Born: 1929
Education: 1951 - Chelsea School of Art, London
1964 - School of the Art Institute,Chicago, Illinois
1973 - University of Hawaii, Honolulu
Syed Ahmad Jamal has been for the better part of his artistic life an abstract expressionist artist but he played an important role in the Malay-Islamic revivalist movement during the Seventies and Eighties. In 1974, he curated the Rupa dan Jiwa exhibition which highlighted traditional Malay aesthetic values in design. This particular work was inspired by similar pursuits and marked a phase of his life when he was influenced by traditional Malay craft orientations. In this case, he had worked closely with a traditional songkit weaver and had his designs transferred to the songkit cloth by the weaver. It was an attempt to bring contemporary fine art ideas into the traditional Malay craft contexts. He produced several such pieces during the period. Their aesthetic quality lies in the use of the different coloured threads which lend a shimmering elegance to the works. These songkit works produced by the artist were often exhibited as hanging scrolls.
The central image in the work is the traditional tumpai motif which symbolises, in the Southeast Asian traditional art contexts, the cosmic world mountain Mahameru. This triangular motif is, in fact, traceable to the region’s historic pre-Hindu tribal art forms as well. The mountain, or gunungan motif, in the region’s tribal art contexts, denoted the “middle world” of a mythical, symbolic three-layered universe. The middle world is where man and animals subsisted. This triangular shape appears twice in this work, at the top and at the bottom, in two differing versions. The horizontal bands set against the two triangular forms allow for a visual contrast and may suggest symbolic layers of spiritual attainment. A golden diagonal shaft moves downward to the middle of the work, acting as a visual counterpoint to the repetitive horizontal bands. The work’s decorative aspects are clearly derived by the fusion of craft and painting concerns. More significantly, the work allowed for a re-discovery of the Malay cultural ethos, which was a central concern of the Malay-Islamic revivalist artists, in the immediate post-National Cultural Congress contexts of the Seventies.