The duo will show work alongside the late Cultural Medallion recipient Sarkasi Said.
SINGAPORE – Seen from afar, you might mistake Singaporean artist Sunar Sugiyou’s Wiseman for an arcane sinograph dashed off in Chinese ink.
“The masters already perfected the strokes 5,000 years ago, why should I do the same?” asks Sunar, who says that working in the medium as a non-Chinese and self-taught Chinese ink artist has given him latitude to break from tradition. Sunar, who is of Javanese heritage, started his Chinese ink journey by painting roosters – which woke him up for dawn prayers at the kampung he grew up in. Instead of picking up the tradition by learning to execute various plants and flowers, he simply picked up books by the Chinese masters and imitated them.
Sujak, who worked alongside Sarkasi when they ran an art studio within the handicraft shop at Wisma Indonesia in the late 1970s till 1983, questions if batik artists should be satisfied in continuing to work in traditional ways. “Indonesian housewives can do very fine batik work – can you challenge them?”
Batik artist Sujak Rahman, 75, with his artwork Time Isn’t The Matter at his studio at Goodman Arts Centre. ST PHOTO: LIM YAOHUI
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Artists reinvent batik and Chinese ink traditionsSeen from afar, you might mistake Singaporean artist Sunar Sugiyou’s Wiseman (2023) for an arcane sinograph dashed off in Chinese ink. Upon closer inspection, the illusion dissolves. The black brush strokes are in fact a mix of Chinese ink, acrylic and latex – set...
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