the monday interview with Iskandar Jalil: Melting Pot

Hand it to Singapore's foremost ceramics artist Iskandar Jalil, who believes handcrafted household items must be both beautiful and useful. ST PHOTO: KEVIN LIM

Jun 21, 2010
the monday interview with Iskandar Jalil
Melting Pot
Master potter Iskander Jalil melds his old-school upbringing with the Japanese respect for tradiional crafts and will soon open a larger studio and teaching centre
By john lui

This reporter arrives at Iskandar Jalil's home two minutes late. Singapore's most well-known ceramics artist is standing at his gate, waiting, hands behind his back, not looking happy.

The interview has not started well.

This is the art teacher who locks out tardy students. Known as much for his crankiness as his deftness at the potter's wheel, his sharp tongue - as well as his habit of smashing students' pieces he thinks are derivative or lazy - he has brought more than a few to tears.

But thankfully, I am spared. If the Cultural Medallion recipient had been grumpy, the mood passed as he gave a tour of his three-storey terrace house in Jalan Kembangan, its ground floor turned into a den, ceramics library and gallery. He lives here with his wife Saleha, daughter Elena and son-in-law.

'Cikgu', as his students used to address him, is proud of the small garden, teeming with staghorn ferns and jasmine, graced by a koi pond. He says he invites neighbourhood children in to see the fish or watch him throw a pot on the wheel at the verandah. A home-made lime-and- pandan drink is served in one of his typically chunky cups. Male artists should not make delicate pieces, he feels.

He chuckles at the idea that his collectors, after having paid thousands of dollars for one of his works, prefer to display them behind glass than use them.

Without warning, he picks up one of his cups and bashes it on the wooden tabletop, hard. Bang bang bang. It is intact. He points to the hard interior glaze.

'If you have one of these and it leaks, bring it to me and I will give you a new one. An even better one,' he says. He holds to the Japanese belief that handcrafted household items must be both beautiful and useful.

At 71, he is still in the thick of the action - teaching pottery, making vases and drinking vessels which he calls his 'bread-and-butter pieces' and preparing more adventurous, non-utilitarian works which he dubs 'art pieces', for his one-man show next year.

'It will be my fifth show. I think it will be the finale. I will be 72,' he says flatly.

A large part of pottery work is manual labour. Sacks of material have to be unloaded, works have to be lifted into blazing kilns and there are endless chemistry experiments to discover new coatings and colours.

He has had health problems, among them with his right eye, where 90 per cent of the vision has been lost, most likely due to high blood pressure.

But he says his biggest project is still ahead of him. He is brimming with ideas for his new and larger studio and teaching centre at Temasek Polytechnic in Tampines, which should be open next month.

He cannot wait to move out of his current location at the Malay Heritage Centre in Kampong Glam, where he has been artist-in-residence for nearly two years.

The centre is not renewing his lease and that of another resident artist, batik master Sarkasi Said, 70, because of a revamp.

The move to Tampines will let him do the things he has always wanted to do, but could not. 'I'm eager to go. I'm excited. It's been my dream,' he says.

He hit a low point after he woke up in April with almost half his vision gone, but the new start has revitalised him.

He will be teaching and making pottery in the east, which will not only ease his commute, but allow him to reach out to students in that more densely populated part of the country, he believes.

He will set up a one-stop pottery and ceramics centre to teach, sell and display. It will be a collective, open to all artists and run by artists and volunteers.

His voice rises when he talks about the often predatory relationship between dealers and artists. 'Swindling,' he calls it.

He says he has found a good dealer in Art-2 Gallery, with whom he has worked for almost 20 years, but others have not been so lucky.

Up-and-coming artists would especially benefit from an open, supportive centre such as the one he is proposing.

Over the two days that we talk, he gives pointed views about the Singapore education system (too much specialisation, too soon), his stormy relationship with the authorities, his friends and supporters and why he expects so much of himself and others. He believes he has earned his right to speak, by reason of his age and contributions to art and teaching.

That characteristic prickly, pessimistic tone is never far when he talks, especially when the topic is about the place of craftsmen in Singapore, compared with the place he considers his second home, Japan, where he received further training in the art in 1972 under a Colombo Plan scholarship.

Without a culture of respect for the skills of the dressmaker, woodworker or potter, he feels that craftsmen will forever be at the mercy of landlords.

The National Heritage Board, which manages the Malay Heritage Centre, has said it is upgrading the exhibits, providing more public spaces and 'contemporising the programmes and activities'.

'I thought I would be at the centre until I kicked the bucket,' he says.

So why not own his own workshop and be master of his own fate? He shoots down that idea. Too impractical, he says, he would not be able to focus on both art and running a business.

Ms Vera Ong, 52, owner of the Art-2 Gallery, says that while the artist might have rough ideas about pricing, he prefers a largely hands-off approach to administration and financial matters. 'He leaves it to us to select the pieces we want for our gallery. He doesn't want to handle the money side of things,' she says.

As Singapore's leading potter, he sets the benchmark for other craftsmen. His value has risen 'a fair bit' in the last two decades, she says.

A teapot of his would have cost $300 in 1990, but his small pieces now start at $800 and larger ones can go up to $6,000.

She knows that he throws away most of his raw work because it does not meet his standards, but that is par for the course for any good artist. Iskandar is just very fussy about quality, she says.

In Material Message Metaphor, a coffee-table book about Iskandar and his work that her gallery published in 2007, he is as unsparing with others as he is with his own work.

In a self-penned essay about a typical day in his life, the avid motorcyclist gripes about traffic policemen.

He calls out experts who say his works are 'Japanese-influenced' ('They have not influenced me... I am inspired by their culture... and discipline.'). He is dismayed by potters who do not feel it necessary to master the wheel or who moan about the limitations of clay ('I am not a sculptor. I believe in making the simple bowl, teapots and spherical vases.')

And if you think the Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze-starring Ghost (1990) with its famous gooey pottery scene typifies the process, he will set you straight. He works with as little water as possible.

'I hate to see a pool of water in the wheel basin. It's untidy and unsightly,' he writes.

In the book, and during the Life! interview, he emphasises instinct, rather than intellect, to create. He is dismissive of the cerebral and abstract nature of contemporary art, especially installation art, and how much of it cannot stand without a theoretical framework to bolster it.

'Picasso could draw before he went into abstract art,' he says, and the former visual communications teacher is appalled at how so many younger, celebrated artists have put expression above craftsmanship. Other bugbears include artists who ape the styles of others.

Woe betide any student who violated these principles, say those who took his foundation course on material design at Temasek Polytechnic.

One former student is award-winning film director Royston Tan, 34.

'A student's nightmare', is how he describes the tutor who once brought him to tears with his harsh words.

'We all hated him. We were stretched to the max. But we all came out different people. He taught us basic respect for our craft and the material. It's part of my own philosophy and how I work now,' he says. He has invited Iskandar to speak at his film events.

The artist had trademark quirks. He would lock out latecomers at the start of the lesson, says Tan.

Iskandar, a compulsive journal keeper known for his beautiful flowing calligraphic style, would accept only handwritten assignments, to better read the person behind the essay.

Sub-standard clay works were not just marked down. They were smashed with a hammer or flung from the fifth-floor classroom. Students nicknamed him 'the Flying Missile'.

Iskandar is almost gleeful when he recalls these incidents. 'Royston called me a 'murderer',' he says, chuckling.

In the decades that he was a potter, he also taught fulltime at Baharuddin Vocational Institute and Temasek Polytechnic's School of Design, until his retirement in 1999.

He also taught at community centres and at the Nanyang School of Fine Arts. He has also been an external examiner for the MARA Institute of Technology in Malaysia, and Curtin University in Australia.

He and his wife Saleha, 68, also a retired teacher, have two children - son Edzra, 40, and daughter Elena, 34, both also teachers. They have two grandchildren from Edzra's marriage.

Art was the furthest thing from the mind of the young Iskandar. His father, Abdul Jalil, trained to be a doctor but had to drop out of the then King Edward VII Medical School when his parents died. The former Raffles Institution boy then became a teacher and government auditor. Iskandar was the eldest of five.

Life in Kampong Chantek in the Bukit Timah area was not easy, but not especially hard, he says. As a child, his duties included getting wood for cooking fuel. He was in Victoria School and attended the then Teacher's Training College in 1962 and became a science and mathematics teacher.

His old-school approach to discipline comes from both his father and his admiration for the Japanese way of passing on the art of traditional crafts.

Apprentices learn complex techniques through the repetitive execution of simpler, almost trivial tasks, year upon year.

After all, it was only in 2000, 12 years after he had been given the Cultural Medallion, that his pottery 'sensei' or mentor in Japan bestowed on him the title of 'master potter'.

The slow accumulation of experience is the only way to pick up an instinctive feeling for the material, he says. During a visit to his workshop at the Malay Heritage Centre, Iskandar throws a pot to demonstrate what he means by instinct.

He does not know beforehand what will emerge. 'I let the material talk to me,' he says.

He relies mostly on his left hand to shape the material from the inside of the pot, as his right lost some function over a decade ago. He is now learning to work around his bad eye by touch and muscle memory.

Iskandar is aware that this Jedi-master approach will not wash in time-short, achievement-oriented Singapore. Even young Japanese see the old ways of learning as hardship, he says. Over the years, however, he has amassed a corp of loyal students, a few of whom still work with him and who are ceramics artists and teachers in their own right.

Some of those students will help him move equipment to his new digs in Tampines.

There is a glint in his eye when he talks about the fresh start. 'It's a new adventure, right?'

johnlui@sph.com.sg

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my life so far

'My blindness in one eye made me think, 'How can I do good work with only one eye?' But I know there is always a way'







On coping with health issues

'I sleep on the floor, on a thin mattress. It forces the body to move around when you sleep, so that your blood can flow. On a soft, comfortable bed, the blood doesn't flow. Why do you think the Japanese can live to 100? They sleep on tatami mats. In the old days, the Malays slept on wooden planks and the Chinese used porcelain pillows'

Iskandar during his youth (top) and trying out the traditional foot-kick wheel (above) at a pottery factory while on holiday in Cappadocia, Turkey, in 1997

On not getting soft

'Those who think and conceptualise, in any work, will make that work clinical and contrived. A good piece comes from understanding the material and yourself'

On why he prefers to be guided by instinct

Iskandar Jalil in a family portrait taken in the 1980s with (from left) son Edzra, wife Saleha and daughter Elena

'I give marks to students who made mistakes and the other students who got it right were angry with me. I told them it was because the mistakes were good mistakes. At your level, you can't see it'

On his teaching philosophy

and as a boy (with white hat, below) at home in Kampong Chantek in Bukit Timah.