langkawi magazine

Culture SECTION

Ibrahim Hussein Arts Center in Langkawi

Langkawi's most prominent favorite son is Dato Ibrahim Hussein, perhaps the most celebrated Malaysian artist.

Unlike most celebrities, he enjoys visitors and shares with them the fruits of his creative endeavors. This is done in a clearing on a densely forested hillside overlooking the Andaman Sea. There is a simple but dramatic white structure, home of the Ibrahaim Hussein Museum and Cultural Foundation.

Dato calls it the first phase of the project. What he envisages is a living center where international painters, sculptors, musicians and scholars can come to exchange ideas, create, perform and study. Actually, it's something for artists in Malaysia like Robert Redford's Sundance Institute is for young filmmakers in Sundance, Utah.

A project that ambitious ordinarily would be undertaken only by some well-endowed philanthropic foundation. Yet, meeting by meeting, personal entreaties, and what might be called 'arm twisting', the soft-spoken, affable Malaysian artist has accomplished on his own what others bluntly told him time and time again could not be done.

Even the prime minister on a visit to Langkawi once passed the site and saw construction taking place. He commented in surprise to the Dato, 'I thought you had given up.' He hadn't. But no one would have blamed him if he had.

Ibrahim Hussein is a highly successful and widely recognized artist, perhaps better known outside Malaysia than inside. Chu-Li, the art authority, has written of Hussein's modernistic, abstract work 'His style is futuristic and it is through a distinctive ordering of lines that he expresses differing complexities of form and dimensions.

He has no gallery that displays and sells his works. No agent. If someone hears of him and his work and is interested in acquiring one of his abstract paintings, they must manage to find his home, which doubles as his studio, in Kuala Lumpur. There one of his paintings fetch as much as $170,000.

Those works that are in Malaysia are mainly found in the offices of banks, major corporations and in private collections.

Now a visitor to Langkawi, for the small price of admission, can spend hours studying and admiring Hussein's major recent works as well as dozens of whimsical objects he has created while 'camping out' at the Center. Dato never intended the Center to be a gallery for his works. And to be sure he does not sell here.

Thanks to him Langkawi, now a major leisure destination, also boasts an arts Center of world-class stature.

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