When Sulaiman Esa was embarking on his iconic Waiting for Godot series in 1977, he was warned by the school’s head of art and design, that it would be sacrilegious to juxtapose a nude image next to Quranic calligraphic writings. That was before the onset of a more stringent Islamic mores in the wake of the Ayatollah Khomeiny’s hardline Islamisation in the early 1980s. Sulaiman took a chance and submitted the work for the national printmaking competition organised by the National Art Gallery (NAG) in 1977, and it won the Minor Award. More than audacity of the sacred and the profane, Sulaiman was torn between the “Inner conflict in resisting Western art paradigms” (From The Periphery to the Centre: The Social Significance of Sulaiman Esa’s Work from 1950s to 2007, by Prof Madya Dr Khatijah Sanusi, Ahmad Farid Raihan) and the presaging of Islamic aesthetic values and symbols. It was a time between his ground-breaking Mystical Reality (1974) and his ‘Tauhid’ of Islamic Art phase. tuk Syed Ahmad presciently called it his (Sulaiman’s) “self-portrait.” In the series, Sulaiman superimposed an image of Islamic architecture with that of a nude woman from a fashion magazine he bought in Rome while taking a costume and stage design certificate course at the Academia de Rome (1974-75). It was not really planned. He had variations of the theme in various printmaking techniques, and apart from the National Art Gallery, the National Gallery Singapore (NGS) and the Singapore Art Museum have a number of the works. In 2015, T.K. Sabapathy revisited the Godot series in the Re-Invented commission by the NGS, and wrote: “The Waiting for Godot series exemplifies lives and practices of artists in worlds that are driven by competing histories, contending cultural traditions and distinctive individual aspirations. Even as it emerged from a personal predicament, its compass is worldly.” Sulaiman recalled that when he was studying in London in the 1960s, he was drawn by the Existentialism theories of Sartre, Camus and Beckett, and that on his return to Kuala Lumpur, he attended a performance of Waiting for Godot in Kuala Lumpur. The rest were more wit and poetics. Sulaiman Esa broke into the Malaysian art scene big time when he and Redza Piyadasa launched their controversial and cerebral Conceptual Art paintings and installations in 1974. His Waiting for Godot works were fortified by Printmaking training at Hornsey College of Art, London (1967) after his Diploma in Art and Design (1962-1966), and post-graduate Printmaking at Atelier 17, Paris (1968). His Islamic Art phase came with the credentials of his Master in Fine Art, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore (1979-1981) and his PhD Islamic Studies at the Temple University, Philadelphia (1986-1996). In 1973, he won the Major Award in the Man and his World competition organised by the NAG. He had lectured at the Universiti ITM since 1969 and was made Associate Professor in 1995. His tremendous contributions can be seen in two career-defining exhibitions: Insyirah: Works from 1980-2000 (Galeri Petronas, KL, 2001); and the stunning Rajah: Art, Idea and Creativity (1950-2011) retrospective at the NAG in 2011.