VALENTINE WILLE FINE ART

press release

Valentine Willie Fine Art is delighted to announce the launch of Chang Fee Ming's latest publication of his travel sketches, Sketching Through Southeast Asia. In conjunction with the launch, an exhibition of Chang Fee Ming's sketches, accumulated from his twenty years of travelling across the region, will be held at the gallery from 21 July to 14 August 2010.

Sketching Through Southeast Asia tells a different story about Southeast Asia than the dominant narrative that has largely preoccupied itself with the region's modernity, urbanisation and economic growth.

As a collection of sketches, it demonstrates Chang Fee Ming's insatiable appetite for travelling and recording the realities that are increasingly threatened by the homogenising forces of modernity and his sympathy towards our cultural inheritance and traditional ways of life.

Sketching Through Southeast Asia is not a lamentation of vanishing worlds but a commitment to the spirited yet unassuming courage of the ordinary people of Southeast Asia. It draws from them a lesson about other models of living, other ways of relating to one's environment as well as one another.

The book divides the artist's travel into five easy to follow categories: Market and Meeting Place, Culture and Tradition, Work and Livelihood, Rest and Leisure, Garden and Landscape. From the fishing coasts of the Nusantara to the farming communities of Indochina, this body of sketches illustrates the complex socio-cultural make up of the region and once again proves Chang Fee Ming's artistic versatility as Malaysia's unrivalled contemporary watercolourist.

biography

Born in Kuala Terengganu, Malaysia in 1959, Chang Fee Ming is a self-taught artist who began his career in the early 1980s. Since winning the Malaysian Watercolour Society Award in 1984, he has gone on to gain many accolades both locally and internationally, and became a Signature Member of the National Watercolour Society (USA) in 1994.

Chang Fee Ming is one of Asia’s most accomplished artists working with watercolour. For over twenty years his subject has been the people of Malaysia, Southeast Asia and Asia.

He has exhibited widely in the Southeast Asian region, with solo shows in Kuala Lumpur, Chiang Mai, Singapore, Jakarta and Bali, and participating in numerous major exhibitions in Malaysia, Australia, Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand, China (Tianjin and Shanghai), Indonesia, USA, Canada, Hong Kong, UK, Sweden and Brazil.

In recent years, his Mekong series, based on seven years of research and travel, toured to Galeri Petronas, Kuala Lumpur, National Art Gallery, Jakarta and Chiang Mai University Art Museum, Chiang Mai in 2004. In 2005, he travelled to the Swahili Coast in Africa, making a series of small works and studies. From 2005 through to 2007 he has been researching and working on the source of the Mekong, in Yunnan, Tibet and Qinhai. This series was later exhibited in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Beijing. In 2009, Chang Fee Ming participated in the artist residency program at Singapore Tyler Print Institute.

Chang Fee Ming is based in Kuala Terengganu, spending part of the year in Bali, and much of the rest travelling through Asia.