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Lot Essay
One of Malaysian art's most celebrated visual artist and poet, Abdul Latiff Mohidin's oeuvre stretching from the 1960s to 1998 represents a lifetime effort to convey the essential quality of the Southeast Asian region's art and culture. Trained in art in Germany at the Hochschule fur Bildende Kunste, Atelier La Courriere in France and the Pratt Graphic Centre in America, his works bear a distinctively cosmopolitan outlook in terms of the successful development of a modern abstract visual language and a sustained exploration of world art and literature.
Latiff Mohidin's landmark Pago Pago series which evoked primitive tribal essences and energies won him his first wave of critical acclaim and installed him as one of Malaysia and Southeast Asia's most important modern artist. His subsequent Gelombang and Rimba series are also definitive bodies of work; lesser known is his exploration of world literature. In 2007, Latiff Mohidin released a Bahasa Melayu translation of the Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching but his engagement with the text had already begun much earlier.
Tao Landscape (Homage to Lao Tzu) (Post Rimba series) (Lot 155) is one of the artist's comparatively rarer work that fuses disciplines and brings the world of words to art. In the development of his abstract tendencies from the Gelombang series, Latiff Mohidin has continually chosen to amplify selected visual elements over others such that the thrush of each body of work moves ahead of the previous along the same trajectory line.
In the present lot, the force of movement is distinctly seen, with the entire pictorial surface kinetically activated into a swirling field. In contrast to his works in the preceding Rimba series, Latiff Mohidin was certainly working with even more complex brushwork and lines here. The assertiveness of the flat line, with its precision and clarity seen before the Rimba series, has been replaced by a preference for the grander sweep of the brush and a freer, more expressive compositional scheme. The chromatic arrangement in the present lot develops from the Rimba series, where the intricacy and dynamism of the primeval forest becomes even more vigourous as it morphs to represent the rhythm, paradoxes, analogies and loose intepretative framework of Lao Tzu's classic literary work, the Tao Te Ching. If the way of the Tao is nameless, beyond distinction, and transcends language, then Latiff Mohidin's Tao Landscape (Homage to Lao Tzu) has certainly captured that very essence.
Latiff Mohidin's landmark Pago Pago series which evoked primitive tribal essences and energies won him his first wave of critical acclaim and installed him as one of Malaysia and Southeast Asia's most important modern artist. His subsequent Gelombang and Rimba series are also definitive bodies of work; lesser known is his exploration of world literature. In 2007, Latiff Mohidin released a Bahasa Melayu translation of the Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching but his engagement with the text had already begun much earlier.
Tao Landscape (Homage to Lao Tzu) (Post Rimba series) (Lot 155) is one of the artist's comparatively rarer work that fuses disciplines and brings the world of words to art. In the development of his abstract tendencies from the Gelombang series, Latiff Mohidin has continually chosen to amplify selected visual elements over others such that the thrush of each body of work moves ahead of the previous along the same trajectory line.
In the present lot, the force of movement is distinctly seen, with the entire pictorial surface kinetically activated into a swirling field. In contrast to his works in the preceding Rimba series, Latiff Mohidin was certainly working with even more complex brushwork and lines here. The assertiveness of the flat line, with its precision and clarity seen before the Rimba series, has been replaced by a preference for the grander sweep of the brush and a freer, more expressive compositional scheme. The chromatic arrangement in the present lot develops from the Rimba series, where the intricacy and dynamism of the primeval forest becomes even more vigourous as it morphs to represent the rhythm, paradoxes, analogies and loose intepretative framework of Lao Tzu's classic literary work, the Tao Te Ching. If the way of the Tao is nameless, beyond distinction, and transcends language, then Latiff Mohidin's Tao Landscape (Homage to Lao Tzu) has certainly captured that very essence.