Three Compared Artists: China, Bangladesh, Indonesia

    "When I'm gone, make sure my paintings don't die!”

    (Felix Nusshaum)

 

I Ketut Nama

Art has always been a great source of inspiration for me. It may be that, it can be said, I was born with a pen in my hand, not so much the pencil, and always strictly in black ink. I loved drawing and painting since elementary school, and I loved leafing through art books. Then with time I left, abundant drawing, and now delegating my eyes to draw with the camera.

After all, the link between art and photography is historical and the examples of great photographers who have alternated their career with painting or drawing are not rare, I name two of my absolute favorites: of course Cartier-Bresson and Saul Leiter.

Then, as I always say to those who follow my courses, our photographs feed on everything we are passionate about, from the paintings we love, to the music, to the books read, to the foods. Everything enters our images and makes them unique and different from the others, precisely because of the complex cultural background that we carry with us.

For this reason, even now, photographers' books alternate the search for catalogs or books of painters or artists, wherever I go.

Indeed, the local painters help me to understand more deeply cultures other than mine, they are doors that open visual corridors to what can then be my story through images of those places.

In this case, I would like to tell  you about three very different artists, by style and origin: Jiang Guo Fang from China, Sheikh Mohammad Sultan from Bangladesh and I Ketut Nama from Indonesia. The first two are very famous painters in their countries, while the last one is a Bali painter and illustrator.

 

All three have something in common with me: I've never been to China, I've been to Indonesia many times over the course of ten years but I've never been to Bali, and the Bangladesh painted by SM Sultan is the rural one that I didn't see on my last trip to that country, because I spent almost all my time in Dhaka. Therefore, each in their own way, tells something I don't know.

But the reason I am interested in telling you about them, and the profound reason for the charm that their art has on me, is tradition.

Jiang Go Fang

The former is one of the most important modern painters in China. Jiang Guo Fang was born in 1951 in a province of Jiangxi in a peasant family, and then – thanks to his studies – graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts where he taught and began his career as a professional painter.

His fame is linked to over 170 paintings dedicated to the Forbidden City. And it's in fact at the exhibition dedicated to these paintings, in 2005 in Rome, that I came to know him, getting lost in the mysterious charm of his large canvases.

He was the first and the only modern painter to be able to exhibit his paintings in the Forbidden City in 2004. Always fascinated by the mythology around that famous era and that magnificent residence, built in 1420 and consisting of over 9.000 rooms extended for 5 sq. km, which hosted the imperial family before their decline. Jiang writes:

“My love of the traditional culture naturally breads an artistic urge to pursue the oil painting art of the Forbidden City. As a painter, from an aesthetic point of view, the Forbidden City crystallizes one of the finest parts of the excellent culture of the Chinese people. [...] The Forbidden City used to be criticized and condemned whenever it was related in novels, dramas, films and other forms of art. In fine arts, the depiction of Forbidden City would be even regarded as something counteractive. Regardless of all that, my passion for the Forbidden City remains unchanged and the Forbidden City often haunts in my dreams.”

Jiang Guo Fang, “Childishness,” Oil on canvas, 2003

Jiang Guo Fang, “New day in the Hall of Gathering Excellence,” Oil on canvas, 1993

His pictorial sensitivity is very inspired by the Flemish painters which he studied in the Academy, Van Eyck and Vermeer above all.  The lights and the warm colors, almost always on red and golden shades, the chiaroscuro, the shadows, make his images like dreams, imbued with melancholy. The faces of his subjects, even if noble women, princesses, children of princes, always seem unhappy, enclosed within the splendid walls of the buildings, in luxury and gold and with magnificent fabrics, but never free.

S. M. Sultan

S. M. Sultan was born in 1924, in the village of Masumdia, in a division of Jessore in Bangladesh. As an only child, he had to leave school early to help his family, working with his bricklayer father. This marks his childhood, then reversing the work of his father who from a two-dimensional drawing transformed the project into a three-dimensional reality, while he will make the reality two-dimensional with his painting.

It's very poetic what Ahmed Safa wrote about Sultan:

“There are some that are born, but the circumstances of their birth cannot hold them. All of them cannot be called rare-born either. There are some children born with a peculiar nature in this world. Their natural urge is to cut off the bindings of their birth. Not all of them manage to transcend into another life-cycle in their life-time. In crores, one may find only a few who attain at birth transmigration into a higher life-cycle. The god of life on his own comes forward to light that wonderful flame of transcendence in the lamp of the new-born life.”

In short, a predestined capable with his art of transcending the limits of an ever-recurring life for those born in those places.

 

A peculiarity that can be seen in all the rural scenes of his paintings are the traditional village houses, made of bamboo, wood and canes, despite the fact that he and his father raised brick houses. He died in 1994 at 71 years of age, after a life outside the rules, devoted to art in all its forms, including singing and music.

S. M. Sultan, “Hair dressing,” Oil on canvas, 1987

S. M. Sultan, “Cutting fish-2,” Oil on canvas, 1989

He was the singer of rural Bangladesh, of the beauty of its nature; he loved to surround himself with animals, children and observe the Chitra River—painted many times—in front of his home.

Women are voluptuous and strong; men have powerful bodies that refer to Michelangelo's anatomy. He represented all the daily activities of the villages, immortalizing that dream world in which he had grown up. He hated the city and suffered when he had to come to Dhaka for his exhibitions. His world was his village in Narail, where he took his last breath.

I Ketut Nama

 

The Indonesian artist's book has a different story. In reality it's an illustrated book for children that I bought many years ago at the Children's Book Fair in Bologna, where I worked for the Indonesia pavilion.

The book is titled Ni Terong Kuning (The Yellow Eggplant). It is a Balinese folklore told by the writer Putut Oka Sukanta and illustrated by I Ketut Nama. The story, which originates from the Buleleng Regency in Bali, tells about a family whose father was a famous gambler in his village, and renowned for his fighting cocks. 

One day he had to leave for a long journey, leaving his wife pregnant, and warning her that if the new born is a female she would have had to kill her and feed her to his roosters. But the mother refused, hiding her daughter at her mother's house who raised her. When the father came back and found out the truth, he forced his daughter to follow him to a distant place to kill her, but the angels saved her. Instead of ending her life, the father cut a banana branch and fed it to his roosters, convinced it was his daughter, thus causing all his precious roosters to die. This made the father fall into total discouragement and repentance. The pitying daughter asked the angels to be able to return to cheer their father, and so it was. The family reunited happily, the father died of too much suffering and the daughter was married by the king of the village because she had been the only one able to see Heaven and the angels.

I Ketut Nama is a traditional Balinese painter born in Ubud in 1949, and has also exhibited his paintings in Europe.

I Ketut Nama

Ubud has always been the nerve center of Balinese Art: that is, the Javanese Hindu Art that originated in the Kingdom of Majapahit, up to Bali in 1300, with references to the epic of Ramayana and Mahabharata, with many folklore stories. Ida Bagus Made Togog (1913-1989) was the most famous painter from Batuan, a village in Bali, from which, together with Ubud, the classic Balinese artistic style originated. Among the many themes depicted, that of the fight between the roosters is a classic of Balinese iconography, see also the paintings of I Ketut Ginarsa.

Bali is certainly the most famous island among the 17,000 islands of Indonesia, even if it is the most atypical, culturally and religiously distant from Java. But, without a shadow of a doubt, it is that – precisely because of its strong Hindu connotation – that has kept alive the ancient epic tradition of Ramayana and Mahabharata which informs all Indonesian art and culture, as well as for Malaysia, the Thailand to India from which it originated.

And secondly, Bali is the island that must face more decisively than all the other areas of Indonesia, the contamination that comes from the West, having always been the island of mass tourism and exploration by western writers, painters, anthropologists since the last century.

To conclude, these three artists, as you have seen, are very different from each other in style and culture, and mine was simply a suggestion. A tip for your eyes, because it gives me great pleasure to look at their works. But there is something that goes beyond mere artistic interest, something that makes them part of a single discourse and unites them. And that is precisely the love for tradition, as I said before. Their attempt to immortalize, throuhg their work, a mythical, affective and loved past, which has already disappeared or is threatened, overwhelmed by modernity, by tourism or by globalization that want to make all of us alike and without history.

The example of S. M. Sultan is paradigmatic and poetic: to lay bricks with his father and then to knock them down with his paintings, to preserve the past that was a love for nature and tradition that live in the hearts of his own people. As if to break that life-cycle, as Ahmed Safa wrote.

That seems to be the common genetic trace of many countries in Asia: to have one's destiny already written, in the unstoppable path towards modernity.  

And oblivion...

That art can save us.

 

“Jiang Guo Fang - The painter of the Forbidden City” (Gangemi Editore, 2005)

“S. M. Sultan” by Sadeq Khan (Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, 2003)

“Ni Terong Kuning - The Yellow Eggplant” by Putu Oka Sukanta \ I Ketut Nama (Grasindo, 2010)

Italian version