IVAN LAM – Panoramas’ of the Gloriously Mundane

By Anurendra Jegadeva

I met Ivan Lam more than a decade ago when he first returned from America.

He was only slightly younger then but already he had an intense realization that he would only ever be able to find himself through his art. He possessed a sharp awareness of tradition and a love for innovation, of popular culture and its iconographies as well as a deep need to communicate with his contemporary audience in real and meaningful terms.

A kind of Ying and Yang – the Alpha-Omega if you like.

This commitment to the struggle to make meaningful work has stood him well through the years.

From early painted print works and the ground-breaking Perspex light boxes of the 90s to the prize-winning Integral (2001) and Symphony of our Children (2003)’; from the celebration of popular objects as monuments in works like Evo 7(2003) and acidic post colonial references to the confluence of traditional symbols, fleeting trends and contemporary values in sexy, sexy works like the Ripple Series (2003) and Utamaro (2003)– Lam has been on a quest for a style and technique that consciously pushed the boundaries of painting as he searched for reason through observations of contemporary life.

His ability to continuously push the boundaries of painting has also meant that he has remained relevant within a creative mainstream more and more dominated by new and mixed media, and where painters have felt the acute need to reinvent the medium itself for it – and them - to remain innovative and significant.

His treatment of his subject matter also pushes the boundaries of the narrative. With a refreshing irreverence, Lam strips down the narrative in his work to single moments – always from a distant standoff tinged with personal experience and unwilling to dictate any kind of definite meaning to his audience.

The common experience he wants to convey is almost abstract in how it is presented. It doesn’t translate into a specific Malaysian or Asian one but finds a larger resonance that is more interested in the artist and his audience as witnesses to a world afflicted by media and consumerism, confusion and displacement – and always - the universal loneliness of that contemporary citizen within a world of webs crowded with noise and opinion.

These distinct narrative devices and painting formats came to fruition two years ago when Lam gave us AFTER ALL THESE YEARS…. autobiographical paintings hung like a wayang in 9 scenes, stories of love and family, of birth and change. Of memory and reality - always tinged with a sense of loss.

A painter at heart, PANORAMA, sees Lam at the peak of his contemporary relevance. A culmination of sorts – the exhibition attests to a mastery and reinterpretation of contemporary realism through a definite and highly defined technique, style and expressions that have been perfected over the last decade.

As he himself very humbly puts it - ` I had spent the last ten years honing my skill – I know the `kungfu’ – now I wanted to tell the story.’

There is a strong narrative quality that continues from AFTER ALL THESE YEARS but it is not a `continuing narrative’. PANORAMA’s stories are broader and more inclusive and unapologetic that these pictures have a story.

Still, to see this exhibition as a sequel to AFTER ALL THESE YEARS… (2007) is convenient and enjoyable even if unnecessary.                                                              

Every stage of an artist’s development refers to its own past, especially its immediate one.

PANORAMA’s seamless execution may find its beginnings in its predecessor but this is an undeniably fresh and powerfully heartfelt body of work.                   

As contemporary painting, PANORAMA, the most recent genre paintings by Ivan Lam, with their meticulously observed realism are his most beautifully pedestrian and resolved to date. 

His atmospheric yet detached interiors of restaurants and cars; exteriors which are deliberately contained … traffic jams; desolate construction sites, crowded airports or the KL Eye carnival – all compulsory parts to a Kuala Lumpur state of mind are the focus of the artist’s increasingly psychological examinations of isolation and displacement as he tries to make sense of the immediate world around him.

Through his paintings Lam has always strived to develop seductive visual elements through the appropriation and reinvention of technologies and industrial processes to portray feelings of alienation associated with contemporary life – and always, in a contemporary visual language.

And while some of the previous works, Sushi Bar (2006) and Surgery (2007) already saw the beginnings of human places devoid of human beings but packed with their trappings, PANORAMA finds all the new works whole-heartedly located in quiet settings that are baroque environments.

These recent paintings are filled with the detail of everyday life – but in their absence of human beings they blister with a methodical silence dictated by their very formatted, almost cubist compositions.

Even in a work like Waiting for a Better Future, Hoping for a Greater Life (2008) which is filled with people waiting at the LCCT departure lounge, the human actors in the painting are given the same treatment and importance as the corrugated walls or the arrivals/departures information board, the stainless steel railings, the plastic tandem chairs.  

Later you realize, that the artist has also created a space from which the viewer, like the artist himself views the vista and becomes a part of the painting. However the artist immediately sets a boundary – a distance from the panorama that denies any kind of real interaction with the space or its sitters.

The viewer remains separate and alone within the setting.

And as if the artist is conscious of what he senses at the corners of his eyes but can never quite see – Lam brings to his paintings his signature panoramic views – he takes the 120 degree, standard view of our perception of the world and gives us a wide angle 170 degree, view of the world… as if to suggest that if we could see more, we would also understand our world better.

Lam enjoys the physicality of these familiar objects yet presents all of them equally, as forthright statements of visual fact. No one object is more important than another. As he distills his visual information, his concern is with the surface of things – corrugated walls, plastic chairs, the various components of the monumental piling crane, the complex play of interiors meeting exteriors; of the horizontal assembly line of red table cloths against vertical lines of door frames and glass fronts.         

Amidst all this paraphernalia of everyday life, the artist commits to a unity of the picture plane – a flatness of the surface where the in and out movement is less important then how all the colors and forms come together in delightful oneness and perfect harmony.

With tantalizing invitation, each very literal vignette is designed to appeal to the senses.

And Lam does not paint movement but rather stillness.

In a work like The Beginning is the End The End is the Beginning (2009), the frantic pace of city life is a given – he leaves it to the audience to fill that in  - but at the same time, the stillness of the scene seems to be at odds with the frustrations of the grunge of daily urban existence. The soft glow of the tactile white clouds on their bed of deep, tranquil blue ping like a Turner-esque mantra of the acceptance of life as it is.

While the narrative moves through places that are unavoidably entwined in our everyday suburban lives - transport, traffic, development, sustenance, entertainment – the path provided by the artist lead you through these paintings only pausing at moments of possible dramatic action.

The Machine That Walks The Earth (2008) is a depiction of part of a piling crane in a housing development near where the artist lives. It has become part of his daily trek to and from home.      

From morning to night, the monolith pounds the earth – testimony to the unstoppable march of development. – captured in the traditional stark light and shadow contrasts that remember Dutch painting.

There is a weight to this piece that The Beginning is the End The End is the Beginning, with its opening skies avoid. In this painting of the machine that walks, the object is anchored within the center and beyond the picture frame. Its monumentality is threatening – its place within the modern landscape non-negotiable.

These scenarios that seem mundane but are so salient because of that very ordinariness are executed with obsessive deliberation. Lam’s panoramas are deliberately frank paintings with no startling revelations, an art of technical prowess, intricate composition, brilliantly tactile surfaces and an undercurrent of social comment.

There is no certainty within the wheel of time (2009), Lam captures a broad vista of the KL Eye fronted by a fair, carousel and the promise of fun and frolic. Painted around the time of the Israeli invasion of Gaza, the park is devoid of laughter or the babble of children. Even without that direct reference the stillness suggests a dire narrative. It is these undercurrents of emotion that make these works so engaging.

While Lam remains involved in what some might consider the questionable enterprise of painting photographically accurate likenesses, he also reveals a state of mind. The artist’s capacity for minute description disguises a more private vision. Neither romantic nor glamorous, Lam’s closely observed naturalism – served cold - has the capacity to arrest our attention and persuades us to immediately relate to the subject as well as their latent content. His images are so rich in detail and design and immediacy that the inclination is to ignore his more formal accomplishments.

For Ivan Lam is an extremely gifted painter.     

Lam understands his medium completely and it is obvious in paintings like The Urgency of Inside Looking Out (2009) where the contemplation of the panorama of the Chinese red-table-cloth restaurant is more important than the emotionality of the place at its busiest times of business. The purposeful flatness of the decorative forms and cool paint surface seem to drive home the point that even if it were full of people – as with the LCCT painting - the viewer, like the artist would find himself alone.

Lam also understands the tools he has at his disposal and is conscious of that which photography has made redundant in modern painting.

In a work like The Urgency of Inside Looking Out or in Waiting for a Better Future, the camera has made images like this one useless unless the artist can draw us into the mysteries of representation and develop a statement about the human condition. In spite of the objectivity and the methodically precise arrangement of the setting, the artist’s concentrated view of what appears to be an everyday event aspires to do more than record people and places.

As an artist, Lam finds in each of these paintings, a moment when the factual storytelling ends and form, atmosphere and social context become central issues. Lam’s realism does not debate the nature of reality, but simply confines itself to panoramic, highly selective views of the social environment we share.

The content of these paintings, more than ever, present not only the reality of objects, but a measure of the artist’s perception of the distances we place between ourselves in contemporary relationships.

And through these paintings, he has the ability to make us feel it.

Therein lies their power.

Like backdrops to our lives, the artist presents scenarios in which we are – unavoidably – the protagonists – not outside the picture but within its foreground – but only as observers not participants.

And so we are inevitably alone.

But if these new paintings are anything to go by, it is a bleak world we live in but it is nevertheless, still extremely beautiful … at least according to Ivan.