Iskandar Jalil: Singapore's master
ceramicist
by: Helen
Musa :: http://www.worldaa.com
Removed from all the commercialism that bombards the devout
Muslim and mystic artist may be, but he is not short of opinions.
'Power is abusive, obscene and degrading. It is not in the language
of a true craftsman,' Iskandar says. A mighty champion of the arts,
he lives with his teacher wife Saleha in a small terrace house
almost swamped by lush tropical foliage. Inside his front gate are
dozens of pots drying by the fish pond, a tribute to his early
Japanese training regime of producing fifty cups a day just to
understand clay. Most of those pots will end up donated to
community groups in Singapore to auction for profit.
For all his modesty, Iskandar is one of the giants of the Singapore
arts scene and an artist with worldwide connections. Australian
potters Greg Daly and Janet Mansfield are his good friends' with
Daly he shared a memorable if surreptitious soda-firing session in
Canberra.
He has visited ceramicists all around the world, faithfully
recording his travels in words and sketches in the small notebooks
given to him by his students over the years. He has spent time in
Scandinavia, Iran and Cambodia where he worked with local Muslim
artisans at the Singa kiln in Siem Reap. From the Blue Mountains in
NSW he got his famous 'Iskandar blue.'
Iskandar's pupils are the leading ceramics teachers of Singapore.
He is the subject of five books and is still, at 68, whizzing
around Singapore on his motorbike spotting repositories of local
clay useful to the artists at nearby Jalan Bahar Clay Studios in
the Dragon Kiln Village.
It is hard to imagine an artist quite so honoured in his own time
and country. His works are owned by the Sultan of Brunei and former
US president George Bush Senior. His larger wall installations can
be seen in Tanjong Pagar Railway Station and Changi Airport. Raised
within a stones throw of the Sultan Mosque, he has been honoured as
one of Singapore's leading Malay citizens, and in 1988 received the
National Cultural Medallion for Visual Arts. On that occasion
thanking the Government for 'accepting pottery as a craft on par
with other forms of visual literary and performing arts.'
At the same time, he regards Japan as his spiritual home, where
back in 1972 he came under the influence of Shoji Hamada, author of
the 'truth to material' movement in pottery and where he adopted
the Wabi-sabi principle of aesthetic non-sentimentality. For
thirty-seven years, he says, he has been sponsoring young Malays
who can identify their strengths. So long, as those strengths are
in the arts or culture, he'll give them an airfare to study
anywhere in the world.
Strangely, this giant of the art world was originally a science
student. But he needed what was called a 'lighter' subject, so took
up ceramics. Forty-five years later he is still doing it. 'My hobby
became my life work,' he says.
Some of the scientist remains in his love of experimenting. He has
been playing with is what remains of the lotus flower when it dies
off. The resulting works are called Lotus pots, though most people
think they look like rice noodle dishes. His zen-like
preoccupations appear in the titles of exhibitions like Raw, Earthy
and Pliable and My Dialogue with Clay. He rejects high gloss
finishes and has always endeavoured to draw his textures and
colours from nature.
Iskandar still walks every day for about 90 minutes, and calls his
lifes ceramic work 'my journey to the unknown.'