For two consecutive years in 1986 and 1987, Chang Fee Ming departed from his usual watercolour métier of exotic Asian and African places, to produce stunning works that won the coveted Minor Awards of the Young Contemporary Artists (Bakat Muda Sezaman, BMS) both times. The winning 1986 mixed media work, Chord Of Friendship, is a double-edge weapon with undercurrents of tension using 16 innocuous newspaper clip excerpts of peace and rapprochement. As the Latin adage goes, Si vis pacem, para bellum (If you want peace, prepare for war). The work of newspaper, fishing net, strings, hooks and wood fits the theme of International Year of Peace. The taut tug of strings from the weaver’s shuttles suggest an ever-present tension, while the irony of the shuttles’ shape of pen nibs symbolically used to ink peace looking like missiles is not lost. Friendship among nations is not a permanent thing and this is borne out by the effects of globalization from an erstwhile bipolar world of the Cold War in the second half of the 20th century. The main pictures are taken from newsclippings of then prime minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad’s 1985 visit to China, following up on the epochal 1974 visit by then prime minister Tun Abdul Razak. This work was re-shown at the Imbas Kembali BMS in 1999. An extraordinary artist working mainly in watercolours, the wanderlust Chang Fee Ming has a string of accolades that inscribes his pre-eminence: the Sime Darby Art Asia Award (Gold / Overall Asean Prize, 1985); the Malaysian Watercolour Society Award in 1984 and 1985); the PNB Malaysian Art Competition (1st Prize, 1985) He also received Awards of Distinction from the Rockport Publishers USA (1997) and Dom Perignon Malaysia (1999), and was a co-winner (Malaysia) of the Winsor & Newton World Millennium Competition in 1999. In the Larasati Jan 26, 2013 auction in Singapore, his seminal work, Mandalay from the 1995 Road to Mandalay exhibition in Jakarta, Indonesia, sold for a premium of S$103,700 (RM255,924) – a record for a watercolour in Southeast Asia.