A JAPANESE who has made a name for himself as a leading artist in Arabic calligraphy will join other leading Islamic artists whose works will be on display at a revamped gallery in the Asian Civilisations Museum.

The museum has added three calligraphic artworks by Kouichi Honda to its new collection of contemporary Islamic artworks. It declined to say how much it paid for the works.

The public can view the works when the revamped West Asia Gallery opens in May.

Ms Tan Huism, deputy director (Curation & Collections) and senior curator (West Asia), said: "What's interesting about Honda-san's work is how he has taken his training in the classical tradition and forms of Arabic calligraphy and injected it with his own modern aesthetic."

Honda, 61, told Life! in a recent interview that his love for the Arabic language began in college. He majored in Arabic at Tokyo University.

After graduation, he moved to Saudi Arabia to work as an interpreter.

His interest in Arabic calligraphy was piqued when he visited the Saudi government's aerial-survey department on business and saw official calligraphers at work.

"I was amazed by the beauty of their work," he said, speaking of the trip as if it had happened yesterday, instead of 30 years ago.

He asked one of the calligraphers to teach him the basics and practised on his own at home. He experimented with pens made of reed and out of wooden chopsticks, before settling on bamboo.

In traditional Arabic calligraphy, the lines from a poem or the Quran are surrounded by colourful designs.

But Honda took out the decorative elements and focused on the beauty of the Arabic letters.

He said: "I create something new by trying to visualise the sentence. While I follow the rules of calligraphy, my creation is driven by the meaning of the word or the sentence."

His big international break came in 1988 when he was invited by the Iraqi government to an international calligraphy conference in Baghdad.

"It was the first big event that I went to and it was nice to get some attention," he said with a smile.

The three works acquired by the museum - The Face Of God, Blue Clouds Of The Night and Nebula Of Letters - are all inscribed with verses from the Quran.

The verses in Nebula Of Letters form a spiral that recall the cosmos. Honda, who teaches Arabic calligraphy to Japanese students, said the art form gives people a peek into the culture of the Middle East. His work is represented in private and public collections around the world, notably in the British Museum in London.

The Asian Civilisations Museum?s West Asia Gallery opens in May. Call 6332-7991 or visit www.acm.org.sg for more information.