The 2004 exhibition Garis (Line) brought together significant drawings and rare prints by Latiff Mohidin, spanning nearly three decades of his career from 1961 to 1992. Introduced by Noor Mahnun Mohamed, the presentation framed Latiff as the “region’s archetype of the artist-traveller,” whose practice was defined by observations and interpretations recorded “on the road”. Rather than viewing these works as mere preliminary studies, the exhibition positioned them as primary records of a “mind and spirit in dialogue” with diverse natural and human energies.

The collection traced Latiff’s formal evolution across a vast geographical trajectory, from his formative art student days in Berlin through his extensive navigation of Southeast Asia, and eventually to his later travels in Samarkand. These sketches provided the foundational “lexicon of stylized architectural, organic and elemental forms” that would later define his iconic visual language in painting and sculpture. By highlighting the immediacy of the mark-making process, Garis examined the drawing as a reflexive site where environmental encounters were distilled into the symbolic motifs that characterize Latiff’s contribution to Southeast Asian modernism.