One of Malaysian art's most celebrated visual artist and poet, Abdul Latiff Mohidin's oeuvre stretching from the 1960s to 1998 represents a lifetime effort to convey the essential quality of the Southeast Asian region's art and culture. The artist is represented in the sale by an exemplary work from his landmark Pago Pago series which won him his first wave of critical acclaim and installed him as one of Malaysia and Southeast Asia's most important modern artist.

A true confluence and metaphor of cross-culturalism, Pago-Pago (Lot 2134) was inspired by Latiff Mohidin's study of the tribal arts of the Pacific Oceanic region in a German museum when he was an art student in Berlin and applied to the imaginary visioning of the Southeast Asian region. Featuring singular looking totem-like forms composed of flattened organic shapes set against a flat and sparse background, the painted forms are juxtaposed to great effect against each other to allow for a suggestion of precarious balance and enhance the sense of productive tension on the pictorial surface. The overall effect of the work is the evocation of primitive tribal essences and energies which was one of the main features of the Pago-Pago series.