This Ibrahim Hussein vintage of the 1968-1970 period with a large diagonal cylindrical blob across the canvas in nocturnal setting spells a most fecund period that saw the likes of Kabuki, Xenobiosis, My Father And The Astronaut, Lebai Malang, Pak Utih, Chairil Anwar, The Sick Politician and May 13. Dated 1968, it indicated that Datuk Ibrahim Hussein, or Ib as he is popularly known, was probably still overseas, with Pop Art, counter-culture and the Hippy Movement and a time of the proliferation of hallucinogenic drugs. Is this a landscape or a coalescence of luminous physical forms with gorgeous combination of colour highlights in undulating facets? Datuk Ibrahim Hussein is world-class, the most high profiled of Malaysian artists. He was given the global Crystal Award by the World Economic Forum (1997), was the first Malaysian to have taken part in the Venice Biennale (under the Smithsonian Institute Workshop, 1970), and he featured in a Best-of-the-World tripartite exhibition together with Andy Warhol and Salvador Dali in Kuwait in 1977. His accolades include the Order of Andres Bello of Venezuela (1993), the Order of Bernardo Higgins (Chile's highest honour to a foreigner, 1996), the Japan Foundation Cultural Award (1988), and the XVIII Prix International D'Art Contemporain de Monte Carlo (1984). On the local front, he was accorded a Retrospective by the National Art Gallery in 1986, awarded the Anugerah Tokoh Melayu Terbilang (2007) and had been conferred the Datuk title three times. He organized the first, and most successful, Langkawi International Festival of Arts, in 2000, after setting up his museum and foundation (2000) in Langkawi. With the help of his muse and wife Datin Sim, he organised the Club Mediterranee Asian Arts Festival in Cherating (Pahang) and Bali (Indonesia). Ib had his art tutelage at the Byam Shaw School of Drawing and Painting and the Royal Academy in London (1963-1966). He also received a double scholarship of Fulbright and John D. Rockefeller II Fund that saw him in the United States, with two solos in New York to boot. In London and the United States, Datuk Ibrahim Hussein innovated with a new technique of image transfer dubbed "printage". This was before Ib's trademark curvilinear parallel lines that started when Sim, later his wife, gave him graphic pens during his Universiti Malaya residency in the mid-1970s.