(excerpts)

on Tajuddin Ismail:

Tajuddin Ismail’s paintings resemble those of de Kooning, whose works, he admits, play a part in determining the way in which he applies his colours on his canvas. The similarity ends there. For to dwell upon any commonalities is to ignore the sheer amount of thinking he does prior to finishing a painting. Three things inform his mind before embarking upon a new work: ideas, emotions, and memories that link themselves to a set of colours and colour combinations. The length of time is dependent upon how an idea is linked to a colour, what emotions are aroused, and which strands of memory are knotted. The choice of colours is instinctive, based upon how he feels at a given time on a given day. Modifications follow at a later stage when he has arranged the basic design in the initial composition.

...A successful work is one in which Tajuddin strikes a balance between spontaneity and solicitude. He does this by having his brush attack with zest, unleashing his emotion, be it rage, anger, hate, wrath; or his brush sweeps soberly to express the feelings of calm, peace, serenity and love. Tajuddin is mainly concerned with how the painting will ultimately look when finished. That look of spontaneity is central to his aesthetics in which content is synonymous with form. Unless the two merge, the raison d’etre for painting is as good as lost. A seemingly natural, unstudied, off-hand quality belies the premeditated studies not readily accessible to the general viewer, who can now see the preliminaries to ‘Blackspace’. ‘Hydra’(1994) and ‘Natura’(1994), though complete works in themselves, display the unprompted and voluntary brushstrokes of watery black, with dashes of reds and yellows. These features eventually lead to the kind of mass which dominates ‘Blackspace’ in which the accidental paint drips enhance the feeling of restlessness.

Similar features can be seen in the ‘Grey Windrift’(1994). The piece is composed of full and half tones, rough and fine lines, drawings of unspecified objects, segmented sections, blank areas, activating a feeling of visual poetry which, on one level, challenges the viewer and, on another, soothes his nerves. Such ambiguity recalls the impact of reading the lines from the poem ‘Praise of Ysolt’ by Ezra Pound: "White words of snow flakes but they are cold/Moss words, lip words, word of slow streams." The references to white, snow flakes, cold, moss, lip, stream help the stanza to reveal itself but the meaning is unclear, a fact we forego because we see the lucid images in ways that are quiet and unthreatening. There is an internal coherence in the arrangement of the words not unlike the one present in the ‘Grey Windrift’ in which the divisions of space may seem arbitrary but help to pull the work together in a totality which is quite apart from the overall meaning of the painting.

On Eng Hwee Chu:

Memory, 1994
Eng Hwee Chu

The list of how women have suffered at the hands of man is long: woman is seldom the mistress of her own destiny, having throughout history been abused, injured, reproached, and enslaved. Today, people of different religious, economic, political, and ecumenical persuasions all agree that something has to be done to alter the situation. In re-stating the problem, Eng Hwee Chu provides no answers. Conceptualizing it in a series of seemingly unrelated vignettes, she registers her rage using symbols arranged around the central figure of her women in such works as ‘Black Moon 12’(1991), ‘Black Moon 13’(1992), ‘Black Moon 14’(1994), ‘Cry Freedom’(1994).

Cry Freedom, 1994
Eng Hwee Chu

In these works, the woman serves as an opener to the story of her suffering. In ‘Black Moon 12’ she is passion personified, depicted diagonally across the canvas, carried in the air by a black shadow, the phantom of the evil of her persona. They fly over a wall that has a circular window at the bottom of which is a hobby horse. Above the wall are lotus flowers whose designs are repeated on a piece of cloth hanging down from the top to the bottom of the canvas. In the distance the horse is seen galloping away. The story ends with a highly charged sexual symbol: a man emerges from the mouth of a container, smiling, satisfied.

In ‘Black Moon 13’ the same figure now rides the hobby horse which yowls at the black figure flying from the opposite direction. Beneath the hobby horse is a chest set on top of a castellated circular tower. There is a man in a suit, near whose feet is a plate in which there are the bones of a leftover fish. Eng Hwee Chu condemns the woman who is easily lured by the illusion of an easy life, wealth, and power. In ‘Black Moon 14’ the woman’s skin has turned white except for her loincloth which is red. She covers her mouth and her eyes partially with one hand, and the other shuts her ear in agony. She is consoled by a Ninja-like figure in purdah who sits on a mat near a rehal or Quranic stand, a reference to the healing powers of religion. In the back is a man sitting on a low table surrounded by a row of kerosene lamps. He points three fingers straight ahead, toward a silhouette of a thin, lifeless wayang character. In ‘Cry Freedom’ she and her black shadow are tied while a white male raises his fists, unable to do much to free them. A white pigeon flies away, a sign of unfulfilled desire. In the back there are other people whose fate is sealed; the freedom they enjoy is a chimera projected by a mind sickened with helplessness and despair. The moon does not appear in these pictures. It is felt as a presence pervading these illogical arrangements of people and things that are confined to a space whose boundaries are unmarked. In such a nightmarish mindscape, revenge is but a fleeting thought. Only the voice of conscience reverberates.