Despite Britain’s gradual colonization of Malaysia in the 18th and 19th centuries, 19th-century British landscape conventions had only a limited impact on the country’s artists and was largely ignored by the chroniclers of modern Malaysian art history. 

Between 1920 and 1939 in Penang, such artists as Yong Mun Sen, Abdullah Ariff, and Chuah Thean Teng mainly produced representational works interpreting national identity.

At the end of World War II, the Nanyang School, based in Singapore, made a conscious effort to fuse Western techniques with Eastern aesthetic principles. Well-known among this group are Georgette Chen, Cheong Soo Pieng, and Lim Yew Kuan.

Following Malaysian independence (1963), artists principally expressed their newfound freedom with landscapes. Malay artists such as Ariff set about developing a repertoire of imagery embodying ideal worlds in which nature and humans are unified, while Chinese artists such as Teng attempted to convey a more cosmopolitan impression of the region using traditional batik techniques.

In the late 1950s and ’60s the return of the first generation of artists who had trained overseas led to the development of a distinctly Malaysian aesthetic that encapsulated inherited tradition with a cosmopolitan appeal.

Later acknowledged as the founding fathers of Malaysian Abstract Expressionism, this group included Latiff Mohidin, Syed Ahmad Jamal, Jolly Koh, Ibrahim Hussein, Joseph Tan, and Yeoh Jin Leng. The works of these artists experimented with geometric lines and symmetry representative of classical Islamic art methods. Their efforts and approaches came to fuel a considerable debate about Malaysian national and Islamic identity and the future direction of contemporary art. A dominant trend to emerge was the exploration of Islamic consciousness, signalling a reexamination of medium and representation.

Source: Southeast Asian arts: Singapore and Malaysia: 20th and 21st centuries

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