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.Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, Salleh’s mixed media drawings/paintings repeatedly featured a composite of recurring imagery of symbols and motifs. This was in keeping with his ongoing appreciation and exploration of geometric patterns found in Islamic art and Pythagorean geometry. But while the subject matter dealt with philosophical issues of life and spirituality, Salleh also took delight in exploring the physical transformations the materials with which he worked underwent. For him these reactions, especially peculiar to absorbent natural fibres such as paper or cotton fabric, had an own identity as well as being carriers of meaning.
