Digital Dabblings and Unspoken Dialogues

Jaafar’s late work showed a few significant shifts. In the 1990s, he started dabbling in computer-generated art and also introduced the Jawi script as a recurring motif in his paintings. Between 1991 and 1992, Jaafar became a media specialist at the Institute of Technical Education. Using computers there, he became Singapore’s first artist to make digitally-generated art, some of which you see here. To create these, he used the bitmap graphics editor Deluxe Paint III on a Commodore Amiga, a personal computer launched around the same time as the first Apple Macintosh. The Amiga was considered the cutting edge of technology at the time. Like his batik paintings, Jaafar’s digital artwork showed how he was very much both teacher and student, exploring mediums from his day job and looking with open-minded curiosity to see where they would lead in his art. In 1994, Jaafar retired and moved to Johor Bahru, Malaysia. The new location provided him a more spacious studio space; many of his paintings there were over two metres long. On your right is a piece from the Unspoken Dialogue series. The Jawi script is not decipherable. Instead, the alphabets overlap and are repeated in expressive strokes, densely layered over one another like a cacophonous dialogue. The title of this series, Unspoken Dialogue, recalls Jaafar’s calling art a “silent language” decades earlier. “Every stroke tells of the artist’s mind, the work speaks for itself.” And so it is that Jaafar Latiff’s art remains beyond the lifetime of a textile, telling future generations of the mind and emotions of a Singaporean son—an artist, a teacher—as he lived through his country’s dramatic transformation from kampungs to city, from third world to first.