Born in 1962 in Singapore, Salleh bin Japar is a conceptual multi-disciplinary artist whose work addresses concerns of identity and society, Muslim values, and globalisation. Salleh came to prominence with the seminal 1988 collaborative exhibition ‘Trimurti’, and in 2001 was a Singapore Pavilion representative at the 49th Venice Biennale.After completing his studies in Australia, Salleh travelled briefly through Indonesia. Having encountered the vast and open Australian outback and experienced the revered mountains of Java, Salleh’s Islamic faith deepened, leading him to relate notions of spirituality with landscapes in his work. With ‘Gunungan II’ (‘mountain’ in Malay) Salleh seeks to represent the mountain’s mythic status as an epicentre of spiritual energy, replete with symbols and imagery of his style of the late 1980s/early 1990s. Spirituality preoccupied Salleh because he felt “the world is in crisis and the societies we live in seem to have lost their sense of destiny....".
