The language of abstraction retains a vibrant presence in Malaysia, even in the new millennium. An exhibition organized by the Bank Negara Museum and Art Gallery, “The Unreal Deal: Six Decades of Malaysian Abstract Art” (2017), narrated the development of the genre from the 1950s to the present moment, tracing the beginnings of the contemporary or postmodern period to seminal moments in the late 1960s and 1970s. The geometric, hard-edged vocabulary of artists such as Tang Tuck Kan and Choong Kam Kow, working in a Minimalist lineage, were associated with the so-called New Scene that emerged in the 1970s, while the likes of Syed Ahmad Jamal, Latiff Mohidin and Yeoh Jin Leng, who favoured an expressive, intuitive approach, were referred to as the Grup artists, named for an eponymous exhibition held in 1967. Their work engendered a vital tradition of art-making that spans the gamut from the gestural to the geometric; as this author has remarked elsewhere, various strategies of abstraction remain discernible today. The first is a form of soft abstraction, dominated by the quasi-figurative. Other categories include gestural mark-making, centred on the action of the artist’s hand, and the geometric, including minimalism and the monochrome. Finally, materially-based abstraction is premised on an interest in materials and mediums in their own right, rather than as a means to an end.

Zulkifli Lee’s objects are poised between the geometric, the gestural and the material. The current exhibition is comprised of images and sculptures that are fabricated from natural materials such as soil, limestone and used wood. His two-dimensional works are comprised of stencilled geometric motifs, including lines, waves and other shapes, created from varieties of native soil and limestone collected from locations around Malaysia, rather than more familiar mediums such as paint. The chromatic palette of these compositions are entirely organic, derived from their constituent materials; no artificial colours or dyes were introduced in the process. The sculptural pieces are fabricated from found wood and steel, evincing the artist’s familiar idiom of block- and grid-like forms. The wooden components, often bearing the visible traces of age, damage and general wear and tear, were sourced from sites such as old kampung or village homes, disused train tracks and abandoned bridge structures in and around Kuala Lumpur, as well as being acquired from stores specializing in second-hand wood intended for upcycling. Carved into standardized shapes, these wooden blocks are juxtaposed with metal lattices in interlocking combinations that evoke the repetitive systems of capitalism and modern life (more on which later).

These works, as Zulkifli observes, foreground the patina of passing time and the defects inherent in nature, not unlike the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, while also suggesting the transformations in our everyday environment. The forms and materiality of his objects, however, also speak to metaphysical notions, even aesthetic precepts based on religious dictate. They represent attempts to bridge opposites and collapse dichotomies, a melding of consonance and dissonance in the aesthetic register – a dynamic that, of course, lent the show its title. He writes at length of the exhibition’s driving impulse:

Reality is a network of relationships. My sculptures works are a manifestation of the fact that we are always part of something larger than ourselves. I reconfigure familiar, interconnecting relationships. My work attempts to push the paradoxical coincidence of opposites. All paradoxes may be reconciled, and nature is built on opposites – a compromise between what is comforting and what is disturbing. Contrasts are the reality of nature, and to ignore them would be to ignore the complexities of life. Like the consonance and dissonance of intervals and chords in music, I want to celebrate opposites, acknowledge differences and learn to find beauty in the contrast.

This paradox of opposites, the contrast of contradictory phenomena that makes up the complex reality of the natural world, is embodied in the duality of forms, materials and textures in Zulkifli’s works: the sculptural interlacing of wood and metal, the employment of organic substances such as soil to produce carefully delineated geometries in his so-dubbed paintings. The amalgamation of dichotomous materialities and tactilities points to the religious doctrine of oneness, with unity functioning as an allusion to the Quranic creed of tawhid that asserts the absolute, indivisible singularity of God. Renowned Muslim scholar Ismail al Faruqi describes it as belief in the “ultimate, finalistic terminus and axiological ground that He must be unique … [a] uniqueness which the Muslim affirms in his confession of faith, “There is no God but God.” He – writing with his wife – further identifies six characteristics of Islamic aesthetics that produces the “impression of infinity and transcendence” demanded by tawhid: abstraction; modular structure; successive combinations; repetition; dynamism; intricacy. That Zulkifli’s objects are emblematic of these attributes is immediately apparent, and the al Faruqis’ remarks throw the matter into relief. Repetition, for instance, serves to reinforce the language of abstraction by the “curbing of the individuation of the constituent parts”, preventing “any one module in the design from taking precedence over another”, while dynamism, or the temporal experience inherent to the viewing of modular patterns, ensures that the “infinite pattern can never be comprehended in a single glance, in a single moment … The totality cannot be comprehended simultaneously; instead, one only knows the whole after savouring and experiencing its many parts.”

Given the context of his personal faith, the religious connotations of Zulkifli’s practice seem unsurprising. (He identifies as Malay-Muslim.) What is equally significant in the understanding of his visual vocabulary, however, is the genealogy of minimalism that his objects are heir to. Formal traits such as geometricity, seriality and repetition are aligned with the priorities of Islamic art and design, but, at the same time, recall broader references that have been read into the minimalist ethos – namely, evocations of our architectural fabric, and the abstract impulses of modernity and capitalism. The forms of his sculptures suggest urban edifice and traditional structure alike, calling to mind the anonymity of modern architecture on the one hand, and the evolution of Malaysia’s built environment on the other. The latter, Zulkifli remarks, is attested to by the use of found wood in his work, typically of tropical hardwood species such as chengal (Neobalanocarpus) and balau (Shorea) that are common to Southeast Asia, and scavenged from the remains of abandoned houses, train tracks and even electrical poles. He points out that newly-cut wood has little character; the “patina of time”, in his words, is inimitable by human hand and stands as testimony not simply to divine action, or the work of God, but also the material culture of rural lifeworlds. Traditional wood-crafted Malay homes, from the long-roofed house (rumah bumbung panjang) to the pyramid-roofed version (rumah bumbung limas), are still in evidence in kampungs across the country. Postwar development, of course, assured the displacement of wood by steel, glass and concrete, but historical materialities and the memory of vanishing ways of life are embedded in these structural fragments.

The impression that these sculptural configurations instantly elicit, however, is the rationalization of the urban terrain. The blankness of contemporary architecture – especially the machine aesthetic of the International Style, with its modular, mass-produced formats – informs the vertical ascent of the city and its often impassive appearance. Akadraga (2023), for instance, foregrounds the gridded pattern of its metal elements, their cubic layout protruding outward like so many windows in an office block, while Samasama (2023) snakes upwards in a zig-zag shape, the crenellated edges of its wooden tower hugged by steel scaffolding on one side. Zulkifli remembers that, on his way to classes as a M.A. student at Universiti Teknologi MARA in Shah Alam in the 2010s, he would espy construction work underway for stations along a new MRT (mass rapid transit) line – likely the Kajang Line, which began operating in 2016. The recollection of these scaffolding-clad sites, metonyms for the constantly developing Klang Valley conurbation that surrounds Kuala Lumpur, eventually found its way into the current pieces. It is Julang (2024) that perhaps invites architectural comparisons most clearly. Boasting a sleek, linear exoskeleton that wraps around a core structure of alternating wood and steel blocks, it implies both the shape of Constantin Brancusi’s many variations on his Endless Column motif (which first appeared in 1918), as well as landmarks such as the Norman Foster-designed headquarters of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation in the former British colony, which is held up by conspicuous external trusses on its façade that serve as supports for the entire tower. Closer to home, the architectural intimations and vertical orientation of Julang hint at current socio-economic contexts, with Malaysia witnessing the recent rise of two skyscrapers that are, as of the writing of this essay, the tallest and second tallest buildings in the country, and the tallest and third tallest in the region – respectively, Merdeka 118, which was inaugurated in January 2024, and The Exchange 106, opened in 2019.

Other works in the exhibition are two-dimensional pieces that the artist refers to as ‘paintings.’ Despite the label, their creation involved neither paint nor pigment. The primary materials were soil and limestone of varying hues, ground into extremely fine granules and mixed with an acrylic binder, with water utilized as a solvent. The geometric motifs were produced with a stencil, and range from the dense mesh of diagonals and horizontals in Berkampung: Serong & Datar (2024), to the multicoloured blocks of wavy lines of Korus Duet (2024), to the allover squiggles seen in Alun-alun (2020). Zulkifli admits that his embrace of abstraction, while coinciding with Islamic precepts, is in part a reaction to his previous career as a graphic designer and illustrator in the advertising industry, the output for which was very much focused on the human figure. What ultimately connects his two- and three-dimensional works is the trope of abstraction. As painter and academic Peter Halley noted, the auspices of modernity and capitalism have, for many of us, diluted the physicality of our world into little more than ideational analogues and flows: “Each human being is no longer just a number, but is a collection of numbers … There is the telephone number, the social security number, and the credit card number. The financial markets … have completely detached themselves from any relationship with the material world. Currencies float. National boundaries crumble.” Elsewhere, he writes, social relations are governed by the abstraction of urban topographies: “People live in sealed houses or condos in highly controlled landscapes. They travel in the sealed environment of the automobile along the abstract pathway of the highway to equally artificial office parks and shopping malls. When one speaks of abstract art, it is essential to remember that it is only a reflection of a physical environment that has also become essentially abstract.”

The abstraction of the economy, of cities, of development; these are determined by the all-encompassing systems of capitalism and technocracy, forces that structure the tenor of life as it is experienced in the twentieth century and beyond. Perhaps art historian Anna Chave hit the nail on the head when, on the topic of minimalism, she pointedly observed that “what disturbs viewers most about Minimalist art may be what disturbs them most about their own lives and times, as the face it projects is society’s blankest, steeliest face, the impersonal face of technology, industry, and commerce.” Adherence to the doctrines of Islam represents one discursive aspect of Zulkifli’s work, but the assembly-line standardization that characterizes mass production – whether architectural, urban or technological – is transposed into the aesthetic register in his objects, and serve as uncanny, uneasy reminders.