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EXHIBITED
911, Taksu Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, 2002.

LITERATURE
Ivan Lam: After All These Years, Wei-Ling Gallery,Kuala Lumpur, 2007, illustrated on page 26.

Influenced by Pop Art godfathers Jasper John and Robert Rauschenberg, Lam’s works depart from the dominance of abstraction in the Malaysian art scene by appropriating popular cultural imagery and iconographies, employing tools of mass production, and combining the principles of design and commercialism, to reinvent a visual language that is distinctly his own. Quoted from curator Anurendra Jegadeva’s essay Ivan Lam On Painting… So Far, ‘not only is his body of work an important part of the history of art in Malaysia but it presents a great session in the practice of painting as a serious science and methodology which places it as new and contemporary medium’.

Initially trained as a printmaker, Lam is obsessed with the systematic act of layering, strategic composition of colours, and perfection in graphic clarity and balance. Evident in this piece, 911, the giant text blocks ‘the day the music died’ are executed with crisp precision and stark contrast, with letters conjoining one another to form abstracted geometric shapes that oscillates between text and graphic. This signature line from Don McLean’s famous song American Pie surrounds a burning flag, pointing to the obvious reference of the September Eleven terrorist attack on the New York Twin Towers. However, for Lam, the text is used purely as a visual device, and it is entirely up to the viewer to bring their own interpretation to the symbols and signifiers depicted in his work. Exhibited in his 911 solo in Taksu Gallery in 2002, the 911 series is a significant turning point where Lam wrapped up his American-based work and ventured into his next series CMYK.

Ivan Lam, one of the most popular contemporary Malaysian artists, received his art education in University of East London, Maine College of Art, USA and Limkokwing Institute of Technology, Malaysia. Since returning from the United States, Lam has been establishing and inventing himself to become the epitome of Malaysian pop art where his work has been exhibited in various private and public galleries in Malaysia and abroad. Lam is one of the few artists who are ‘sponsored’ by a paint company, Nippon where he uses them for his paintings. An award-winning artist who has garnered numerous art awards both locally and internationally, he was the grand prize-winner for the sought-after Phillip Morris Art prize in 2003, and was most recently amongst the top 10 finalists in the Sovereign Art competition, in Hong Kong. No stranger to the auction scene, his painting Three Buses was auctioned in Christie’s Hong Kong in 2008 for a final bid of HKD125,000, almost three times its lower estimate.