This must rank as arguably the first known batik with pornographic connotations. It is noteworthy that a Patrick Ng Kah Onn batik won the RM3,000 top prize in a Manila art competition. Something kinky’s going on: a totally naked couple, the woman sitting up on the edge of a mattress on the floor with one leg slightly raised and her hands behind her back, while the man slightly turned from her and with his right hand propping on the mattress over the woman’s legs and the other doing something. The room is dingy as if wallpapered with cardboards and with only a metal-bar window framing the woman, who is gazing at viewer, either pleading or in a come-on coquette. Labelled as a batik, it is remarkable that Patrick Ng was able to accomplish the composition with patterns and overlaps and realistic figures using such medium. Patrick Ng Kah Onn was a prodigy of the Wednesday Art Group founded by Peter Harris, and held the post of secretary. He held his first solo at the British Council in Kuala Lumpur in March 1963 and in 1966, his work was selected for the Arts of Malaysia exhibition at the Commonwealth Institute in London. At that time, he was already in London where he studied first at the Chelsea College of Art and Design (now the Hammersmith College) in 1964-65, and then the Wimbledon and Southlands College of Education in 1966-68. He stayed put in London and taught at Hammersmith before he died of liver cancer in 1989. In Malaysia, Patrick Ng had a brief teaching spell at the Methodist Girls School in Kuala Lumpur and his alma mater, Victoria Institution. His brother-in-law, Peter Cocquerel in an interview with Ooi Kok Chuen, revealed that Patrick had only returned once in 1970, for a short visit. He added that Patrick Ng later became more interested in music, opera and films. Patrick Ng’s The Dancer (1964) was sold at RM78,400 in Henry Butcher (November 2017) Art Auction.