The story of Yong Mun Sen, who is widely hailed as the ‘Father of Malaysian Art’ is a well-rehearsed one. It is a story that is nevertheless filled with inconsistencies, gaps and contradictions. Exhibition and auction catalogues have over the past 67 years sketched out the brief contours of an autodidact from Kuching, who eventually settled down in Penang and found his metier as a watercolourist of great originality.

 

For modern artist and playwright Lee Joo For, the appellation of ‘Father’ assigned to Mun Sen was deservedly for his singularity. Mun Sen, in Joo For’s reckoning, ‘activates and energises artists to experiment and find new techniques bouncing off from the study of conventional ones, to effect a synthesis between eastern and western methods, and above all to see life, nature and art with a new vision, unborrowed, but daringly one’s own. Because Mun Sen dared, Malaysian artists old and new dared.’

 

Yet, for all of Mun Sen’s art historical prominence, our understanding of Mun Sen’s artistic career appears uneven. For one, while we have some ideas of Mun Sen’s artistic activities before the Second World War, they primarily list his accomplishments with little elaboration and discussion of the context in which Mun Sen worked as an artist.

 

Then, there’s also the case where artworks produced by Mun Sen in the 1920s and 1930s tended to be smaller in volume compared to the post-war period. A large part of Mun Sen’s oeuvre that are currently in circulation in the secondary market tends to be works produced after the Second World War and almost exclusively in the watercolour medium. This has resulted in a tendency to elevate Mun Sen’s stature solely as that of a great watercolourist. Moreover, the story of Mun Sen is often pieced together through recollections, either from the artist or family members after the second World War. These are recollections of the pre-war era made long after the period which they describe. While they sketch a general contour of Mun Sen’s activities, the recollections often lack accuracy in details.

 

In order to paint a more accurate picture of a Penang art and cultural scene of the 1930s, characterised by Yong Mun Sen as a ‘Golden Age’, we are required to turn to a different range of historical sources. It is through newspaper reports and other documents that we are able to reconstruct with some level of detail Mun Sen’s artistic activities before the Second World War, as well as fill in some gaps and  reconcile a number of inconsistencies to clarify Mun Sen at the peak of his creative form.

 

Owing to the word-limitation, this essay will focus on three areas of Mun Sen’s pre-war activities - his studio, his photography practice and the exhibitions he organised and participated in. It is hoped that by providing a fuller account of Mun Sen’s pre-war activities, we gain a fuller and much more versatile profile of a modern artist - as photographer, sculptor,  oil painter, photo-journalist, businessman and community organiser. This historical research contributes to future analysis of Mun Sen’s pre-war oeuvre, giving historical and contextual understanding of the cultural life that Mun Sen led and the cultural world of Penang… [read more in NAFA publication]