Baron of batik Sarkasi Said’s son Ika Zahri prefers to hide connection to late father

SINGAPORE – Ika Zahri Sarkasi poses easily on a 4m by 3.5m batik work, a wash of colours crashing into one another like the waves of a buoyant sea.

Excitedly, he relates how his father, the late Sarkasi Said, put the material through multiple cycles of soaking and colouring to create its glinting depth. The overlapping, impossible-to-delineate lines hand-drawn from molten wax are clearly still a source of wonder. “Look at how even these are – thin when thin, thick when thick.”

Asked if he has reached a comparable level of skill after practising for 40 years, he musters only a wan smile.

At 59, the well-known artist and batik teacher continues to feel keenly the passing of his father, reminded daily by the black-and-white photographs of his father’s early exhibitions on the walls of Ika’s Yio Chu Kang home.

The Cultural Medallion certificate awarded to Sarkasi just a year before his death in 2021 at age 81 takes pride of place. The spirit of the patriarch also lingers in the over 100 works stowed away in the home, some stretched and mounted, others meticulously folded.

Even the short-sleeved top Ika is wearing was designed by the man once referred to reverentially as the baron of batik.

In public, though, he is more reticent of the connection, and jokes: “If I tell people, my price will be higher.

“The thing is, I don’t want them to compare or have ideas. People will always think, ‘Because you are Sarkasi Said’s son, your work must be better.’ Some people don’t find out until more than 20 years later. That’s what my dad would have wanted – he did not want me to cling to him to get popular.”

Early internship

Ika has been pegged to fill his father’s shoes since he started teaching his father’s batik classes at The Substation when he was 18, after a period of time straddling the dual tasks of assisting him and reeling in a more stable income as an auxiliary police officer at the airport.

It was a natural progression – his father leaving it mostly up to him, despite him confessing to no great calling to be an artist.

His “internship” was built into his upbringing as the eldest of four siblings. Sarkasi had a studio in Tampines where Ika and his siblings would flock to daily during the school holidays. Forbidden from touching the hot wax, they still sneaked fumbled attempts whenever their strict father was not around.

The studio doubled as a boutique, Tzee Creations, that designed and sold batik clothing. Customers included Senior Minister Lee Hsien Loong. This was a well-oiled operation: Each of the children – three sons and a daughter – developed their own speciality, from colouring to washing.

“For me, I must know everything,” Ika says with pride. “I took over a lot, so he could focus on meeting all the important people on how we can improve art in Singapore.”

Sarkasi would later be invited as a board member to committees including those for the National Arts Council and Modern Art Society, further reducing his time for practice.

For this interview, this reporter had to meet Ika and his wife Zarinah Begum, who teaches batik with him, during their only downtime after 8pm, as they are oversubscribed for classes at various schools on weekdays. Ms Zarinah, who was inducted to batik only after marrying into the family, reckons they have 2,000 students in all.

On weekends, the couple, who have two children, also conduct private sessions on the patio of their home, where students have the run of the place – sometimes with kueh-kueh and drinks provided – and washing can be finished outdoors to disperse the fumes. Ika jokes: “It’s sometimes like a daycare centre.”

Twilight is when Ika paints by himself till 2am, surrounded by quiet and the occasional call of cicadas.

Not just orchids

It is not always a stable life. When school contracts dried up during the Covid-19 pandemic, Ika worked as a parcel delivery driver.

“This is art life – sometimes you see payment only once every three months or get it a month after finishing, but it’s much more than as a police officer, which is more stagnant, isn’t it?” he says equanimously.

Where Sarkasi has been credited with elevating batik craft to fine art with his “always moving” abstraction, Ika combines oil and batik painting. The oil subject floats outwards from the more suffused batik background.

Orchids, the motif that made his father’s name in the 1970s, remains the popular commission, but his own interest has bent more towards kampung and street scenes, enamoured with the details especially in large pieces that take five days just to complete the preliminary waxing.

He knows his art royalty status comes with the responsibility to promote his late father’s works, which he frequently puts before his own. His mother Salamah Ahmad, who was with her husband during the making of most works and so a fount of context, died on March 28 at age 77.

At The Aleeya, a restaurant in Dickson Road, he sank his own money into exhibiting a unique series of his father’s black-and-white works. The pieces are still on show and on sale to the public, and he welcomes collectors who want other artworks by his father to reach out.

He is colouring in an orchid diptych as he talks, expertly blending. Nearby, he has prepared a batik bear his four-year-old granddaughter requested for the following day – “She is very particular.”

Asked if the orchid is a commission, his reply is cheeky, and in line with his father’s vision of the role of the artist: “Some of this is. The other parts, I’ll show the collector when he comes.”