Chef de Mulu

Urban Jungle Fusion unfolds like a dreamlike sequence, as if seen from the window of a traditional Malaysian house. In the foreground, faint outlines of a village and a bridge suggest a path leading into the jungle. Yet this jungle does not appear harmonious, but unsettled, stormy, threatened. The sky glows red – restless, windy, an ominous sign.

The vegetation in the foreground is bent, its inclination becoming a symbol of decline. It seems to waver under invisible forces, as if the jungle itself were bowing to external pressures. On the horizon, the faint silhouette of a ship’s mast appears – a sign of Western origin and colonial exploitation. The work thus refers to the historic and ongoing threats to the rainforest: slash-and-burn practices, deforestation, and the extraction of resources for global and Western markets.

In the sky, faces emerge – spirits of the jungle announcing danger and chaos. They transform the natural scene into a spiritual, symbolic landscape, at once vision, memory and warning.

Stylistically, Urban Jungle Fusion unites the eruptive force of Neo-Expressionism with a Symbolist visual language of dream, anxiety and mysticism. The colours speak directly: the red of the sky as threat, the green of vegetation as wounded life, the yellow as a sign of death and transience. The result is a work that is both subjective and mythical – a fusion of nature and history, expression and symbol, a vision of the jungle caught between resistance, transformation and looming demise.