronan Bouroullec.


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