1993 APT1 Conference : Identity, tradition and change

cultures after a century. If one looks at this building I think to a large extent if you are talking about where we are going. This building has evolved at a time when there was no national cultural policy when there was no selfconsciousness about ethnic differences and I wanted to show this past and then we will go on from here. So basically when one looks at Malaysia now you will find that it is very ..... and syncretic, and its a kind of movement which shows solutions addressed and posted by different groups of people. Lets go on. This modern art movement started very late after the Second World War. You will find the Chinese played a very important role. Most of the Chinese artists who were involved in this movement came from China to escape communism so the solutions here are very very much a kind of synchronisation in which the European .......... synthesised suggest to result a very interesting sort of solutions. I wont describe the pictures they speak for themselves but one sees a kind of Chinese sensibilities operating here. Another one picture here in which you will find the Chinese element and modernism fusing together. This was in the 40s/50s, late 40s/50s - another picture of an everyday gen...... of the .... seller and his stalls all this grows but in the Chinese sort of format. The Malay element has not emerged at this stage. I think the most important thing was from the 50s until the 60s, mid 50s, artists after independence went over to Europe. It was perhaps a sort of British dedication to our intellectual and moral development that after having ruled us for nearly 200 years, taken our tin, rubber, everything else, they never really bothered about our mental revolution. The first university in Malaysia was started in 1949 and the first arts school, official arts school was started in 1967, the British came in and took us over in 1789 so. This period when we became independent, was the first time we started our art school and then we decided to send our artists overseas. The first group that came back inevitably like John Olsson and everybody e l s e ...................... American influence was very very high...................................... ......................... came in but I would like to draw attention to the way in which a form comes in and gets readapted. This is an abstract specialist painting employing Islamic calligraphic sensibilities and also the