An epic journey, captured By Features Desk
Publisher:The Star - Publication Date: 03-03-2008

Explorer artist Chang Fee Ming has outdone himself in his latest exhibition, Mekong: Exploring the Source.
With 16 masterpieces in watercolour – for masterpieces they are, and that’s no glib hyperbole – Chang has taken his unique technique of lush, velvety textures to a polished pinnacle.
Rarely does one see every piece in a solo exhibition certified as individual works of uncompromising quality and breadth of vision.
All save two diptychs are in Chang’s favourite 56cm x 76cm format. Also shown are several drawings and his diarist “mail art” of scribbles on stamped and previously mailed envelopes. All the works were made in the last three years, since his 2005 Swahili Coast detour when he travelled to East Africa.
The works in Mekong have such tactile quality – never suspected possible in this media – that they almost beg the question, “Are these watercolours?”
Chang has transcended his media and created the type of magic usually only found in the oil masterpieces of Chen Yi-fei (1946-2005) and Xu Wei Xin, both of whom are also noted for their tapestries of the harsh China outback.
This artistic journey is the culmination of an actual journey that started 11 years ago and that took Chang on the Mekong River trail, which stretches 4,880km and spans Viet Nam, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand, the Yunnan Province in China, and ends at the river’s source at Qinghai, bordering Tibet. Qinghai is also the source of two other great Asian rivers, the Yangtze and the Huang He (or Yellow River).
It was an epic journey tracing traditional tribal cultures and lifestyles with observations about socio-economic political destinies. The corpus of insightful, inventive, and inspired watercolours was first unveiled at the 2004 grand exhibition at Galeri Petronas, Kuala Lumpur.
Astonishing by any standards, these works are a visual Lonely Planet guide to the resilience of rustic communities surviving on the fringes of modern developments and changes.
Reaching the source represented not a journey’s end but the rich, variegated experience of the 49-year-old Chang’s own maturity, as an artist, as a human being, and as a creator.
It’s a chequered career stretching back to 1985’s Youth and Children Together when the self-taught, Terengganu-born artist was just 26, with River Market (1987) preceding his sustained dalliance with garish sarong patterns, foreshortened figures, and rippling water with bold, lopped off half figures depicting the lower torsos, as exemplified by Malioboro (1990).
And what of the visual carmine/saffron thunderbolt of 1994’s Road To Mandalay series with the defining work Mandalay, a photo-realist triumph rich in lushness and lustre comparable to celebrated filmmaker Zhang Yimou’s celluloid visual feast, Ju Duo?
This was preceded by Chang’s Balinese brocade-like works Windsong (1993), and followed by Morning Majesty (1996), and Gamelan of the Kraton In the Morning Night (1996), which exuded an incredible, dimple-like mosaic of colourful lace kebaya blouses.
This technique reaches its exquisite finish in the 16 works of this exhibition. Just a sampling of the delightful details: the ribbed lines of the coarse gloves snugged in palm clogs in a supplication ritual in The Road to Potala; the voluminous folds of the monk’s robes (coarser and thicker than the Mandalay works) in A Moment In Red; the bristles of the woolly shirt end in Merging Mountains; and the transparent interplay of sacred mantra scriptures against dense foliage in Prayers In The Wind.
Merging Mountains also harmoniously blends man and nature in spirit and form.
But, as a Chang Fee Ming watercolour painting has come to signify, it’s more than just the technical “wow”. It is his to-the-marrow, wind-in-the-face understanding of place and people and time, and his intelligent representation, sometimes taking geographical licence, that inspires collectors’ confidence.
In this Mekong series, human figures loom large over magnificent, monumental landscapes with theatrical narration but understated drama.
Whatever the quaint character and cultural traits on view, private grievances and underlying tensions can always be gleaned in trademark Chang Fee Ming style.
Even the innocent, cherubic baby in a makeshift cradle in On the Move takes a sinister turn with a handmade gun tucked nearby and glimpses of grazing yaks both hinting at territorial conflicts.
But such are the ways of the frontiers that, paradoxically, the nomadic hordes meet in friendly banter and competitions like horseracing, as seen in Summer Farewell.
I’ve Got One piques interest in the prized parasitic caterpillar fungus cordyceps sinesis, called dong chong xiacao or yartsa gunbu. Notice the odd combination of the taut fruiting body of the caterpillar carcass, a hoe, a prayer bead necklace, and a watch (partly hidden).
For all the pervasive influence of esoteric Vajrayana Buddhism from Tibet, Chang underplays the sacred and the mystical to exude a warmth and intimate approach.
The acculturation of Chinese elements can be seen in the Daoist door god mural (demonised, Tibetan-style) looking over a wizened woman with downcast eyes shuffling past in The Watcher, and the bed sheet bundle strapped over the shoulders and displaying the Double Happiness symbol in the work called Double Happiness.
Perhaps it’s apt to end with Homage, which depicts a peasant, straw hat in hand, quivering with a mixture of reverence and fear as he pays obeisance to the unseen Buddha – and, by extension, the viewer, and, indirectly, the artist.
‘Mekong: Exploring the Source’ will open on Wednesday at Valentine Willie Fine Art (VWFA, 1st Floor, No. 17, Jalan Telawi 3, Bangsar Baru, Kuala Lumpur) and continue until April 5. The exhibition will thereafter travel to Beijing (Vanessa Art Link, May 30-June 15) and Singapore (VWFA, July 5-26).

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