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

《Why Are You Like That?》1969　Printage on canvas　195.6cm x 121.9cm

Born:     1936

Education:

1956 - Nanyang Academy of Art, Singapore

1959 -    Byan Shaw School of Drawing & Painting, London

1963 -    Royal Academy Schools, London

　　The painter Ibrahim Hussein has employed many different stylistic idioms in his illustrious career and his employment of the pop art style was manifested during his stay in New York during the last decades of the Sixties. This painting is one of those works executed in New York when he was a young man. The work’s cosmopolitan and international frames of reference are immediately noticeable in the imagery as well as the mood of the work. Bearing in mind that the artist had earlier studied in London during the first half of the Sixties, this work reflects his very long exposures to the cultural contexts of Western society. The Sixties was indeed a fabulous era and this work captures something of the glitziness and the glamour of that period. The many images in the work are mostly derived from the world of popular mass culture. The beautiful Western women are from fashion magazines and film magazines. The other images, such as the television set, the Beatles all allude to mass culture influences. Words and sentences are stencilled all over the painting. Many are pop song titles.

　　The Sixties was also the era when that Mahaguru of the information age, Marshall MacLuhann, had made his prophetic pronouncements about the medium and the message or, was it the massage? And he had also used the term “the Global village”. It is interesting to note too how much art critical approaches have also changed since then and how differently we view this work today for its interesting use of the popular culture references and the textual modes contained in it. This significant work produced by a Malaysian artist reveals how complex and multifaceted the actual issue of Malaysian cultural experience is. Ibrahim Hussein had, as a young man, described that other more international and cosmopolitan side of the Malaysian exposure and experience.