Students from Ngee Ann Polytechnic’s School of Film & Media Studies requested and interview for their school project and they shot videos during the process. This was in mid 2020, and I was pleasantly surprised when the team comprising of Danial Izwan B Mohd Shahri, Muhd Idris Bin Mohd Asrin, Liu Jia and Saleema Noor Sarah Binte Zulkiflee contacted me a few months later to inform they scored well for the project and was featured in their school newsletter website: https://theurbanwire.com/meet-singapores-community-batik-artist/
I quote the article below for posterity and the link for the video is: https://youtu.be/rWKFU5ftiII
Mr Kamal Dollah founded Kamal Arts Ltd in 2008 and has been conducting workshops on batik painting, a wax-resist painting technique that has its roots in Java.
“Batik was not offered in school (Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts) and that was what drove me to question: ‘What is batik?’,” he said. “Maybe this is a medium that is related to my culture.”
Driven by his curiosity about his roots and his passion for the art form, Mr Kamal has since organised several Community Batik events, where a huge number of people gather to paint on a long, continuous canvas which can measure up to 550m in length. Some of the prominent Members of Parliament who have joined these events include Deputy Prime Minister Mr Heng Swee Keat, Dr Amy Khor and Dr Maliki Osman.
Find out how Mr Kamal broke Singapore’s record for the longest continuous batik painting at Wisma Geylang Serai’s first-year anniversary in January 2020, which attracted some 10,000 participants in this video interview.
