In 1986, the late artist laureate, Syed Ahmad Jamal, under commission by the United Malayan Banking Corporation Berhad (UMBC), completed a sculpture that he named Lunar Peaks (Puncak Purnama). UMBC presented it to City Hall as a bequest to the rakyat.
On July 2, 2016, an order to demolish Lunar Peaks was carried out by stealth. No warning of the destruction had been given. Within hours of the bulldozing, artists, art historians, gallery owners, art critics and representatives of the National Visual Arts Gallery rushed to the site, but they failed to save the sculpture.
When members of the artistic community blasted the decision to destroy Lunar Peaks, the response from Tengku Adnan was terse.
He said Lunar Peaks was an “eyesore”, “too old”, “beyond repair” and “bothersome” to the people. What is a treasure to those who know how to appreciate art is trash to Tengku Adnan.
Ignorance lies at the heart of many of the bad decisions made by our authorities. The KL Mayor, Mohd Amin Nordin Abdul Aziz, expressed sentiments similar to Tengku Adnan’s, saying that Lunar Peaks was badly maintained and in bad shape. So whose fault is that?
In 1996, workers from City Hall damaged Lunar Peaks by carrying out unauthorised modifications to the sculpture. In 2010, Syed Ahmad successfully sued the mayor for infringing on his intellectual property rights and was awarded damages by the High Court.
It was a bit rich for the mayor to say that the structure was beyond repair and in bad shape when it was City Hall that damaged it in the first place.
To make matters worse, the damage was compounded by a lack of regular maintenance. We are only too familiar with Malaysian work ethics. Regular checks on any structure and facility in Malaysia are sporadic at best.
The City Hall signboard on the demolition site stated that the work was being done to rejuvenate those parts of KL that were described as “kejur” or “lifeless”.
If Lunar Peaks was deemed lifeless, then the officials in City Hall were the ones responsible for robbing it of life. These officials are dolts who have no appreciation of art. They made no attempt to understand what Syed Ahmad had in mind.
Syed Ahmad’s work went deeper than just a fusion of the three elements of light, water and earth. When City Hall replaced the special ceramic with stainless steel, they ruined the stepped ascending-and-descending rhythm, which Syed Ahmad had based on the mythical Gunung Ledang.
Tengku Adnan may not realise it, but his destruction of an art work for the reason that it did not conform to his limited knowledge of art reminds us of what Madame Mao did during the so-called Cultural Revolution in China.
Mariam Mokhtar is an FMT columnist.
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