1993 APT1 Conference : Identity, tradition and change

sort of Chinese white base. So I am more or less talking about what happened in art, I am not going to talk about deeper deeper issues. These are other examples of how abstract expressionism got sort of absorbed within the local context. This is another Chinese painter in which he uses the idea of Chinese screens. Another painter, abstract expressionism. It is very tightly packed kind of space in which one finds in Balenese painting or even in South East Asian textiles and a kind of what some people call a nervous wiry energy comes out. When one notices something happening as soon as these forms come in. This is another work from the 1960s, abstract expressionism and primitive art emerging. But I think one of the most important things that happened was this exhibition for the first time in 1970 for the other artist here, Sulaiman Elsa, you may want to talk to him, and myself, we were trained at the ...... College of Art and like most of the other Colleges at that time, there was a great emphasis on liberal studies. We were exposed to philosophy, sociology. We were exposed to this sort of shifting role views and all that, so when we came back we were questioned for the first time a mode of perception which was basically Westerncentric based on say the logical assumption from the Renaissance, Aristotle perceptive logic, moving on to Cezanne and then Cubism - a kind of physicality of things, a very objective look at the universe but which was completely different from the European point of view. We published this manifesto which was about 20 pages in which we asked questions about why we should be Eurocentric like European artists, why should we go back to ...... and we asked ourselves why should we look at reality in terms of how Cezanne looked or Picasso looked at it. Why can't we look at it in the way oriental cultures look at reality so motions of space and time were also very questioned here. Things like common found hair which for us in the Muslim world for example if you cut your finger nails you are supposed to let technically buried because everything is to go back to the earth. So things like sacrificial hair takes on a different connotation but this exhibition was very strange, largely forgotten at that time but it raised the first questions. But in 1969 the Olympic racial riots and the Chinese and the Indians and Malays killed each other, the Government was in a quandary it called together its sort of intellectuals put them for one week at the National Culture Congress of 1971 and said come up with a solution. The solution was basically eventually that