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The Awaiting series numbering five is one of the most compelling of Chang Fee Ming’s watercolours for its lushness, radiant colours, bold composition and his trademark half-figures. This being the only piece still in the country, two works from the same series are now in the collection of the Singapore Art Museum, while two others are in private hands in Germany and Singapore.
Three female figures clad in sarung of contrasting patterns loom over the sandy beach tarmac looking away to the top-side with the slivers of breakwaters at the top indicating the sea. Their strong hands are placed on the hips and behind their backs, indicating anxiety. This ritual of the women folk is filled with emotional pathos of the hope of safe return of their men out at sea as well as a bountiful harvest. The lopping off of the top half helps shift attention to the variegated colours and patterns in the sarung. The footprints on the sand with subtle glints of light mark presence and absence, eventually washed away by the incoming waves, thus erasing any notion of being. On his simple philosophy, the artist, Fee Ming, has often intoned: “I am not a philosopher, not a poet, and not a writer. I only paint what I see and feel.”
Ranked among the finest of watercolour artists in Asia, Fee Ming has gone from strength to strength since his early successes, winning the Asean Gold Prize in the Sime Darby Art Asia Competition in 1985, the PNB Malaysian Art Competition the same year, and the Malaysian Watercolour Society (MWS) Award in 1984 and 1985. He also won the Minor Awards in the Young Contemporary Artists Competition in 1986 and 1987. In 1997, he won two awards of Distinction in the Rockport Publishers USA and in 1999, the Dom Perignon Portrait of A Perfectionist Award, Malaysia. He was a co-winner of the Winsor & Newton World Millennium Painting Competition in 1999 and was selected for the Singapore Tyler Print Institute project in 2009, which resulted in his solo exhibition Imprinted Thoughts. Exhibited and collected widely around the world, Fee Ming is based in Kuala Terengganu and Bali.
