A pair of doves - Lee Man Fong had done three score of them, all with the birds in various poses, perched or in flight, and all in his inimitable blend of Western realism and perspective and Eastern spirituality. Doves are harmless gregarious creatures, the harbingers of peace, and symbolic of a sense of freedom. A dove pair also means everlasting love. Though depicted mostly whitish to denote purity, they are untrammelled, freely roaming in the wild, while perched on a craggy rock stump like this one, and always bathed in a golden light of soft brownish and greenish hues. This is certainly one of Man Fong's better dove pairs, concentrated right centre, with twine-like vegetation at the right side and top, while a Chinese colophon slithers down on the left, complete with two seal marks. It is imbued with a dreamy cinematic quality with the obvious play of soft-focus. Not many have succeeded in his trademark subjects of doves: there was the Singapore veteran Choo Keng Kwang, and more recently the young Indonesian Man Fong acolyte Tatang Koentjoro. China-born Lee Man Fong had one of the most flamboyant careers among Asian artists. Made a court painter by President Sukarno, producing the famous deluxe five-volumes of his (Sukarno's) art collection, imprisoned by the Japanese invaders in Jakarta, and spending time between Indonesia and Singapore, besides six years in the Netherlands on a Dutch scholarship. In Indonesia, he had set up an advertising agency, Linto Reclame Bureau (1936) and the Yin Hua association of Chinese painters (1955), but in 1941, he was already a fulltime artist. In Indonesian Art and Beyond (1997), Jim Supangkat wrote of him: "Painting is the flame of culture, forming an expression without words, that can communicate with everyone without … of time, nationality or language." No wonder, in the Sotheby's April 2010 Hong Kong auction, his Bali Life (1960s) sold for a record S$4.1million.