18 July, 2013 3:35PM AWST

Up and coming artist prefers to call Perth home

Young Australian Muslim artist explores how our Australian identity intersects with Asia.

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Still from Abdul Abdullah's video work - My dad wanted to be a swagmanAbdul Abdullah

A young Aussie man in a singlet displaying the Australian flag sits in a lonely Thai bar at twilight with a cigarette and a beer, mournfully and earnestly singing Waltzing Maltilda.

Richly coloured, this solemn, but also slightly comic depiction (it could be any Australian a bit drunk and homesick on holiday) is a video installation called 'My dad wanted to be a swagman' produced by Perth artist Abdul Abdullah during an inaugural artist-in-residence program at UWA and recently on display at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery.

The video work at UWA was a seven week opportunity to access all the resources the campus offers to produce a piece that explored the intersection between Australia and Asia, in conjunction with the Ian Fairweather retrospective.

He and fellow artist Casey Ayres were invited to participate by the UWA Cultural Precinct director Ted Snell for the first of what Professor Snell hopes will be an ongoing series of artist residencies.

"These guys are guinea pigs - we wanted to open up the campus to artists and see what they would come up with.

"I know both of them, they are fantastic artists and they are both of them interested in that mix of their heritage, the way in which their cultures have meshed together, the cultures of their parents from an Asian and European background.

"I was blown away [with the work]" Professor Snell says.

Abdullah travelled to Thailand to shoot the video, in which he plays the main character.

"It's not really a narrative," he explains.

"It's an Australian of mixed descent singing Waltzing Matilda slowly and sadly in empty bar in Thailand.

"My work in the past few years has all been about identity.

"I'm a seven generation Australian with a direct ancestor who was a convict who arrived in Australia in 1815, but I'm also a Muslim, my skin is brown and my name is Abdul-Hamid bin Ibrahim Bin Abdullah, so there's that superficial conflict, and that idea of what is home, and nationhood.

"I really fell in love with the lyrics of the song. And to think that this song was once suggested for the Australian anthem, but really it is a sad song about a swagman who commits suicide rather than be taken by the soldiers.

"It is really Australian and an Aussie emblem and people sing it at the world cup and it's about Australian identity. But at the same time I think it's potentially used by people who claim to identify with the swagman but who might be more closely related to the squatter or even the soldiers in the song."

At just 26 and having graduated from Curtin University just four years ago, Abdullah has forged a strong career in the art world and says he's close to making a full time living as an artist while working a day or two a week tutoring high school students.

With painting his main practice, the turning point in his career came when his portrait of academic and ABC broadcaster Waleed Aly was a finalist in the Archibald portrait prize in 2011.

That exposure was crucial in him being accepted by a Melbourne gallery, and a number of projects have followed.

It's not the usual story of the struggling artist and Abdullah credits determination and hard work for his success.

"I think self discipline can make the difference for someone who is just out of art school and in their 20s. It's really easy not to do these sorts of things.

"When I was younger I boxed competitively and that gave me a way of seeing things, and a way of approaching training. And before I went to art school I studied journalism where we'd have to write all the time and so going to art school where we had to write one essay a semester was a breeze.

"Using the working methods I already had helped me.

"There are a handful of people from my year who are doing well in Australia and internationally and they are the ones that were in the studio at Curtin at night when everyone else was at home, trying to push what they could do."

While he doesn't have a lot of free time, or complete financial certainly, Abdullah says the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

"I don't have a boss, I can sleep in until whenever I like, but at the same time it's like running your own small business in the most volatile industry on the planet.

"There's a lot of competition and at any moment it can all fall out from underneath you. The past year it has been going reasonably well and I hope this continues, but it takes a lot of work.

"The hours are more than a full-time job."

With the residency over, Abdullah has flown to Sydney for the Underbelly Festival on Cockatoo Island. After that he has a show at his Melbourne gallery, and then it's the Sydney contemporary art fair, back to Perth before heading off to the London art fair in February.

Despite his work regularly taking him far away, Abdullah says he prefers to call Perth home.

"I lived in Melbourne for just under two years when I left art school but then I moved back.

"I think that Perth is for me, an easier and nicer place to live and I prefer to go to Melbourne and Sydney when I've got something to do there."