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BALAM - Journey to the Garden of EdenHamidi Hadi

Wei-LingGallery

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As we talk about Hamidi’s experiences studying in the UK and European landscape painting Hamidi talks about Friedrich’s ‘Wanderer above the Sea of Fog” (1818) as a core influence and we discuss European traditions of landscape painting and the sublime. We go on to talk about Chinese mountain-water painters and I think about Shan-Shui-Hau and the compositions of the artists of the Liu Song Dynasty. In talking to Hamidi, I begin to think about the theory of aesthetics, about Burke’s “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful” (1757) and Kant’s “Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime”. I think about Hamidi’s paintings, about how they seem effortless once completed. However, as a painter myself I know there has been a struggle to find them. I think about the immensity of Hamidi’s attempts to convey something of the human condition when faced with the landscape. I think about Kant saying “the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt”. We talk about the Garden of Eden and I think about God as the great gardener and Hirshfield’s 1785 text “Theorie der Gartenkunst” which translates as the ‘theory of garden art’. Hirshfield never actually designed or made an actual garden himself and wasn’t a gardener. His text theorised how the imaginary garden should look as he laid down his aesthetic principles. These descriptions and theories influenced the German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich in his creation of paintings of imagined landscapes that capture an evocative emotional mood like ‘Eldena in the Giant Mountains’ (1830/5) and ‘The Great Enclosure’ (1832). Like the Chinese mountain-water brush painters Friedrich observed the landscape and studied the optical phenomena of meteorological conditions to compose imagined landscapes that ask the viewer to contemplate the sublime potential of nature and the nature of the human soul.

Hamidi’s practice as an artist has formally migrated from pictorial representation of the objective world into abstraction and the synthesis of complex materials and methods to describe his emotional and spiritual responses to being in the world. We can see that throughout this transformation he, like Friedrich and like the Shan-Shui-Hau artists, observes the natural phenomena of the world and uses this in his imaginary landscapes. Hamidi has seen the rain on the windscreen, the clouds across the landscape, the stripped vegetation giving way to industrialisation and commercial development. He investigates these phenomena through the use of industrial paint, resin, wax, marks, blends, in pools of material, gravity, surface tension.

As we contemplate the work that is revealed through the techniques and methods then we begin to connect the reference points that give us clues to Hamidi’s inner landscape, his contemplation of his place in the world, the clues that connect us to his respect for tradition, to his relationship to his father’s love of the mountains, to his father’s study journals on the scripture and divine nature of god. Looking at the thousands of random resin peaks that push out from the surface of Hamidi’s paintings we can see the monsoon rain lashing on the windscreen. Looking at Hamidi’s grids that lie underneath the ebb and flow of the paint and resin we can see this painter’s own landscape carved up by industrial development, parking lots and malls. Looking at the Garden of Eden we feel Hamidi’s concern for the Malaysian landscape, for a landscape facing the apocalypse of a coming ecological storm brought on by commercial development, for a world torn apart by terror and the tension between the faiths of nations. In Hamidi’s new work we contemplate a fall from grace that is both terrifying and fascinating.

“BALAM: Journey to the Garden of Eden” is a metaphor for Hamidi Hadi’s experience of being on the world, for the development of his creative practice, for the changes happening to the Malaysian landscape and for human consciousness contemplating the sublime, faith and the nature of the soul.

Dr Hedley Roberts*Dr Roberts has lived and worked in London for over 20 years as an artist and is the Head of Art and Design at the University of East London. He is a Royal College of Art Fellow and a Stanley Picker Fellow, a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy UK, and serves on the Executive Committee of the Council for Higher Education in At and Design, UK.

I meet Hamidi Hamidi. His wide smile is framed against the architecture of Batu Gajah train station and the lush vegetation beyond. I get into his car and we set off to toward his studio. We’re both painters and we’re the same age. Tentatively we began to talk about patterns of working, about the necessary rituals that we perform to create the creative space from which the works emerge. As we talk we drive along the highway and Hamidi remarks on the rapid changes to the roads and the landscape that has happened since he lived in the area. The single track is now multilane and the highway is lined with parking lots, walls and sections that delineate commercial zones. As I stare out of the window I try to imagine it without the new commercial blocks and buildings, but cannot. Hamidi asks if I wanted to go to the studio first. I say perhaps we could talk some more, maybe over coffee. I say I wanted to learn something about the manbefore I see the work. In the restaurant we drank Teh Tarik. Hamidi lights one of many cigarettes and we flippantly reference the ritual of smoking as a contemplative space in the artist’s practice. We discuss Hamidi’s time in Wolverhampton in the UK, about his return to Malaysia, his history with the Wei-Ling Gallery, his employment at the University, his PHD in Printmaking. In this subject we find more common ground.

Hamidi’s first floor studio is on a commercial block and the windows frame a view across the highway and into the landscape. Hamidi looks out of the window and smokes as I look at the work stacked up against the wall, spread out on the floor. Some finished, some still in progress. Cans of industrial paint dribble their contents down the sides of the tins, tarpaulins cover sections of the floor where a large work is in progress. Paint pools and eddies on the canvas on the floor, textures resist and meld into each other, surface viscosity tensions wrinkle and pull as they find each other. The canvases are all square in aspect ratio, all the same size, except for two panoramic formats that are twice as long as they are wide. The format is familiar to my own practice. I know the difficulties and the joy of facing the square composition.

Hamidi talks about the rain on the window in a monsoon, about the change in the landscape, about getting older, spending time with his children. He looks out at the sky. He smiles some more. We talk some more about when he was studying in Wolverhampton, about meeting his wife, the beginnings of his family life, the old days of working multiple jobs to make ends meet. We talk about the everyday things, about memories, about what we think about when we look away from the paintings. Hamidi talks about walking in the hills with his father, about the sky and the earth. He says his father studied the Qur’an and wrote in Arabic script in his journals. I notice a book on his shelf “Fifty Great Disasters & Tragedies that Shocked the World” and we begin to talk about terror and the sublime. We find common interest in Caspar David Friedrich’s ‘Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog’. Hamidi then takes a break to pray and I think about Romanticism, spiritual contemplation and Hamidi’s life in the changing Malaysian landscape.

Hamidi’s career as a painter is well established in South East Asia. Well known for his experimental use of materials and for his transition from a figurative approach of his studentship to the abstraction of his maturity. The paintings that I looked at in the studio on my visit represented at least 2 years of work. They embody a refinement of a variety of approaches that represent Hamidi’s steady focus on the material and process that forms the texture and surface of the work. Previous catalogues of his shows speak eloquently about his approach to experimentation and form, about the transition from figuration to abstraction. However, what interests me in speaking to Hamidi is the man, the artist and the motivations that keep him returning to his studio day after day, and how these have shaped the subjectivity of the work.

Standing looking at the paintings I initially struggle to see the connection between them. Works like ‘Perfect Moment’ and ‘Tumbuh’ seem impermanent, temporal, with translucent colours and shapes cling to the white mist of the canvas surface. Paintings like ‘Renungan’ and ‘Antara 2 Musim’ layer up deep textures of resin over gridded planes withquiet target motifs. ‘Angin Tenggara’ is overlaid with waxy layers of semi-translucent resin and deeply coloured paint drifting across, clouding, obscuring the flat planes of the composition below. The largest of the paintings is ‘The Garden of Eden’. This has a bifurcated composition where each side of the painting has random elements that mirror the other in a form that appears both as a Rorschach ink blot like those used in psychoanalytical tests and also as great apocalyptic clouds suspended above a low horizon line. In the centre of this composition a single tree appears rendered in a pictorial form. It is damaged, burnt, but still alive.

8 9Tumbuh, Industrial paint on canvas, 171cm X 171cm, 2014Angin Tenggara, Industrial paint, resin on canvas, 171cm X 171cm, 2014

10 11Pengembara di monson tenggara, Industrial paint on canvas, 171cm X 171cm, 2014 Dalam kabus, Industrial paint, resin on canvas, 171cm X 171cm, 2014

12 13Perfect Moment 2, Industrial paint on canvas, 171cm X171cm, 2014 Monolog 2, Industrial paint, resin on canvas, 171cm X 171cm, 2013

14 15Monolog 1, Resin on Canvas,171cm x 231cm, 2013 Renungan I, Industrial paint, resin on canvas, 171cm X 171cm, 2014

16 17Antara 2 musim, Industrial paint, Resin on canvas, 171cm x 342cm (Diptych), 2014

18 19Perfect Moment, Industrial paint on canvas, 171cm X 171cm, 2014 The wanderer and a day after the monsoon rain 1, Industrial paint, resin on canvas, 171cm X 171cm, 2014

20 21Night Walker, Industrial paint, Resin on canvas, 152cm x 229cm, 2013

22 23Antara 2 garisan masa, Industrial paint, resin, charcoal on canvas, 171cm X 171cm, 2013 Musim ranum, Industrial paint on canvas, 171cm X 171cm, 2014

24 25Cliff, Industrial paint on canvas, 220cm X370cm, 2014

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HAMIDI BIN ABDUL HADI (b.1971)EDUCATION2003 Masters in Art and Design Network (Painting), University of Wolverhampton, Midlands, UK2001 B.A (Hons) in Fine Art, University Teknologi MARA1995 B.A in Fine Art, Institut Teknologi MARA

SOLO EXHIBITIONS2014 BALAM-Journey to the Garden of Eden, Wei-Ling Contemporary, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.2012 ANTARA, Wei-Ling Contemporary, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.2009 TIMANG-TIMANG, Wei-Ling Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.2007 ALUN, Wei-Ling Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.2005 INDELIBLE MARKINGS, Townhouse Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS2014 The PEAK Group Show- HO MIA, Wei-Ling Contemporary, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.2013 Sekaki X Sekaki, Segaris @ Publika, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. COMA, Hong Kong ART BASEL, Hong Kong. 18@8 Mirror, Mirror on the wall, Wei-Ling Contemporary, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.2012 18@8 KUL-SIN, Wei-Ling Contemporary, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. 18@18 KUL-SIN, ION Art, Singapore. KEMBARA JIWA;The Travelling Soul, Galeri Chandan @ Publika, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. KEMBARA JIWA; The Travelling Soul, Selasar Sunaryo, Bandung ,Indonesia. KEMBARA JIWA; The Travelling Soul, Taman Budaya, Jogjakarta ,Indonesia. TIMELESS, Wei-Ling Contemporary, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. KAMI RESPON, Galeri FSSR UiTM Perak, Perak, Malaysia. Transit-A4, House of Matahati, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.2011 THE 8th ASIA FIBER ART, Galeri UiTM Perak, Perak, Malaysia. 1MALAYSIA ART FESTIVAL 2011, KL Convention Centre, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. MALAYSIAN RICE PLATES PROJECT, Wei-Ling Gallery and Ministry of Tourism, KL Convention Center, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.2010 MATAHATI & FRIENDS, House of Matahati, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. CELEBRATE MALAYSIA, Petronas Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. MALAYSIA ARTISTS: NEW OBJECT (IONS), Petronas Galery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.2009 The 24th ASIAN INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION, Balai Seni Lukis, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.2008 MIND BODY & SOUL - MBSIII, Wei-Ling Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. TREASURE BOX, Wei-Ling Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. ARTRIANGLE MalaysiaPhilippinesIndonesia ( Organise by Matahati), Soka Gakkai, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. TENGGARA, Recent paintings from Malaysia, Indonesia and Philipines (Organise by Matahati), Novas Gallery, Liverpool, ENGLAND. The 23rd ASIAN INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION, University Art Museum Guangzhou, China.

HEART TO HEART Asian International Art Show, YUGE Gallery, Guangzhou, China. SERANGKAI RUPA, Galeri Tuanku Nur Zahirah UiTM Shah Alam, Malaysia.2007 THE FORCE OF NATURE, Darling muse Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. THE 9th INTERNATIONAL SEMINAR & ART EXHIBITION, Srinakharinwirot University, Bangkok, Thailand. IMAGINING ASIA, 22nd ASEAN INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION, Selasar Sunaryo Art Space, Bandung, Indonesia. KAMI II, Museum Negeri Pulau Pinang, Malaysia. ACROSS THE BORDER, Gallery @ StarHill, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. ARTRIANGLE MalaysiaPhilippinesIndonesia, Soka Gakkai, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. YOUNG CONTEMPORARIES, National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.2006 MALAYSIA-POLAND Art Exchange Workshop, UiTM Shah Alam Gallery, Malaysia. CONVERGENCE-CONTEMPORARY MALAYSIA ART, Weiling Gallery,Kuala Lumpur. 18@8, Kuala Lumpur-Karachi, Amin Gulgee Gallery, Karachi, Pakistan in collaboration with Wei-Ling Gallery.2005 MALAYSIA-JAPAN Art Exchange Workshop, Galery Seni UiTM Perak, Malaysia.2004 Kami II, Shah Alam Gallery, Malaysia. Imajan, Taman Warisan Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.2003 3 Man and A Women, Shah Alam Gallery and Pelita Hati Gallery, Malaysia.2002 MA Show, University of Wolverhampton , Midland, UK.2000 Philips Morris, ASEAN Art Exhibition, National Gallery, Singapore. TANDA, Tangsi Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Philips Morris, ASEAN Art Exhibition, National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. SIMPLY RED, Tangsi Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.1999 Malam Puisi, KOSOVO, Dewan Bandaraya, Ipoh, Malaysia. Pekan Seni Ipoh IV, Dewan Bandaran Ipoh, Malaysia. Shah Alam Open Art Exhibition, Shah Alam Gallery, Selangor, Malaysia.1998 Pekan Seni Ipoh III, Dewan Bandaran Ipoh, Malaysia. Coming Together, Pelita Hati , Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Penglipure Lara, Pelita Hati, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.1997 MALAYSIAN DRAWING, National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. BAKAT MUDA SEZAMAN, National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.1996 Young Contemporaries, National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. National Day Art Competition, National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Islamic Fiber Art, Pengucapan Islam Dalam Kesenian, Petronas Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. New Artist, Petronas Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.1995 Degree Show, KSSR Gallery, ITM Shah Alam, Malaysia. Ledakan, KSSR Foyer, ITM Shah Alam, Malaysia. The Young Artist, Pelita Hati Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Alternative Print, Petronas Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. ILHAM, Diploma Collection, Petronas Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.1994 Kenyir Ecofest, Kenyir, Terengganu, Malaysia. 1993 Cactus Drawing Competition and Exhibition, Bukit Cahaya, Shah Alam, Malaysia.

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PROJECT DIRECTOR| Lim Wei-Ling

EDITED BY | Shaza Sofi & Lim Siew Boon

DESIGNED BY | Lim Siew Boon

Copyright © 2014 Wei-Ling GalleryAll rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted In any

form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any other information storage and retrieval system without prior in writing from the publisher.

Cover image: Hamidi Hadi, Garden of Eden, 260cm x 360cm, Industrial paint on canvas, 2014

Produced by Wei-Ling Gallery

To accompany the exhibition entitled ‘BALAM-Journey to the Garden of Eden’from 2nd October 2014 - 23rd October 2014 atWei-Ling ContemporaryG212 Ground FloorThe Gardens MallKuala Lumpur, Malaysia

T: +603 2282 8323 F: +603 22601107

Wei-Ling GalleryNo. 8 Jalan Scott, Brickfields50470 Kuala Lumpur, MalaysiaT: +603 2260 1106 F: +603 22601107

W: www.weiling-gallery.com E: weilingcontemporary@gmail.com

Wei-Ling Gallery@Victory AnnexeEastern & Oriental Hotel10 Lebuh Farquhar10200 Penang, Malaysia

T: +604 2613 691 F: +603 22601107

AWARDS2004 Bakat Muda Sezaman (finalist), Balai Seni Lukis Negara. “SENI KIJANG BANK NEGARA MALAYSIA AWARD, (Consolation Prize), Balai Seni Bank Negara, Kuala Lumpur.2000 TOP 5 WINNERS,Phillip Morris ASEAN Biennale Art Competition, National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur. Certificate of Recognition, The Philip Morris ASEAN Art Award, Singapore. CONSOLATION PRIZE, Formula Malaysia Art Competition, Malaysia. ARTIST INTERACTION, Philips Morris ASEAN Art Awards, LASALLE-SIA College of the Arts, Singapore.1996 HONOURABLE MENTION, Philips Morris ASEAN Biennale Art Awards, 1996, National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur.1995 DEAN LIST, School of Art and Design, Institute Teknologi Mara, Shah Alam, Malaysia.1994 Consolation Prize, Kenyir Eco-fest ’94, International Art Competition.1993 SECOND PRIZE OPEN, Cactus Drawing Competition, Bukit Cahaya, Shah Alam Malaysia.

PUBLIC COLLECTIONSGALERI PETRONAS, MalaysiaNATIONAL ART GALLERY, MalaysiaPARKROYAL HOTEL, MalaysiaTHE ALIYA & FAROUK KHAN COLLECTION, MalaysiaWONG & PARTNERS, Malaysia

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my many thanks to the following individuals for their support and encouragement: Wei-Ling & Yohan for believing in me. Hedley Roberts, Head of Art & Design, East London University (UEL), your willingness to travel hundreds of miles to see me have deeply touched my heart. Suhaimi Tular (Wak) for your continual constructive criticism. Shaza, Siew Boon and the gallery crew involved in making this show a reality. To all my Collectors for your support and belief in me. To all my friends who have always wished me well. And last but not least, special thanks go to my loving family Ja, Hannah, Alham & Qiqi for allowing me the time to make this body of works.

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