Awang Damit Ahmad’s (ADA) Payarama Series, though newer, is regarded as the trigger point of the staggering price upsurge in his career works since his Essence of Culture (Intipati Budaya, notably in the exhibition at Singapore’s Shenn’s Fine Art in 1994), Alun-Alun, Marista and Iraga series. It vindicates his inimical vocabulary in singing paeans about the rustic people and the land, less developed and inhabited then in an obscure Kuala Penyu village in Sabah, his familiarity with terrain and the eco-organisms and raw implements when helping out his fisherman-farmer father. His latest Payarama show, Dari Iraga Ke Payarama, at the Segaris Art Centre in December 2014, was a huge success. A relative late-starter in Art, ADA wasted no time in equipping himself as artist and teacher when he quit his job as a Telekom Malaysia technician in 1975, to study Art at the Mara Institute of Technology University (UiTM(, topping the class in 1983. After following the artists’ delegation to the Malaysian Art at the Asia-Pacific Museum in Pasadena, Los Angeles, in 1989-90, he studied for the Master’s at the Catholic University in Washington D.C., after which he keeps honing his expressionist ideals on canvas while teaching at UiTM. In 1988, he won 2nd Prize in the Malaysian Bank Association art competition. In 1991, Awang won his biggest accolade when Nyanyian Petani Gunung (now in Petronas Collection), won the coveted prize in Salon Malaysia III, organised by the National Art Gallery.