The First Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Sulaiman Esa was born in Johor Baharu, Malaysia in 1941. His formal art training took place in England, France and the United States- he completed a Diploma of Art and Design at Hornsey College of Art in London, a Post-Graduate Diploma in Printmaking at Atelier 17, Paris (studying under S. W. Hayter), and a Master of Fine Arts at the Maryland Institute, Baltimore, in the United States. Since 1967, Sulaiman Esa has exhibited in major national art shows, including 'Salon Malaysia', 1969, 1979 and 1992; 'Malaysian Landscape', 1972; 'Man and His World', 1973; and 'Painting & Graphic Art Malaysia', 1977, all at the National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur. Though Sulaiman Esa held his first solo show, 'Towards Tauhid', in 1984, he had already created a niche in the history of modern Malaysian art in 1974 when, together MALAYSIA SULAIMAN ESA Garden of mystery I 1992 Mixed media 185x180cm Collection : The artist with another prominent Malaysian artist, Redza Piyadasa, he mounted 'Towards a Mystical Reality', an exhibition of conceptua., art accompanied by an artists manifesto. Sulaiman Esa's work has been widely shown internationally, including ASEAN exhibitions in Singapore (1972) and Jakarta (1980); an ASEAN exhibition touring Malay- sia, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines, 1974; 'Contemporary Malaysian Art 1965-78', Commonwealth Institute, London, England, 1978; 'Contemporary Asian Art Show ', Fukuoka, Japan, 1980; 'Works on Paper', touring the United States and Japan, 1981; 'Titian 1', National Museum Art Gallery, Singapore, 1983; and 'Art Work on Paper', Manila, the Philippines, 1983. Sulaiman Esa is currently a senior art lecturer at the lnstitut Teknologi MARA at Shah Alam, Malaysia. 24 Sulaiman Esa's works revolve around a profound belief in Islam as a way of life and also as a way of art. Though this direction has become more pronounced in recent years, there has always been an underlying philo- sophical if not spiritual leaning in his artistic endeavours, whether this be Islam, Taoism, Zen or Existentialism. Of his 'Towards a Mystical Reality ' exhibition with Redza Piyadasa in 1974, an astute commentator on modern Malaysian art, the late Ismail Zain, remarked that 'the minimality and simplicity of their art is almost Zen in spirit'. A similar quality can be seen in his Islam-oriented works such as the 'Garden of mystery' series. The ego-effacing, conceptual works of 'Towards a Mystical Reality' tended to be dismissive of the primacy of physical reality, as do his more recent craft-rooted Islamic works. His present works speak of God in Islam, and for him, the function of art is to heighten the perception and experience of the reality of God. To this end, the crafted nature of the handmade paper of his works exhibits formal similarities with the enigmatic forms and sense of mystery and mysticism inherent in pre-modern paraphernalia such as battle shields and ritual fetishes. His works are not so much beautiful objects as they are objectified metaphors of the beauty of Godliness as presented through his sensitive understanding of colour and the cosmology of geometry. What this artist said in 1972 about his non- figurative works on canvas still seems pertinent to his Islamic works of today: You do not look at my paintings but into and through them. In their richly textured surfaces, one sees the entity of matter, concentrating on the sum of energy of both pigment and material. In the transparent work, as a result of the dematerialisation of coloured surfaces, one is exercising a simultaneous reading of matter/antimatter, volume/void, figure/ground. Zainol Abidin Bin Ahmad Shariff