This year, when I was asked to write about his new works, the Mekong series made over the past three to four years, I noticed that the “materiality” I had discussed had been pushed and exploited even further. He had gained a deeper and clearer understanding of the properties of watercolour as a medium - the immense colouristic possibilities and the translucence/opacity of the pigments themselves. By playing with both thick and thin layers of the pigment, he had found ways to overlay translucence over opacity, and vice versa, such that the final painted surface was incredibly tactile and material, but without losing the glowing transparency afforded by watercolours. In a way, he worked in a process much like that of an oil painter, manipulating the translucence and opacity inherent in the pigments and dyes. Very few watercolourists achieve this level of
understanding and facility.

I had originally wanted to write further about this, but something else caught my attention. Fee Ming had a series of painted postcards and envelopes, almost a hundred in all. These “minor” works are unassuming and do not possess the same level of aesthetic finish the larger watercolours have. However, I liked their intimacy. I liked holding them with my fingers, and being able to flip them around to look at both sides. I liked the idea that they had been held in the hands of many people, from the post-office clerk to the postman. Many of these cards and envelopes have sat in post offices, mail bags, and post-boxes; have travelled aboard motor-bikes, vans, trains and planes; and have traversed vast terrains, crossing boundaries and nations.

II
The significance and meaning acquired by these postcards and envelopes through their journeys, unframed, unprotected, vulnerable to weather and man, struck a chord deep in me. Each had accumulated something more than the Art on its surface, something perhaps parallel and akin to the unquantifiable experience, observations and knowledge Fee Ming has gathered in his years of itinerant travails. These works also offered a rich array of inter-textual information: from the sketches made by the artist to the postage stamps to the post-markings on the stamps, and to even the envelopes and picture postcards themselves. So, having been lured into this path, I will attempt to think, write and explain more about them. But first, a necessary digression.

The “significance and meaning” I refer to in these hand-painted postcards and envelopes lie in the history of communication and travel, the idea of progress, and the formation of nations. Prior to the invention of the
postage stamp, the recipient of the mail had to pay for the letter. The Industrial Revolution of the early 1800’s made it possible to produce en masse. The first adhesive postage stamps, with an engraving of the
profile of Queen Victoria worth a penny each and called “The Penny Black”, were issued in 1840. Within
a year, about 72,000,000 Penny Black stamps were printed and sold.

The issuing of prepaid postage in the form of a stamp made communication simpler, more uniform and efficient. The image on the stamp - Queen Victoria in the case of The Penny Black - gave the letter or postcard a sense of legitimacy and officialdom. The choice of the image on the stamp is of further significance – Queen Victoria was the Monarch who saw the making of modern Britain, the Empress who for over 63 years ruled across oceans and continents, led the largest Empire and made Britain the richest country in the world.

From the first Penny Black to the postage stamps of this day and century, the symbolic role of the image on them has not really changed that much. These images continue to construct and propagate a Nation’s psyche – its cultural and natural wealth, its economic and technological progress, its national aspirations and programs. In effect, postage stamps contain and embody the visual power of nationalism, propaganda and Nationhood. Replicated in millions, they circumvent the globe, reaching people deep into the smallest town and village.

To avoid the reuse and misuse of stamps, cancellations or postage markings were created. Originally in the form of a Maltese Cross, it was modified and modernised to become more specific. Postal markings not only cancelled the validity of a stamp but also gave it an added authenticity, right down to an exact time and date, a particular post office in a particular district/state. Postal markings bring the National to the Personal, the
global to the local.

III
This digression has attempted to cull the oftentimes overlooked cultural and political “narratives” or significance stamps and postal markings possess. More importantly, it provides us with a frame and lens, so to speak, to read Fee Ming’s envelopes and postcards. And not merely as drawings – all the elements, the drawings, stamps, postage cancellations and all other images, text and marks that lie on the surface, each contain their own narrative. Together, these narratives inform, intervene and transform each other such that individual meanings are no longer static, isolated and stable, and it is not possible to look at any one of them without referencing others.

The two visually dominant narratives on all of Fee Ming’s envelopes and postcards are his drawings and the stamps. The drawings, like the images for his larger, finished paintings, are about the commonplace, the ordinary: boats anchored at a jetty, a mother carrying a child on her back, earthen pots and fish traps, a weaver next to a loom, workers and monks, the daily monotony of hard work. They are spontaneous and fleeting images rendered mostly in ink, sometimes in pencil, and often coloured in with washes and
mottled dabs of watercolour.

In contrast to the drawings are the stamps. Despite being smaller in scale, they stand out because of their slickness and fineness of detail, their projection of a different world and sensibility – political leaders and
smiling citizens, luscious flora, exotic birds and reptiles, national monuments and flags, electric towers and speeding trains, anti-malaria and football campaigns. Heroic, patriotic and idealised, these images conceal
what the drawings reveal. They construct the archetypal and iconic while the drawings portray the personal and idiosyncratic.

IV
On an off-white envelope sent from Ho Chih Minh City, Vietnam post-marked June 12, 2001, are pasted three stamps. On one of them is a high-voltage electric tower with orange waves emanating from it. Above is a stylised light bulb with the text: 500KW. On another stamp is an image of a modern, red and blue diesel train moving towards us. In almost  illegible script in the left corner, the model of the train D12E is
printed. In the third stamp, we see a beautifully detailed pheasant, Laphura Diardi. This pheasant, almost extinct, is on the endangered species list.

Fee Ming’s ink drawing was done in Vinh Long, in the Mekong River plains Southwest of Ho Chi Minh city. It is an image of a fishmonger wearing a straw hat squatting on a stool eating with chopsticks from her bowl. Surrounding here are two large trays, holding catfish. An empty scale sits besides her. On this envelope is also Fee Ming’s address in Terengganu, Malaysia, and on the back, a logo of a lotus, “Teratai Arts and Crafts”, a crafts shop in Kuala Terengganu.

The envelope travelled with Fee Ming to Vietnam and was transformed in the journey through the artist’s observations of a country still reconstructing itself from almost twenty years of war which devastated its resources and infrastructure. It left Terenggganu as a plain envelope the same time as Fee Ming, and returned home on a plane from Ho Chi Minh City as something quite different.

The narratives on this envelope are rich and poignant. The country prides itself in being able to offer a diesel train service and electricity to the people. It commemorates a pheasant disappearing from its landscape while the fishmonger continues her daily life selling whatever is available from the day’s catch, perhaps unaware or unable to partake in the modernity that is slowly creeping in.

Many of the narratives, if we take time to delve a little deeper and look a little closer, are full of such reflexivity and irony. On another envelope, sent from Ban Hat Khrai, Chiang Khong,Thailand on April 4, 2001 (dated in its Thai equivalent), we see a drawing of a group of workers - four sitting and one standing - dressed in blue peasant shirts and pants. The two stamps sitting beside this image portray the celebration of a Buddhist Festival, the Maghapuja Day, a day in the third lunar month when Buddha met his disciples. These two scenes, like temple murals, are elaborate, and the people in it are leisurely enjoying themselves in chatter, activity, food and dance. The envelope is from Fee Ming’s own stationery with his name in front and address at the back in brilliant gold. Who are these workers? Are they resting or waiting or perhaps out of a job? Why aren’t they at the celebrations? How have tradition and religion enriched them?

In a commercial tourist postcard distributed by China’s Information Office, Fee Ming has done a quick sketch of a profile of a young girl with what seem like decorations and flowers in her hair. On top is a line of four stamps, all of the Great Wall of China. This card was sent on May 6, 2001 from Xishuangbanna and is
addressed to Fee Ming’s wife. On the front of the postcard is a picture of two young boys, hardly five
perhaps, clinging on to the roughly hewn wooden supports of a house. These boys are half naked, appear unwashed and slightly malnourished. The younger one stares straight at us. Below this picture is a caption: “Boys of the Mountain Folks”.

In this postcard, there is both poignancy and humour. The profile of this young girl, looking somewhat surprised, stares directly the name of Fee Ming’s wife. What is the artist telling his wife about the girls of this
region? Why does she look so different from the forlorn-looking boys on the photograph? Why is this image of children living in poverty marketing mountain folks as exotic? Why wasn’t a country that has built the Great Wall, the only visible man-made structure from satellite, able to provide a better life for them? Many layers of narratives emerge from this interplay.

V
Fee Ming’s envelopes and postcards make references to many practices and traditions. Perhaps the most obvious are first-day covers, except that these works are a subversion of them. They deconstruct the ideology of idealised nationhood. I am also reminded of the kinds of sketches and drawings made by colonial
ethnographers and naturalists, observing along their journeys and sending these back home. Or even contemporary art practices like mail art and some of the works by conceptual artist On Kawara about time, place and travelling.

It would be an error to see and read these works purely as sketches or studies, and to judge them solely on the quality of line or paint. Aesthetics is but one of the layers. Because of the process through which these works are conceived and made, they have become documents with multiple narratives. They are documents about the art of journeys and travelling, both personal and geographical. Of observing and the transformation of knowledge and experience. Of place and country, traversing past and present, transience and permanence.

Wong Hoy Cheong is a visual artist based in Malaysia working in various
media. He occasionally curates exhibition and writes on art.