Pioneer artist Cheong Laitong, best known for Muzium Negara mural, dies aged 90

A handout image of a young Cheong Laitong seen working in his art studio during the 1960s. Photo: Cheong Laitong

Cheong Laitong, a pioneering artist who introduced a new modern aesthetic to post-independence Malaysian art, has died. He was 90.

The news was confirmed by a family member, who revealed that Laitong (as he was more popularly known) died in Kuala Lumpur on Nov 4.

Laitong, who was born in Guangzhou, China in 1932, moved to Malaysia in 1937 to join his family in Kuala Lumpur.

As a child growing up in Kuala Lumpur's Chinatown, Laitong gravitated towards a career in art, where drawings of giant elephants and huge trees were his earliest memories of his favourite subjects. In his later years, he would also return to themes surrounding nature.

In a pre-Merdeka environment, the young artist was among the few who benefited from the Wednesday Art Group in the 1950s in KL initiated by Englishman Peter Harris, then a school inspector and dedicated art teacher.

As one of Malaysia's most important public artworks, Laitong’s 1962 mosaic mural series still proudly adorns Muzium Negara's outer wall. Photo: The Star/Filepic

"A painting must always extend beyond the boundaries of its frame. One must be able to imagine everything that exists beyond that. If a painting does not evoke the need to suppose a world that continues, then it has failed," Laitong was quoted as saying in an interview with The Star in August, 1995.

In 1961, Laitong was granted a year-long scholarship to study at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, United States before going on to further his art education at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London.

Laitong also made local art history when, in 1962, he won the competition to design the large frontal murals for Muzium Negara (National Museum) in Kuala Lumpur.

His murals at Muzium Negara were commissioned by the country’s first prime minister Tunku Abdul Rahman and paid for by pioneer rubber magnate and philanthropist Datuk Lee Kong Chian in 1962 after the national competition.

Cheong Laitong's 'Image On Rhythm' (1964), an abstract painting that was included in the seminal 'GRUP' exhibition in KL in 1967. Photo: The Star/Filepic

As one of Malaysia's most important public artworks, Laitong’s 1962 mosaic mural series - Episodes Of Malayan History and Malayan Crafts and Craftsmen (both made from imported glass mosaic from Florence, Italy) - still proudly adorns Muzium Negara's outer wall.

"I was working at the Malayan Film Unit and I followed the cameraman to the East Coast where they made films about batik and songket weaving factories, and I remember vividly how these works were created. In my early period as an artist, I was influenced by the East Coast Malay craftsmen who were making kites, songket, batik, fabrics, weaving, basketry, pots and silver. Those were my favourite painting subjects, so it fitted in nicely when I tried to design the murals," recalled Laitong when describing the design of his murals in the book Building Merdeka: Independence Architecture in Kuala Lumpur, 1957-1966.

During those heady years in the 1960s, he joined the ranks of the pioneers of Malaysian art and began to paint and exhibit actively in KL and abroad, with his artistic inclinations leaning towards abstract expressionism.

Laitong also shared a certain kinship with a group of artists of the era, including Syed Ahmad Jamal, Ibrahim Hussein, Yeoh Jin Leng and Abdul Latiff Mohidin.

“It was a kinship that was forged by similar education backgrounds, preferred methods of work and shared aesthetic values. The approach adopted by these artists as to the purpose of art and methods of work, established the avant garde position of the 1960s in the context of modern art activity in Malaysia,” wrote art critic and academic T.K. Sabapathy in the Modern Artists Of Malaysia book (1983).

Laitong, who was always known as an affable gentleman, seen at his 'Expression Of 60 Years - An Exhibition Of Selected Works From 1960 To 2013' at the White Box, Publika in Kuala Lumpur in May 2014. Photo: The Star/Filepic

Despite embarking on a more than 30-year career in the advertising industry (in Malaysia and the region) later on, Laitong never let his art fade away. In 1969 and 1979, he also won the first prize awards at Salon Malaysia (art competition).

After his retirement from advertising, Laitong returned to exhibiting art in the 1990s, allowing a new generation to discover his legacy through retrospective shows interspersed with the artist's sporadic periods of painting, an obsession which remained until the last years of his life.

“When you start to paint, the painting will tell you what to do, you just carry on painting. Painting will develop your mind and dictate to you which direction you go. Sometimes, the painting would just stop halfway and say, ‘I don’t want to talk to you anymore, and you can’t paint this anymore .... all paintings have life,” he declared in an interview with The Star in July 2007.

Laitong is survived by his wife and four children.