In Person - The Elusive Artist: An interview with Latiff Mohidin

He said no and I was crushed. That was, essentially, the first 5 minutes of my whirlwind get-together with one of Malaysia's most elusive painters, Latiff Mohidin. The opportunity to interview him came merely 24 hours before the day itself. After waiting several years for the man to surface from his studio in Penang, one simply does not wait around to say yes to such an offer. The hours to follow were spent going through the archives of texts written about him and visually consuming what his brush-to-canvass efforts had to offer, albeit from the limitations of my computer screen. The time set for the interview was 2pm. I got there earlier and walked around the exhibition, a retrospective by the Balai Seni Visual Negara featuring a third of his entire body of work, spanning three periods; the Formative (1951-1960s including his years spent in Singapore and Berlin), the Meditative (1970s-1980s) and the Gestural (1980s-now). Soon after it was my turn to meet the man himself and in absolutely no time at all, he told me that he was tired after doing so many media interviews that day and that it was off! Think, Dino, think! I only had one chance to hook him in. Then I blurted it out. "Tuan. Please indulge me, but if there is one question I have always wanted to ask you, it's this; how is it that after all these years, when one talks about your work, inadvertently Pago-pago comes up? I mean, this was your work from more than four decades ago!" A moment to consider. Yes! I was in. But this interview was different. We did not waste time getting to know Latiff Mohidin, the man. Off camera, he nonchalantly suggested that to know about his background, we must read up on it some other time. Happy to be known only as Pak Latiff, this interview was a visual journey of the artiste. From his very first piece, a typical kampong scene painted on canvass when he was nine, to the ever green Pago-pago, and beyond. And for the first time that day (I was told), Latiff Mohidin beamed as he spoke proudly of his masterpieces, one at a time.