Talking about Birds

In the years before his passing, Mhd Din painted monumental calligraphic works, held solo exhibitions overseas, composed poetry, and wrote essays exploring how Islamic aesthetics had evolved in the Malay world. After four decades of study, travel, and art making, Mhd Din arrived at the realisation that the Sufism he practiced was unmistakably shaped by his Southeast Asian heritage. Mhd Din maintained a lifelong interest in the epic theatre of the Southeast Asian wayang, which he studied intensely and incorporated into his art. In this section, we explore a series of paintings made late in Mhd Din’s life that explore the figure of the dervish in the form of the wayang kulit, or shadow puppet. A dervish is a Sufi seeker, a carrier of knowledge who sometimes exists at the margins of society, but acts as a compass for human progress. One example of this approach, Talking About Birds, references the famous poem “The Conference of the Birds” by Persian mystic Farid-ud-Din Attar. The poem describes a journey by a group of 30 birds, led by the wise hoopoe bird as an allegory of the master leading his pupils to enlightenment. As you leave the exhibition, we invite you to explore the adjacent corridor filled with quotations by Mhd Din, highlighting the thought process behind his artistic approaches, and spanning his wide-ranging interests in music, poetry, and more. Amongst them is a dedication by his friend and fellow artist Tumadi Patri titled The True Love of Art, who remembers Mhd Din for embracing multiple methods and sources of knowledge in his perennial quest for meaning. We hope you have enjoyed this tour. Continue on to the next gallery where you will encounter the “Nervous City” of Goh Beng Kwan.