Artist Ivan Lam uses layers of paint and subtle textures to reveal a carefully crafted bigger picture.
IT’S like doing Shaolin kung fu training without learning any fancy moves ... just sweeping the floor or washing dishes,” says artist Ivan Lam about his latest show, Panorama.
“It’s been five years of exploration, sweat, elation, rejection and fulfilment. Only to realise that my master, who is myself, didn’t make me do it for the sake of torturing me. It was to lay a foundation ... I learnt how to become a better painter and person.”
Judging by the packed opening of Panorama on Wednesday at Wei-Ling Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, the chic party afterwards, and the RM40,000 pricetags, Lam’s star in the local arts scene is rising fast. There was even a full-sized highway billboard in the city advertising the show!
What about the art (and artist) behind the publicity?
Ivan Lam with The Machine That Walks the Earth. – SHAARI CHEMAT / The Star
Artist, writer and curator J.Anurendra notes that, “Panorama sees Lam at the peak of his contemporary relevance. The exhibition attests to a mastery and reinterpretation of contemporary realism through definite and highly defined technique, style and expressions that have been perfected over the last decade.”
Art commentator Gina Fairley gushes: “Panorama expands our understanding of painting ... Lam’s paintings unleash reality and it is exhilarating.”
While it is always better to see the real works rather than pictures of them, it is especially critical in the case of Lam’s works – for only then can one appreciate the punctilious brushwork, multiple layering of paints, and subtle textures that go into his creations.
This is how Lam’s “ordinary” scenes of Chinese restaurants, airport lounges or car workshops get transported into the realm of the “gloriously mundane”.
“These scenes are mundane yet extra ordinary,” he says. “People take them for granted but when you frame them up, they become gems.”
Gallery director Lim Wei-Ling says, “I have seen Ivan’s growth as an artist over the years. From light boxes and silk screen prints to layering of paints, he really conquers a certain technique, and then he moves on. He wants to keep pushing himself to try new things.”
Lam is the only artist in Malaysia (“and probably the world,” he adds) who uses Nippon paint for his works.
“It’s meant for walls. It gives a flat thin coat when I do multiple layers with it, compared to oil paint.”
Yaw Seng Heng, the managing director of Nippon Paints Malaysia comments, “By experimenting with hundreds of shades from our colour range, he has elevated normal house paint to the stature of magnificent artwork.”
Does Banana Republic tell us where we are heading?
Lam’s works in Panorama are infused with a certain silence amidst what would normally be hubbub, like a freeze frame in a movie when you expect a voice over narration to come on at any time.
In The Urgency of Inside Looking Out, he has deliberately chosen to paint a Chinese restaurant without a single customer inside.
“When we frequent Chinese restaurants we perceive them as non-halal,” comments Lam. “This one is halal and there are many Malay customers. When we are inside we are judged by our outside cover, never by our content.”
Apart from the textures from the multiple layering of paints, Lam has also chosen his viewpoints carefully.
“The normal eye can only see (as wide as) 120°,” explains Lam, who is also a full-time lecturer at a local college. “But for my panoramas, I painted the view so that you can see 170° without having to turn your head left or right.”
Another freeze frame painting is Waiting for a Better Future, Hoping for a Greater Life, where he depicts people waiting at the LCCT (Low Cost Carrier Terminal) departure lounge.
Fairley comments, “I am reminded of Samuel Beckett’s 1948 play, Waiting for Godot, the story of two men waiting for another person, perhaps God, who never arrives. It is perhaps a hint of Lam’s wry questioning of the absence of meaning within contemporary society.... As Beckett points out, it was not the arrival of the mysterious Godot that was the revelation, but the wait itself.”
There is No Certainty Within the Wheel of Time is Lam’s response to the invasion of Gaza by Israeli forces.
“The playground is empty. Where are the children? They should be playing and their laughter should be heard. The high saturated colours belies the grave situation in Gaza,” he shares.
“Even without that direct reference, the stillness suggests a dire narrative,” comments Anurendra. “It is these undercurrents of emotion that make these works so engaging (even though) Lam is involved in what some might consider the questionable enterprise of painting photographically accurate likenesses.”
Another poignant piece of silent commentary is The Machine That Walks the Earth, where a piling crane near Lam’s home appears like a more clunky version of a Terminator 3 robot amidst a barren, desert-like landscape. Here, the meticulous layering of paints makes one almost able to taste the acrid mix of semi-rusted metal and sun-bleached paint. How much have our attitudes about development become almost machine-like?
“There is a fine line between development and the environment. Between man and nature. Where is the balance?” asks Lam.
“This machine sits central to this narrative in a plea for balance,” comments Fairley. “It is an extremely active painting despite its static subject, pushing and pulling our eye between foreground and the background.
“Furthermore, the machine is anchored out of frame making its presence as expansive as its natural horizontal stretch. It is a visual and metaphorical power play and, as a painting, far more complex than its simple pictorial.”
Panorama continues where the artist left off in his 2007 exhibition called Ivan Lam: After All These Years…. The earlier exhibition had rougher blocks of colour with clearly defined borders, but Panorama has finer brush strokes with sometimes blurred boundaries. Hence Lam’s Shaolin kung fu analogy.
“I am more confident and have more control with the technique now. If I do any finer brushstrokes, then you might as well take a photo. I like to really master a certain technique and then move on to something else,” he relates.
“For instance, to get my table cloths (in the Chinese restaurant painting) perfectly right, I researched and learned from Rennaissance painters and Old Masters. From emulating, I then made it my own (style). In between each painting, I did two weeks of research first.”
Says gallery director Lim, “He applies the dots and layers of paint very carefully, one mistake and the whole thing is gone. I have seen him go through 40 or 50 canvases just to get one work.”
The artist confesses, “There are days I don’t feel like going to the studio, but I make it a point to clock in my hours. I am the least talented artist around, it’s more of hard work.”
“I don’t agree,” says Lim. “Ivan is not only talented but he has professional integrity. Some artists take the easy way out and just repeat a winning formula. That’s when selling takes over from artistic development. If he did that, he would be cheating himself. It would just be just routine with not much heart and soul.”
Interestingly enough, after all the years of painstakingly careful technique, Lam feels that he has enough mastery over his kung fu to paint with much more abandon.
And this can be seen in the free-flowing, almost obscenely protruding, yellow strokes of his Banana Republic, where he hints that the joke may be on the audience (us?) who may one day live in a basket case country and hiak chiu (the Cantonese term for “eat the banana”, which can be taken to mean “be damned”).
This work is also his cheeky “preview” painting of his next exhibition, but that’s another story....
‘Panorama’ is on until Aug 27 at Wei-Ling Gallery (No. 8, Jalan Scott, Brickfields, Kuala Lumpur). Opening hours are 7pm to noon on Monday to Friday; 10am to 5pm on Saturday; and by appointment on Sunday. Enquiries, call 03-2260 1106 or go to weiling-gallery.com.