Is it a tree, a stick figure after the German artist A.R. Penck (a.k.a. Ralf Winkler), like Latiff Mohidin a painter-printmaker-sculptor, or an abstraction of an ancient monolith from past civilisations? The reddish veneer of the totem exudes some form of animated vigour, from a synthesis of natural and ancient man-made forms or leaf geometry of pagoda and bamboo shoots, that flowered as Latiff Mohidin’s most-imaginative Pago-Pago series between 1960-1969. Or are these a retrospection of his Minangkabau past. As he told A. Ghani Ismail, in a two-parter newspaper essay in the New Sunday Times in October 1989: “Minangkabau is not race. It is not culture in the sense I have no artefacts to show, no dance forms of its own, no… Minangkabau is Mind. A world view of its own … and a mental force which makes us live to leave behind works of the mind.”