KUMARI
NAHAPPAN
Born
1953 in Klang, Selangor, Malaysia. She was the first candidate from the LaSalle-SIA
College of the Arts, Singapore to obtain a Master of Fine Arts degree from Royal
Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia in 1995. In 1998, she won the first
prize (abstract category) in the United Overseas Bank Painting of the Year Award
competition in Singapore.
Kumari's paintings are to understood as a part
of a personal ritual based on her religious beliefs and the ritual practices
of Hinduism. Kumari needs the sensuality of the colours, smells, voices, and
sounds of Hindu rituals as an artistic source and energetic reservoir of her
own art work. Regarding it as comparable to an offering, she relies on it to
balance the pervasive and inevitable dualism between nature and culture, life
and death, sun and moon, man and woman as well as light and shadow.
Kumari considers her paintings, which she builds up in many differently coloured
layers (mainly in tones of red), to be like small vibrant fragments of manifold
visions which allow her to speak about the enormous life-giving energies of
the sun, about the breathing sounds and vastness of the desert, about Sunyata,
an emptiness full of possibilities and about the forces bringing nature into
life time and again.
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IMAGE
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CAPTION |
SELLING
PRICE
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Kumari Nahappan Nine-O-One
(B) Reference: Marjorie Chu, Understanding Contemporary Southeast Asian Art, p. 171 |
S$12,000
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Kumari Nahappan Surya
Series 99 Number Two Reference: Marjorie Chu, Understanding Contemporary Southeast Asian Art, p. 169 |
S$7,500
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