TO bask in the lovely complexities of natural opulence, to grip that paintbrush and paint nature in congruence of light and shadow which melt into each other must be one of the high points of any artist’s existence.
Jai Abu Hassan has done just that, his latest solo show Siang & Malam (Day and Night) is a flurry of wild energy, the unbridled spirits of the “torrents”.
The artist postulates: “This new body of work challenges the conventional notions of looking at picturesque landscapes by subtly incorporating symbolic subject matters as a device to divert generalised perceptions of external beauty. Siang & Malam aims to project the transient landscapes in my mind, altered by metaphorical elements to add new meaning. At times it feels truly necessary to detach myself for a moment from the heavy burden of socio-realism and the mass of political cliches by which we are continuously deluded.”
Jai has held many shows over the years, and all are unforgettable in their own ways. The one which still comes to mind every time his name comes up (which is fairly often) is his 2014 Dato Rock. The show was in a printing warehouse and the audience arrived garbed in outfits befitting a rock concert — leather, pleather, velvet, chains and more leather. Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, Freddy Mercury, Jimi Hendrix, Alice Cooper and John Lennon glower broodingly at you, too inebriated to do anything else.
There have been other exhibitions after that such as 2015 Painting Industry, Equator Art Projects at Singapore’s Gillman Barracks and Picturing Painting at the UiTM-friendly gallery Segaris Art Centre. Now we have the monochromic and the shrilly-chatoyant Siang & Malam, part homage to the heroes of his youth, Abdullah Ariff, Yeoh Jin Leng, Patrick Ng, Yong Mun Seng and Redza Piyadasa.
On the east side of the gallery are his darker paintings, scenes taking place from dusk until dawn. On the west side story, are landscapes set ablaze in hues so vivid they burn the irises.
“The day is a journey, and the night becomes the time for stories told in the brightest side of the moon. Imagination roams the realm of the two landscapes with crisis and interpretation. In an environment with intense episodes of sociopolitical drama, I choose to return to the premise of romanticism. The landscape as metaphor is broadly used here, and as a subject matter, inspired in part by periodical journeys up north, where I grew up.
“And the stimulus for day and night comes from those in-betweens, the transience from light to dark,” Jai shares.
BOLD WANDERER
It is true that the image put before you need not necessarily exist. It is how the artist envisions a particular landscape to be, what it looks like inside his head. We go along this trip, in the anticipations to learn something new, and old, about ourselves. The landscapes of Siang as seen in Aku Terbakar, The Burning Love and Bahang Pisang symbolise sanguinity and a rekindling, azure skies bleeding into cerulean, plant life in full blossom and fire as that emblem of hope. Jai is the bold wanderer among these romantic isolations, giving us delightful moods of his hidden feelings.
In Malam, Jai once again wanders Byronic-like, only this time around, the elegies are muted, his tenors wounded. His skies growl, his seas rage in a maelstrom of ash-tinged abysses, deep and ghostly hollows, as seen in The Island Of Shame, Diego Garcia, Merdeka (Misteri Orang-Orang Telus) and Injured Mountains (Bukit Putus). You can hear the unsettling murmurs of the wind, those final whispers in the dark before fire and smoke consumes it all.
As he went from painting to painting, remarking on each one carefully, the artist says: “Am trying to ‘escape’ from bitumen for this series. He pauses, frowns, and then exclaims: “Oh look, there it is in this painting!”
From the deeply melancholic The Wild Swans at Coole by Irish poet William Butler Yeats, written in 1917 and published in the June issue of the Little River in the same year — the poet in the unbearable search for beauty which lasts in a world finite and ephemeral: —
The trees in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty-swans
The nineteenth autumn has come upon me,
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter in wheeling great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings
I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore,
All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread
Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still
But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake’s edge or pool
Delight men’s eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?
PROCESS PAINTER
JALAINI Abu Hassan (or Jai as he is known in art circles) create works inspired by current themes expressed in local and familiar imagery and focused through his personal lens of nostalgia and history. Educated at Mara Institute of Technology (now UiTM) where he obtained his Bachelor’s Degree, Jai, equipped with a full scholarship, continued his studies at the prestigious Slade School in Fine Art in London and Pratt Institute in New York, coming home with a Master’s Degree and Master of Fine Art.
A process painter, Jai is interested in the exploration of the act of creating a work, the exploration of materials and mediums, and the marks that form a drawing. He is always pushing back the boundaries in search of new processes and working towards presenting a Malaysian visual vernacular, one whose meaning would undoubtedly speak of his identity and culture.
Acclaimed at home and internationally, Jai has held solo shows in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the US where he presented Bangsawan Kebangsaan at the Tyler Rollins Fine Art Gallery in April 2011. His works are in the collection of Malaysia’s National art gallery and in private, corporate and gallery collections around the world.