Yesterday while visiting my friend in Kuala Lumpur, I went to one of the art gallery there, The Petronas gallery, they had two exhibition one is called Bumi Nusantara and the second is Daerah Samad.
Bumi Nusantara (Nusantara Journey) was actually a recollection of journey of the Petronas Adventure team which is gracefully done by Masnoor Ramli, whom are member of Matahati art group. The journey started from West Malaysia through Indonesia to East Malaysia, the exhibition would show how Masnoor would capture the journey in form of photography, paintings, videos and artifacts. Some of their portrayals of Indonesia,are depressingly true, however some like the picture above, is actually amazing, the picture was actually an art from my hometown, called tapis which is similar to batik in Java and the fact that not many people knows it. Some of the portrayals are showing the very life of Indonesian citizens with their everyday difficulty or natural disaster that have been happening recently such as the tsunami in Aceh or Lapindo-Brantas mud tragedy in East Java.
This picture shows some of the comic portrayals of pop cultures in Indonesia, how smoking is part of the everyday life,and even an old man would still smoke a specific type of cigarette brand, which has the tagline of "Male's Choice" (well ok, it's kinda weird if I try to direct translate it, but it's the one that written there)
Daerah Samad (Samad's Land) on the other hand is a totally different kind of arts, while Bumi Nusantara would portray the journey through Indonesia, Daerah Samad is collection of 100 sketches from a national Malaysian Laureate Poet named A. Samad Said. The sketches however, not always using papers as the medium, some of them are even using tissue napkins from various restaurants, however a common theme was that the sketches consisted of dots and lines of black and red colors.
Here are some of his arts, some of them are words that I couldn't read however it is still amazing how he had been doing this all the time, and below is one of the example of the sketches.
Sorry to only having a small number of pictures, I forgot to save some of the interesting ones on my phone, well however this exhibition is giving new impression in my dull life. For more information you can go to Petronas Gallery website
Cheers