Lot 040
Chang Fee Ming
b. Terengganu, 1959
Long Life To The Past (Langkawi), 1993
signed with artist’s monogram (lower right)
watercolour on paper
76 x 56cm
PROVENANCE
Private collection, Kuala Lumpur
ESTIMATE RM 85,000 – 150,000
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The traditional timber Malay house, verandah et al and often built on stilts, is a fascinating study of climatic designs with an eye to ventilation. From pure practical convenience, it later evolved with embellishments reflecting the socio-economic and sub-ethnic status of its occupants. This house espied by the wanderlust artist Chang Fee Ming in Langkawi, had the unusual adjunct of window bars obviously due to security concerns with the kampung increasingly fringing the city. The carved parts, on top with the sun motif and on the lower panels with the punched star-shaped holes, are imbued with marks of the old Malay world-view. The artist’s painting skill is impeccable.
From his rise in the mid-1980s with a clutch of prestigious awards, Chang Fee Ming has become one of Asia’s best-known artists painting in watercolour today. The Sime Darby Gold Award (1985), the PNB Major Award (1984), Minor Awards in Bakat Muda Sezaman twice (1986 and 1987) and an unprecedented triple winner of the Malaysian Watercolour Society Prize (1984, 1986, 1987). More awards followed in the 1990s – Distinction, Rockport Publishers USA 1997; Dom Perignon Portrait of A Perfectionist Award, Malaysia 1999; and the Winsor & Newton World Millennium Painting Competition (co-winner, Malaysia, 1999). Fee Ming is best remembered for his epic Mekong painting odyssey, a great art-thropology insight tracing life around the great river across six countries up to its source in the plateaus of Tibet. |
