106 The Eye Must Travel
A conversation with Yeoh Jin Leng, one of Malaysia’s most prolific and longest-serving artists, reveals a voracious appetite for travel and an unending sense of curiosity.
Malaysia’s senior artist Yeoh Jin Leng’s understanding of the canvas is most recently revealed in kampung scenes of the East Coast, a first showing of drawings dating back to 1962.
How does Yeoh Jin Leng look at a piece of art? According to him, it’s the simplest detail that matters the most. “My way of viewing a piece is to look at the drawing behind it. A line is not just a flat, straight line,” he tells me, as we sit in the foyer of The Edge Galerie. In the room next door, works from his September exhibition - held as part of the Kuala Lumpur International Arts Festival 2017 - have just been installed. “For me, drawing is fundamental and must be strongly founded. If you can’t draw properly, you become superficial with your paintings because you don’t understand your canvas. With your paint, you can get it to move 10 miles, 100 miles or bring things right to the surface of the canvas according how to you draw.” Yeoh’s latest exhibition, then, is surely a masterclass in drawing: the highlight is a large collection of his drawings of Terengganu in its pre-merdeka years. A series of photographs by the late sultan of Terengganu, Almarhum Sultan Ismail
Nasiruddin Shah, complements Yeoh’s drawings.
Executed in ink, oil pastel and charcoal, the Malaya we see on paper is firmly a thing of the past - perhaps for better and for worse, as the artist himself points out. “These are all drawings of the east coast that date from 1962 to 1965, which I found in a drawer. They’ve never been displayed before. Those images of the old days - the boats and the kampung scenes - are all gone now,” Yeoh reflects. “I suppose we must move on with our desires until we understand the aesthetics of what is fine or vulgar, in order to reflect the kind of society we want. But by removing art education from our syllabus and placing more importance on the sciences for the kind of development that we think is good, we’ve taken away something that is beautiful from our country.”
His own pursuit of beauty - a lifelong exploration of the power of artistic creativity - has taken many forms throughout his career as an artist and an art educator. Starting from his schooldays in the 1940s, when he painted stage sets at Anderson School in Ipoh, Yeoh adeptly mastered art forms ranging from metalwork (some of his copper apsaras are included in the exhibition) to pottery. It’s all the more remarkable that his skills were often largely selftaught, particularly when it comes to his work in clay. In what he terms “an enjoyable labour of love”, he had to learn everything from scratch, from building his own potter’s wheel and kiln to experimenting with recipes for clays and glazes.
It’s not hard to see how Yeoh’s innate sense of curiosity has fuelled his art and his work, and best of all, it continues to do so. It’s a lesson he’s tried to impart to all the students he’s taught over the years. “Develop that sense of curiosity that we all have, and just with that, you’ll find the things you’re looking for, your way.” That same instinct has taken him on many an adventure, often to areas as remote as the desert camps of nomadic carpet-weavers in Esfahan, Iran or the longhouses of Sarawak’s jungles. “It’s wonderful to be confronted with cultural traditions and eventually, you develop a sense of love and wonder at the creation within this earthspace,” Yeoh says, smiling gently.
“When I stayed with the Iban and watched them make their ukir carvings, it was done naturally and with love - not because they wanted their art to be promoted. They went beyond making a simple coconut scraper: they’d carve seeds into little animals in that spirit of making something new, something that reaches beyond. And it’s this experimentation that I want to continue moving on with - even right now.” www. jinlengyeoh.com ≠
“Those images of the old days – the boats and the kampung scenes – are all gone now.”