Iskandar Jalil: Singapore's master ceramicist
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Iskandar Jalil: Singapore's master ceramicist
by: Helen Musa :: http://www.worldaa.comRemoved from all the commercialism that bombards the devout Muslim and mystic artist may be, but he is not short of opinions. 'Power is abusive, obscene and degrading. It is not in the language of a true craftsman,' Iskandar says. A mighty champion of the arts, he lives with his teacher wife Saleha in a small terrace house almost swamped by lush tropical foliage. Inside his front gate are dozens of pots drying by the fish pond, a tribute to his early Japanese training regime of producing fifty cups a day just to understand clay. Most of those pots will end up donated to community groups in Singapore to auction for profit.
For all his modesty, Iskandar is one of the giants of the Singapore arts scene and an artist with worldwide connections. Australian potters Greg Daly and Janet Mansfield are his good friends' with Daly he shared a memorable if surreptitious soda-firing session in Canberra.
He has visited ceramicists all around the world, faithfully recording his travels in words and sketches in the small notebooks given to him by his students over the years. He has spent time in Scandinavia, Iran and Cambodia where he worked with local Muslim artisans at the Singa kiln in Siem Reap. From the Blue Mountains in NSW he got his famous 'Iskandar blue.'
Iskandar's pupils are the leading ceramics teachers of Singapore. He is the subject of five books and is still, at 68, whizzing around Singapore on his motorbike spotting repositories of local clay useful to the artists at nearby Jalan Bahar Clay Studios in the Dragon Kiln Village.
It is hard to imagine an artist quite so honoured in his own time and country. His works are owned by the Sultan of Brunei and former US president George Bush Senior. His larger wall installations can be seen in Tanjong Pagar Railway Station and Changi Airport. Raised within a stone�s throw of the Sultan Mosque, he has been honoured as one of Singapore's leading Malay citizens, and in 1988 received the National Cultural Medallion for Visual Arts. On that occasion thanking the Government for 'accepting pottery as a craft on par with other forms of visual literary and performing arts.'
At the same time, he regards Japan as his spiritual home, where back in 1972 he came under the influence of Shoji Hamada, author of the 'truth to material' movement in pottery and where he adopted the Wabi-sabi principle of aesthetic non-sentimentality. For thirty-seven years, he says, he has been sponsoring young Malays who can identify their strengths. So long, as those strengths are in the arts or culture, he'll give them an airfare to study anywhere in the world.
Strangely, this giant of the art world was originally a science student. But he needed what was called a 'lighter' subject, so took up ceramics. Forty-five years later he is still doing it. 'My hobby became my life work,' he says.
Some of the scientist remains in his love of experimenting. He has been playing with is what remains of the lotus flower when it dies off. The resulting works are called Lotus pots, though most people think they look like rice noodle dishes. His zen-like preoccupations appear in the titles of exhibitions like Raw, Earthy and Pliable and My Dialogue with Clay. He rejects high gloss finishes and has always endeavoured to draw his textures and colours from nature.
Iskandar still walks every day for about 90 minutes, and calls his life�s ceramic work 'my journey to the unknown.'