The landscape is effused with a light clay-coloured veneer, with a spot of blue scratchy strokes on top and faint shadows below. Streaks of red, horizontal and vertical and slanted, spread like a surface virus but are sometimes submerged under other colours. This is not a Monet landscape, real or Impressionist with straight-out interpretations of the reality presented or imagined. Open arid expanse or thorny thickets, marshy dollops or scraggy surfaces under a shifting light, Nature at its best is no unblemished paradise. Latiff Mohidin probably paints the way a bat moves, with sensory perceptions, following the Aristotelian “energy of the mind”. As Vincent van Gogh enthused: “I dream my paintings, and I paint my dreams”. Painter, printmaker, philosopher, poet, sculptor Latiff Mohidin straddles over Southeast Asian art and aesthetics like a colossus. He is a trilinguist – Malay, English and German. His Pago-Pago series is regional art legend. Latiff was awarded a major Retrospective at the National Art Gallery in December 2012 to June 2013, his second. He studied at the Hochschule fur Bildende Kunst in West Berlin, the Pratt Institute in New York, and Atelier Lacouriere-Frelaut in Paris. He won 2nd Prize (Graphics) in the 1968 Salon Malaysia. In literature, he won the SEA Write Award twice (1984 and 1986) and the Malaysian Literary Awards from 1972 to 1976, and he was also appointed Guest Writer at Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka in 1988.