Muhammad Raimy Bin Ismail

World of flowers and willows, 2013

30 x 91cm (x 4)

Oil on canvas

My work consists of four long portrait paintings of various maikos. Maikos and geikos (Kyoto dialect for geishas) generally live in their own ‘world’, their world is called 'the world of the flowers and willows'. How I want to translate that concept into paintings Is that I want to show how at that moment in time, when I was in Japan, I didn't care about anything else. I was literally in my own 'world', like the geikos and maikos. How I couldn't care less about what was happening in my own country (Singapore) which was badly hit by the haze. I also wish to bring traditional concepts like geishas into a new light by adding modern news into the paintings of the ever traditional geisha. The flowers at the back of the paintings symbolize the juxtaposition of air quality in Japan and Singapore. How at that point of time, the air in Japan was as fresh as flowers while the air quality in Singapore was horrible, as represented by the N95 masks.