Sam Karuna

Sam Karuna is one of the heroes of Malaysian Batik. Although he grew up in Perak, Sam found his place early as an innovative Batik artist in the contemporary Batik heartland of the state Penang. Penang is where most of the Batik giants found their inspiration and where their talents were recognized.

Sam is well known abroad and at home. His name crops up often in the context of the Batik art form. Most of the reasons Sam’s reputation precedes him has to do with the fact that in his quiet way, this artist is not only prolific but he conducts a Batik Fine Art Training Centre for foreign art teachers, students, and Batik enthusiasts. To date, approximately more than 8000 foreign students have attended his courses.

Artists in Malaysia continuously invented new ways of executing Batik, the essence of most of their imagery remained very much tied up with traditional effects such as cracking, fragmented colour planes, and defined outlines.

Sam takes his Batik much further. As a practicing artist since the 60’s, Sam started with watercolour and oils. After extensive research in Batik, he found his calling in with this medium. Following exhibitions in Penang, Singapore, and Bangkok, Sam was encouraged to go on tour in Australia and held 10 solo exhibitions throughout the country. Sam’s appeal lies in the fact that he has taken the medium even further than his peers before him. His vision of Batik, a total diversionism, revealed his unique techniques making a manifesto of Batik painting. Sam is concerned with not losing any credit for originality of his technique and has guarded the secret that gives his paintings a degree of detail which is seldom achieved in Batik painting.

Unlike conventional Batik painting, Sam does not rely on defined segmented figures and scenarios so common with Batik Painting. He has successfully adapted a unique technique that gives his realistic and impressionistic paintings a mottled surface glow, he has named it as 'dyetik'.

Batik artist K.C. Haru, or Chi as she is affectionately referred to was born in Nagoya, Japan. Her early school education was followed by the conventionality of Business Management major in spite of her interest in art painting from a very young age. After college, Chi apprenticed with one of the leading artists, mastering mediums like oil and acrylic. However, during that time, Chi felt somewhat restricted by these traditionally Western idioms. Searching for a medium that she could best express herself with, Chi enrolled in Sam Karuna s Batik painting class while visiting Malaysia in 1996. Chi describes her reaction as total disbelief.

While Japan does boast its own brand of Batik art, Chi found that its reliance on flour as a masking rather than wax was quite restrictive in allowing her to be creative. Waxing enables the artist to enhance details and seems to be easier to work with. After three years of guidance and encouragement from the Malaysian Batik Guru, Sam Karuna, Chi now teaches classes in Batik art and practices with the same sense of innovation as Sam prescribes to. However, she does hold dearly to some of the more conventional and traditional methods of Batik such as cracking.

Chi still retains some of the classicism of Batik. The effects are definitive. Chi combines much of the segmented outlined forms seen in Batik with a use of pigment that throws up a glow, which appears to emanate from the heart of her paintings. Much of this gentler rending of form, and the novel use of a hue and tone, are obviously due to the expert guidance from her mentor. As like Sam, Chi has begun to explore some of the less idyllic subjects so associated with Batik. Her paintings display the more realistic side of the human condition such as the rural wearing life. Now this artist seems perched on the edge of a dream to take her branded Batik back to Japan, and to introduce it to artists and art lovers in her home country. K.C. Haru is determined and well on her way to becoming a significant name within the Japanese Batik fraternity.