1941–present
Latiff Mohidin
Latiff Mohidin was born in 1941 in Lenggeng and as a young man won a scholarship to study in Berlin. After returning in 1964 he travelled through Indochina and the Malay world, and these journeys grew into the “Pago Pago” cycle (1964–1968). He paints, makes sculpture and writes poetry; his collection “Sungai Mekong” appeared in 1971. In 2018 the Centre Pompidou in Paris showed his work.
Biography
Latiff Mohidin sold his first painting at the age of eleven. The buyer was the British Commissioner-General for Southeast Asia, Sir Malcolm MacDonald.
He was born on 20 August 1941 in Lenggeng, in the state of Negeri Sembilan, into a family with roots in the Minangkabau community of West Sumatra. He received his primary education at the Kota Raja Malay School in Singapore. After his first exhibition at that school, people began to speak of him as a boy with a magical gift in his hands. According to some accounts, his father came from Tiku in Sumatra, and the family moved to Singapore later. From 1960 to 1964 Mohidin studied at the Academy of Arts in Berlin on a scholarship from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), the German Academic Exchange Service. Berlin gave him more than painting: it was then that he came to know German literature and became fascinated by Goethe. Because of this education he speaks Malay, English and German. After returning in 1964 he travelled through Indochina and the Malay world, meeting avant-garde artists and intellectuals. He tried to connect the history of modern art, with its drawing, painting and writing, to places beyond Europe and America. For this period he uses the phrase “Pago Pago”. By it he means the cosmopolitan yet regionally rooted spirit of his work, and he himself described it as a Southeast Asian brand of modernism. Paintings, sculptures and texts made mostly between 1964 and 1968 are gathered under this name. In writing on Southeast Asian art, this period holds a significant place.
In 1969 the French Ministry of Culture gave him a scholarship to study etching at the Atelier Lacourière-Frélaut in Paris. He then received a grant from the Asian Cultural Program of the JDR 3rd Fund (later the Asian Cultural Council) and spent a residency under it at the Pratt Institute in New York.
He came to be recognised as a poet after the collection “Sungai Mekong” (1971), later translated into several languages. His poems, like his painting, stay outside ideological systems and rather explore the author’s inner world. In 1988 came the book “GARIS Latiff Mohidin dari titik ke titik” (“Line: Latiff Mohidin from Point to Point”). His literary and painterly world was shaped also by Jorge Luis Borges, Chairil Anwar and Goethe. In 2012 he published his own Malay translation of the first part of Goethe’s “Faust”: he had, to my mind, begun to blur the line between the visual and the literary long before, but here it all but disappears.
In 2018 Mohidin became the first Southeast Asian artist to be given a presentation at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Profile notes