Sunday October 7, 2007

Larger-than-life challenge

A veteran artist’s latest exhibition reveals his fearlessness in venturing forth into new territory.

“I wanted to bring out the inherent qualities of the woodcut in that it can produce two-dimensional art but, at the same time, it is a three-dimensional art form in itself,” said Juhari, whose exhibition is aptly titled Okir, an ancient South-East Asian word for wood carving. 

“In other words, these woodcuts take on a larger than life presence.” 

As such, the 18 woodcuts resemble craggy but mysterious totems with the tallest measuring almost 3m tall. Etched onto them are feathery, ethereal wild fowl that Said says are his closest neighbours at his Hulu Langat, Selangor, home.  

On the pieces of wood, the wildfowl are reshuffled to create a dense, compact swirl of etchings of feathers, claws and roving, beady eyes against a black backdrop. The jagged cracks and fine grained texture of the jambu laut wood emanate an ancient, folkloric air, bringing to mind Garuda, the bird-like creature of Hindu and Buddhist mythology modelled in many South-East Asian wood and stone sculptures.  

But 47-year-old Juhari, who has been working extensively in the printmaking medium for over 25 years, has something else in mind. “I am not creating sculptures, I am merely taking printmaking towards its next logical step and dimension.”  

It is, indeed, past time to transform printmaking. It is the visual arts’ dowdy country cousin, not exactly a very sexy medium. Comparatively, paintings and sculptures are cash cows; and video and new media art are more contemporary and much hotter.  

Also, I feel that, somehow, there is something distinctly unglamorous about printmaking – there is the geek factor of perfecting complicated techniques. Plus, often many of the same images appear in a single edition, so the cachet for collectors of owning a unique object is gone.  

Yet printmakers like Juhari, who has made many thought-provoking prints in the past, soldier on for the love of the medium. But even he now says he has been at an impasse.  

“For the last two years, I was really stuck,” said Juhari. “I produced some work but it just did not fit my standards, my ISO certification, so to speak. I wanted to be challenged in a big way.”  

A chance invitation in 2005 to attend a Malaysia-Jordan workshop and exhibition in Kelantan (organised by painter Sharifah Fatimah) provided the mammoth challenge: in the form of a sawn off slab of the jambu laut tree. 

“My first impression was just shock because I have never worked with such huge blocks, it is just impossible with printmaking. The scale, the size was just intimidating,” said Juhari. “You need to get someone to help you move the block so that you can hover over it comfortably.”  

After getting over the initial shock, the possibilities started becoming apparent, he said. The sheer size helped Juhari to focus on the woodcut as a larger-than-life image, an art object in itself.  

But Juhari’s embrace of this challenge is not surprising, as a theme of fearlessness in experimenting with techniques, concepts and content has always run through his work. And there is his refusal to stick to one easily recognisable “style”, with his work ranging from the delicate, muted impressions in the Garden Series (1985) to the allegorical satire of Katak Nak Jadi Lembu (2003).  

Juhari is happy to excavate the influences that have shaped his “just-do-it” approach to making art.  

“Also, I had to succeed because when I first told my mother that I wanted to become an artist, she cried because she could not even visualise what an artist would look like, let alone how I could be successful. We were simple folk from Perak, Gopeng to be precise, so it was all foreign sounding.” 

After a few solo exhibitions and some awards, Juhari wanted to explore printmaking in Japan, which is the Asian powerhouse for the medium. A grant from the Japan Foundation in 1994 made it possible for him to work in Japan with the renowned printmaker Yosesuke Funasaka. 

“It was my second time away from Malaysia, after a year in France. It was a revelation for me, in terms of how I had to find my teacher on my own and once I found my teacher, I could not start printmaking immediately as I hoped I would. 

“Instead, I had to help make the rollers and observe until I was allowed to do my own work. It was humbling, almost like being reborn in away,” Juhari said. 

The Japan experience was the catalyst that allowed him to “understand and work the medium in its entirety”. On his return to Malaysia, he sensed that everything around him could be fodder for his art: “Politics, the everyday, history and nature could be transformed into so many different things.” 

“This journey through printmaking has allowed to me do what I want and it will go on this way for as long as I can.”