Siri Naga (Study)

 

        The idea which comes to my mind in this semester is the visualization of Malay traditional folktales. The idea came through my personal experience and observation upon the current  society which seems to have forgotten about this particular verbal culture.The personal experience which I mention is, how, as a child I was raised with various folk tales like sang kelembai, bandang, and sang kancil .These particular folktales shaped my imagination as a child, but then, as I grow up, I was introduced  with other type of stories from various cultures, especially  through electronic media such as, television and computer, thus, replacing the function of folktales which later, I slowly forget. But then as I grew up , I become realized of  how beautiful and fun the folktales were, and wanted to re-experiencing the stories , but as I attempt to do so, I realized that there were several  problems which can be found in the current society  that became an obstacle. First , there is less people that can tell folktales verbally , plus the  source of the folktales itself which somehow limited to books  and verbal  makes it cannot compete with other stories which is presented visually. This artwork is a  manifestation of my personal longing to re-experiencing the folktales,  as well as providing other source of documentation  other than books and verbal.

         Ive choose only one story among the folktales which is the story of Naga Seri Pahang. I choose this specific story because, for me, this is one of the story which I've  loved and appreciated the most as a child.  But as an adult, what I was interested in, is the method or ways to rightly visualized the stories, because there is almost no visual guidance on how the naga or its environment look like other that data provided through books. To solved this problem, what I did was, Ive conduct  several research upon the dragon makara in southeast Asia to compare its similarities as well as its differences,  and based on the result, I tried to construct  the visual form of Malay naga which differ from the western dragon and f East Asian dragon. 
   
        This series served as an experimentation and a jump start on the mission of visualizing the Malays oral tradition and art, honestly this particular series cant be considered as an complete achievement due to several difficulties faced during the painting process and weakness which needs to be re-looked and improved.but as a conclusion it was a good jump start and a good learning process.