We acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art stands and recognise the creative contribution First Australians make to the art and culture of this country.
Ismail Hashim / Malaysia 1940–2013 / Seats of bicycles of Penang port labourers 1993 / Gelatin silver photograph, hand-coloured on paper / 42 sheets: 64 x 92cm / The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art. Purchased 1993 with funds from The Myer Foundation and Michael Sidney Myer through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Ismail Hashim
Ismail HashimSeats of bicycles of Penang port labourers 1993
Not Currently on Display
This work features 42 bicycle seats of varying condition and type, each belonging to a worker on the docks of Penang, photographed in a consistent style and arranged into a tidy rectangular grid. Ismail Hashim uses this serial strategy to celebrate the beauty and complexity of everyday objects that might otherwise go unnoticed, while alluding to broader issues of labour and class.
The rustic charm which Hashim manages to extract from his scenes of ordinary life is often imbued with a feeling of neglected beauty. Meanwhile, the sense of nostalgia or regret for technological advancement in material culture becomes almost a subtle social comment.
Renowned as a graphic designer, painter and educator, Ismail Hashim (1940–2013) was best known for his meticulously hand-coloured black-and-white photographs of daily Malaysian life. Hashim chose to work in photography for its capacity to record things as they are, finding the opportunity for self-expression in selecting objects ‘sitting together at the moment in which they are captured on film.’
While his photographs appear to be straightforward, unstaged scenes of nooks and crannies of Malaysian life and environment, their design clearly reflects the selective eye and mind of the photographer. The economy of superimposed colours, while usually faithful to the real hues of the objects, reveals the artistic transformation of reality.