Extract from "Masterpieces from the National Art Gallery of Malaysia"

《Smiling Van Gogh And Smiling Gauguin》　1995　

Mixed media on canvas　242cm x 450cm

Born:     1972

Education:

1984 -    School of Art & Design, University Technology MARA (UiTM), Shah Alam

1990 - Southern Illinois University, U.S.A.

1991       - Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York

　　Hasnul Jamal Saidon belongs to the significant group of artists who had introduced post-modernist ideas into the local art scene during the Nineties. He has experimented with electronic media as well. The underpinnings of the post-modernist thinking, with its radical re-questioning and de-constructive tendencies originally surfaced in France during the Sixties as a philosophical movement. These radical ideas entered the international art scene during the Eighties. It took root, quite belatedly, within the local art scene during the Nineties. Smiling Van Gogh and Smiling Gauguin is an example of a post-modernist production and it deals with the art context and with art history. The artist has appropriated aspects of Van Gogh’s and Gauguin’s art into his painting in order to make a satirical comment on them as well as on the more orthodox Western art historical tradition celebrating artistic geniuses. It also touches on the idea of the “noble savage” myth popularised by Gauguin’s paintings.

　　The work is made up of several of Gauguin’s “exotic” Tahitian women standing in poses that have been taken from the painter’s famous paintings. These women exist under a night sky that is blazing with swirling stars, a quotation taken from Van Gogh’s famous painting entitled Starry Night. A closer scrutiny of the Tahitian women (who could pass off as Malay women, in any case) will reveal that they are dressed in Asian costumes which include the Malay baju kurung and the kebaya Iabuh as well as the Japanese kimono. Look more closely into these dresses and you will find that the designs and patterns on them have been taken out of modern Western artistic styles. Among these is the gestural imagery of Jackson Pollock’s Abstract Expressionism. Some of the women though are wearing dresses with Malay patterns. The work makes a wry comment on the heroes of art history and the perceptions of the exotic native by Western artists.