Valentine Willie Fine Art Singapore is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Chang Fee Ming – VISAGE. Inspired largely from his recent sojourn to Paris in 2008 as an observer on the film set of Taiwanese/Malaysian director Tsai Ming Liang’s feature length film shot at The Louvre Museum with the same title, Chang Fee Ming takes his abiding fascination with textural surface, the socio-political history of place and his interest in problematising the genre of ‘realism’ to a new level.

Those who are accustomed to the artist’s lush renditions of the everyday in bucolic setting from the coastlines of Terengganu to the Tibetan plateau will find a different approach in his new series of watercolour. In VISAGE, Tsai Ming Liang’s film set and actors take on a different narrative as Chang Fee Ming appropriates them to tell his own story about the socio-history of Malaysia by combining text and figuration as he merges disparate elements of Parisian and Malaysian iconography.

This surreal collission of time and space is on one level a response to the cinematic language of Tsai Ming Liang and affords Fee Ming with the much regarded notion of ‘critical distance’ in contemporary art through which some of the most difficult issues concerning his country of origin are touched upon.

Favouring the allusive and the metaphorical, the wall has taken the centre stage in Fee Ming’s composition as the graffiti, the language of urban discontent, is employed to highlight social issues and events of the country that never found any resolutions. Cover-ups, conspiracies, intrigues, forgotten atrocities, surfaced and beamed across the wall as coded messages.

While many would consider VISAGE as a departure in a new direction, the exhibition is also arguably an arrival in the sense that the series’s thematic and formal coherence owes just as much to the development of Chang Fee Ming’s practice as Southeast Asia’s preeminent watercolourist over the past twenty five years. The artist’s staying power lies in his flexibility to occupy multiple positions at once, implicating text and image in a slippery production of meaning as well as committing himself to the depiction of different realities through which other stories find a new lease of life.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Chang Fee Ming is the itinerant artist incarnate. Born in Kuala Terengganu, Malaysia in 1959, the self taught artist makes patient records of the realities he is able to capture during his travels.
From the windy Tibetan plateaus to the littoral shores of the Swahili coast, from the farming communities of Indochina to the festivities surrounding Balinese culture, his practice documents, with amazing acuity and depth, the diverse cultural landscapes of the region.

Chang Fee Ming is today recognised as one of Asia’s most accomplished artists working with watercolour. He has exhibited widely in the Southeast Asian region, with solo shows in Kuala Lumpur, Chiang Mai, Singapore, Jakarta and Bali, and participated 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. In the following year, he launched a publication of travel sketches, Sketching Through Southeast Asia, which 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.

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

ABOUT THE DIRECTOR

While many recognised Tsai Ming Liang as one of Taiwan’s most celebrated second generation of ‘new wave’ directors, he was actually born in Sarawak, Malaysia in 1957. He left for studies in Taiwan at the Culture Studies University and have since established his career in Taiwan. Tsai Ming Liang’s cinematic honours include a Golden Lion for Vive L’Amour at the Venice Film Festival in 1994; the Silver Bear/Special Jury Prize for The River at the 1997 Berlin International Film Festival; the FIPRESCI aware for The Hole at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival. His latest film, VISAGE, was commissioned by the Louvre Museum and was nominated for the Golden Palm at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. It tells the story of a Taiwanese filmmaker’s attempt to make a film based on the myth of Salome at the Louvre Museum. This year, The Pusan International Film Festival will honor Tsai Ming Liang as Asian Filmmaker of the Year.