"Variegated Vegetation"

Lush and generous, Adam Azlan's paintings depict prelapsarian jungles in perpetual celebration. The vibrant color and spontaneity of the festive flora suggest a lineage shared with jazz. Azlan makes use of forms inspired by reality, but also incorporates the abstract. Some plant life seems invented, improvised as the plant life of the deepest parts of the ocean sometimes seems. For Azlan, it is not enough to show lots of vegetation. There is a spiritual and emotional quality to the jungle, which he undoubtedly values greatly, and some of his trees a more like flowing souls.

As crowded with branches and vines as the compositions might get, the result is not a competition, but rather a harmony. The notion of "survival of the fittest" does not yet exist in this world. None of the forms Azlan uses are much more complex than those scrawled on the inside of ancient caves, but the aggregation is certainly sophisticated like a collection of Seurat's dots. Rudimentary shapes are an apt choice for a "virgin jungle." It takes a mature artist to show such restraint while maintaining a compositional complexity that puts the suspicious viewer at ease.

-Eugene Hwang