Tell us about how you came to conceive the works for the show – what were your inspirations and aims for this duo exhibition?

Zulkifli: For this series of work, it all started during my year- long residency at Rimbun Dahan, Malaysia in 2017. Back then, I decided to create a new body of work during the residency. In my creative practice, I have always been interested in the language of materials and personalized and impersonalized forms in art making. I continued in this direction, but I wanted to expand it in relation to my previous works.

In developing this new body of work, I believed it was important to start from my own realities and use them as a point of departure. That’s why I try to look back at my own tradition, culture, and faith for inspiration.

I want to bridge contemporary and traditional ideas in my art making through an introspective methodology that has its origins in an Islamic aesthetic philosophy called Nazzariyah. The philosophy comprises four components of aesthetics: first, Tabiat, which talks about the beauty of nature that happens outside the control of humans; second, Riyaziyyah, which discusses the beauty of numbers and geometric forms; third, Insanniyah, which talks about the beauty of humans; and lastly, Illahiyah, which discusses the beauty of God who creates it all.

In making my works, I believe it is more about a problem of method rather than style. Syed Ahmad Jamal said that Malay art forms are the creation of the soul that inspires it, a harmony between man and nature. With this attitude, I try to work and reconnect directly with nature, using organic materials such as soil, limestone, wood, iron oxide, etc. I play with the value of materiality of my chosen medium and engage with the materials’ physicality, visual properties, and phenomenological aspects. I submit part of the image making to the law of nature, to forms and dispositions of art elements outside my personal control. The marks are created by chance, deforming and transforming the images created by me and vice versa.

I think we tend to dislike and stay away from things we don’t understand. Understanding is what shifts the perspective of our appreciation; it sets the value and forms joy. Understanding how something is made, what it is made of, is the empirical process I take toward my chosen materials and medium. The direct manipulation of and intervention with the material is like a dialectical process between the inner and outer realities that make our world.

This is why I tend to create works using unconventional, mundane, and simple mediums to seek and create value. Beauty and artistic taste can exist in simple things too. My

work is not about spectacular, extraordinary, or grand things. I always love to work with humble or ordinary materials: the familiar things in life and our surroundings, things that are normally left unnoticed, that we generally perceive as ugly or ordinary.

Your works are informed by principles of abstraction, modular structure, successive combination, repetition, dynamism, and intricacy that are found in traditional Islamic art. Yet, works like Kesan (No. 1) and Kesan (No. 2) stand out as being quite different from the systematized, minimalist appearance of your main body of work, with layered canvases and the burning or folding of parts of the canvas. Could you share with us the process of creating these works?

Zulkifli: These six principles were introduced by the late Ismail and Lois Lamya al-Faruqi to describe the basic formalistic values that can be found in Islamic art. These principles can also be found in traditional Malay art, especially in Awan Larat motifs. I used these principles as my basic approach in creating and composing the art elements in my works. However, I do not consider them a necessity.

Usually the patterns in my works are composed without elements of focality, with no end and beginning, portraying the idea of infinity. The geometric forms in my works are systematically arranged by means of strict and controlled mathematical order. However, I embrace changes and chance, so some parts are left imperfect and freed. This breaks up the otherwise monotonous, repetitive, and rigid appearance of the works. It creates an interesting tension and harmonious relationship between the controlled, personalized form and uncontrolled, impersonalized form.

Speaking specifically about Kesan (No. 1) and Kesan (No. 2), you can still find these formal principles embedded in them. However, more than just a matter of formal preferences, what I am looking at is the attitude with which the artist confronts and explores reality through art. In exploring the material aspect of my works, I try to expand my process by using the physical conditions of materials. The canvas can be folded and destroyed, while fire is a medium of energy that exists in nature. The changeable nature that these materials possess are interesting for me to highlight in my work.

My artistic approach aims to understand the world by using materials we find in our environment and mapping the relationships that connect them. Using natural phenomena, activating temporal processes, and working with organic substances, my works aim to reveal resonances in the materials that are part of our lives. I try to develop it by tracing the processes of transformation that the respective materials undergo. Starting from an in-depth exploration of the materials’ behaviours, my works aim to use art’s capacity to cast humans into the structure of the world and to sketch out a new kind of connectivity to the processes unfolding within it.

In your sculptures, we see the contrasting materials of wood and metal interlocking with one another. How do your sculptures relate to or depart from your painting practice?

Zulkifli: Of course, my sculptures are different from my painting; however, they are not a great departure from them entirely. You can find a similarity of forms and interpretation between them. For instance, the mathematical order, geometric forms, directness of materials, and philosophical view of them are still the same.

My venture into sculpture is a natural development of my interest in the physical aspect of my works. When a child is born, one important stage of development is to touch things and try to make sense of the physical world. Sense is not just limited to visual sense, which is why I think the haptic and empirical experience is an interesting subject to explore in my practice. Even for my painting, I always treat it as an object-making act rather than the traditional view of picture making.

Material-wise, they are not things I have gathered and found. Wood and steel are industrial products. However, both inherit different connotations. Wood is a product of nature; it is a material that already exists in nature. While steel is actually a product of human intervention of nature, made by combining the elements of iron and carbon together. This again relates to the aesthetic value of Tabiat and Insaniyyah.

My sculptural works examine the relationship and harmony of contradictory opposites, of human intervention and material limitations. The geometric forms create modular interconnections, in which a small or micro unit is interlocked with other units to form a larger interdependent whole. Each unit can stand on its own while simultaneously existing as a part of a larger macro form.

With this empiricist view and haptic concept that I am interested in, I also created a participatory sculpture, titled Isi. I tried to close the gap between the personal and the public idea. Unlike the other two sculptures that were, by definition, static, this work can evolve and provide a unique encounter for each individual who partakes in the experience.

Finally, Zul, the colour palette of your works have a monochromatic appearance and are unique and one-of- a-kind. Where do you find these materials and how do you achieve the subtle variations in tone in your works?

Zulkifli: As mentioned before, I work with nature directly. All of my work uses organic, raw materials. I seek and gather my materials in the real environment around where I live. Just like the ready-made and found object notion of Western art, I consider my materials as found and ready-made materials in nature.

I love to go to construction sites. I think of the site as an encounter and intervention between humans and nature too. The construction site gives me access to many different types of topsoil and subsoils. It’s a practical choice, really, as it’s an easy place to find my materials.

In making my work, the directness of materials is really important. I try to sustain their natural character as much as possible. My work is not a representation of something else but rather a concrete invention of the matter that makes it. The space, form, texture, colour, etc. of the work is not an illusionary image but the real physicality of the matter itself.

Unlike industry-made colours, the colours made by raw materials are not consistent in appearance. So even if they come from the same source of soil or limestone, their tones and colours will differ, sometimes in subtle ways and other times not. There is little possibility of finding the exact same colour again even if I gather the soil at the same place. This makes the colour palette of my works unique and one-of-a- kind.