[1] Latiff Mohidin was born in Lenggeng, Negeri Sembilan, Malaysia[2] with roots in the Minangkabau community of West Sumatra, Indonesia.
Upon his return from Germany in 1964, he travelled throughout Indochina and the Malay world, establishing affinities and conversations with avant-garde artists and intellectuals of the time.
Like his art, his poetry is a methodological wandering that resists ideological systems and structures, offering an extended interrogation of the artist's interior world.
His literary and painterly world is also heavily informed by the writings of Jorge Luis Borges, Chairil Anwar and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe amongst others.
Breaking down disciplinary boundaries between the visual and literary, in 2012, Latiff Mohidin published his translation of Goethe's Faust (Part 1), a figure who has fascinated him since his encounter with German literature in the early 1960s.