A study of Yusof Ghani’s artworks : the ‘Wajah’ series paintings from 2006 to 2010 / Mozhgan Ramezani
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Among the artists in Malaysia, Yusof Ghani is one of the most established and prolific Abstract Expressionist painters in the Malaysian modern art scene. The Wajah series paintings (2006-2010) created by Yusof Ghani is his latest venture into the art world. According to Yusof Ghani there is not any well-written research about Wajah series and the reason might be that although Wajah series was exhibited in Indonesia (2010) and in Canada (2009), it has never been shown in Malaysia. Moreover, currently there are limited references and materials documenting Malaysian art. Thus, the researcher’s concern for the lack of research on Malaysian art for present and future generations led the researcher to embark on this issue as a research. This qualitative research aims to analyze the selected paintings of Wajah series to identify the characteristics of the art elements and principles, determine the technique and explain the main concept of these paintings. The researcher used maximal variation sampling strategy in which the researcher selected six paintings of Wajah series which are still available in Yusof Ghani’s art gallery called Tapak located in Shah Alam, Malaysia. The Narrative Design Method was used for conducting this research. The researcher collected the data through one-on-one interviews with the artist, field-notes, audio materials and documents. The collected data were analyzed using Art Appreciation Theory by Harry S. Broudy as the core theoretical framework in the phase of analyzing the samples. The results show that the eyeless faces in Wajah series do not represent any specific identity. Instead they are symbolic representation of humankind in general. Each piece of this series contains a different narrative and the expressive faces address social issues related to human attitudes. One of the most common features of all the selected paintings is the highly textured surfaces through the technique of impasto as well as modelling technique by sculpting the surface before the paint is applied. Controlled palette of a few hues with a limited tonal scale of dark and light and the ambiguous space of eyeless faces in these paintings set the right ambience for particular mood of these faces. It also can be concluded that Yusof Ghani’s works are technically influenced by the formalistic considerations of Abstract Expressionism in the USA. The relationship between paintings of Wajah series with Abstract Expressionism is clearly seen in the treatment of line and form, the spontaneous and expressive brushstrokes and the randomly placed paint by dripping and dribbles of paint onto the canvas. The Western Abstract Expressionist works are considered to be unconventional non-figurative images. However, Yusof Ghani’s gestural style alternates between abstract work and figurative images and it is not purely Abstract Expressionist as seen in the context of Western art. It could be suggested that Yusof Ghani always emphasizes not only on exploring formalistic issues but also incorporating subject matter and social critiques in his works.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".