http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/640a7eae-78ac-11d9-9961-00000e2511c8.html#ixzz1HT7dMlD7
It was in 1980 that the British twins Rabindra and Amrit Singh made their first visit to India. As a result of that visit, their painting changed. At art school in Chester, England, they had absorbed traditional western methods of perceiving the world, but their travels in India showed them that there were other, Asian traditions of painting - different uses of per-spective; different ways of using colour; different ways of perceiving the symbolic importance of particular objects (birds and flowers, for example).
As British-Asians - they come from an extended Sikh family that continues to live in the Wirral, in Cheshire, although they attended a Catholic school - they began to feel a duty towards these traditions of Indian and Persian painting, and wanted to give them renewed validity in the modern world. Not to have done so, they felt, would have been a betrayal of what they regarded as their heritage.
On their return from India they started to evolve a unique amalgam of British-Asian art, one that echoes and mimics and makes use of the traditions of the past - the tradition of miniature painting from the royal courts of Mughal India, for example - but also incorporates recognisable imagery from the present, including politicians, sportsmen and pop stars. This is not a post-modern exercise in cultural cherry-picking, however. That would suggest a cool, distancing irony. The Singh twins paint in earnest. Their work is a commentary on the state of our world, its corrupt politics, the cult of fashion. They do not paint merely to please; they have a deliberate design upon us. This is both a strength and a weakness of the work.