Ahmad Fuad Osman
Recollections of Long Lost Memories
Recollections of Long Lost Memories by Ahmad Fuad Osman is a series of 71 black and white sepia-toned archival photographs that chart, with nostalgia, the social encounters between hierarchies of life in the Malay world. It begins with British colonial rule in the mid 1800s, followed by its occupation by Japanese forces in the 1940s, the rise of Communism in the 1950s, and then the racial issues between Islamic, Chinese, and Indonesian populations in a multicultural country desiring political independence in the 1960 and 70s.
The archival photographs in this series were gleaned from national archives, museums, libraries, and old books across Malaysia. Comically embedded within each of these rare archival photographs is a figure in technicolor, heavily bearded, sunglass clad in a T-shirt and jeans; this intruder’s attire is at great odds with the highly uniform dress of his culture’s past. This bohemian figure is cleverly inserted, as if in conversation with his ‘hosts’, as if his difference (his dress obviously from another era) is of no concern. Whether talking with a group of local women each holding a traditional umbrella, a public ceremony with officials sitting on raised dias, protests against political legitimacy, or seemingly leisurely bike rides through an antiquated downtown Kuala Lumpur, this intruder mimics pose and object with a subcultural flair and casual Western attitude. Where there is a weapon, he carries a guitar; his red and white plastic mass-produced umbrella attempting to dialog with its past. Recollections of Long Lost Memories was produced the year Malaysia celebrated fifty years of independence—a celebration (and tolerance) of its cultural complexity. It is a work that speaks to Fuad’s continual reappraisal of his culture’s past, begging a re-remembering of its values, acknowledging that the people who come and go can often be overlooked in the modern world’s reliance on images.
Ahmad Fuad Osman is of a generation that came of age in a Malay world whose artists were eager to speak about socio-political issues on terms that broadened questions of nationhood, ethnicity, faith, and historical fact, doubtful of the grand narrative that had been propounded since the race riots of the late 1960s. Such qualities provide the grounding framework for the establishment of acclaimed artist collective Matahati (1991-2011), of which Fuad was a co-founder, believing such issues were valid on a universal platform. Trained as a painter and printmaker, Fuad’s practice embraces multiple forms of media; he is drawn to the impact of political narratives, their materiality, their psychological imprint, their social repercussions, and their symbols. Fuad’s work calls attention to the dubious fragility between fact and fiction, and how memory and its values can be easily monopolized. His practice speaks to the immense distrust of the 'official' record that is currently present in much art across Southeast Asia, in addition to the rising investigation of the arrival of the Islamic world in this region and its legacies.