When you get a cluster of bobbing heads, there's some animation about, like swimmingly floating, but what? is left to conjecture as you grasp the interconnectivity, or alienation perhaps, in some form of human activity. That is the way the world whirls, neither with a bang nor whisper, moving inexorably across a twin thin demarcating line, or static moving within an amoebic sac, so nuanced in colours. Datuk Ibrahim Hussein is the most high profiled and world-classed Malaysian artist. He was given the global Crystal Award by the World Economic Forum (1997), first Malaysian to have taken part in the Venice Biennale (under the Smithsonian Institute Workshop, 1970), and he was selected in a Best-of-the-World tripartite exhibition together with Andy Warhol and Salvador Dali in a best-of-the-world tripartite exhibition 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 organised 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.