Lot 052
KOW LEONG KIANG
b. Selangor, 1970
MIDNIGHT LAVA IN PINK, 2010
Signed and dated ‘Kow Leong Kiang 2010’ lower right
Oil on linen
155cm x 155cm
PROVENANCE
Private collection, Kuala Lumpur.
EXHIBITED
Kow Leong Kiang Intimate Collisions, Valentine Willie Fine Art, Kuala Lumpur, 2010; illustrated on front cover.
ESTIMATE RM 20,000 - 25,000
PRICE REALISED RM 28,600
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This piece originated from Intimate Collisions, a series that was instigated by a year long residency with Valentine Willie Fine Art in Yogyakarta in 2008. The series represents a new direction for Kow as it challenges himself as well as his audience to revel in inner desires and pleasures of the flesh. During his residency, Kow had selected a male and female model whose roles were to interact with one another in a compact four feet by four feet clear plastic box that replicates the square shape of the canvas. The choreographed and collaborative act was photographed by the artist and their physical performances were then translated onto canvas upon his return to Malaysia. The premeditated, claustrophobic circumstance displays the “emotional and psychological possibilities of relationships that have the ability to liberate, traumatise and restrict the mind.”
Kow Leong Kiang stamped his class when he won the highly coveted Grand Prize in the Philip Morris Asean Art Award, the only Malaysian to have done so, in the finals in Vietnam in 1998, with his work called Mr Foreign Speculator, Stop Damaging Our Country, which established him as a major figurative artist. He graduated from the Kuala Lumpur College of Art in 1991 and showed early promise when he won the Minor Award in the Young Contemporary Artists competition in 1992 and the National Day Art Competition in Kuala Lumpur. He was awarded the Freeman Foundation Asian Artist fellowship for a two-month artist’s residency at the Vermont Studio Centre in the United States in 2004. He held his solo exhibition To The Sea at Ernst and Young Gallery in Singapore in August 2012 under The Asia Outreach Programme.
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