Sharing a Tibetan Journey

Rohani Longuet

Others have gone to Tibet in search of spiritual illumination, to climb mountains, or even to discover the source of the Mekong, but for Chang Fee Ming, the "roof of the world" is the last station of many years' travels. It is part of a wider exploration of Southeast Asia and Asia. The insatiable thirst of this Malaysian artist has led him painting and sketching from down the Straits of Lombok to over the Himalayas. He has described peoples who retain ways of life that may soon disappear. He has sought to understand humanity with all its faces, exploring remote corners of a fast changing world.

His guide and his companion in northern, peninsular Southeast Asia has been the Mekong River - tumultuous, untamed, altering its course in Laos, flowing through a lake in Cambodia and spreading in the innumerable branches of its delta in Vietnam. In an extensive previous series of covering six countries, Fee Ming painted the industrious populations along the shores of the 4900 km long river, the resilient tribes of the hills and the inhabitants of the war-torn lands - their rituals, their costumes, their everyday life, as well as their fight for survival amidst radical changes brought about by dams, urbanisation and other trappings of material development.

This second Mekong series is dedicated to Tibet and Qinhai,the high plateau from which large rivers flow down into the Indian and the Pacific Ocean, giving life on the way to a multitude of peoples, fauna and flora. It is also the birthplace of the Bon Pa religion, of tantric Buddhism and the land of "kora" pilgrimages around sacred mountains.

"At first, Tibet was not easy for me to understand. I do not really have cultural roots there". The Tibetan landscape must have been visually difficult too. The Mekong there is barely a rivulet and the flowing water that the artist is so fond of painting, is rarely seen. The green colours of his native tropical Terengganu or of his dear Bali appear, vivid in the clear air, but only briefly during the short summer.

However, difficulty, Fee Ming explained once in an interview, is what motivates him as an artist. The painter has trekked the steep mountains, experiencing the verticality and coldness of the vast landscapes, gradually adapting to the altitude. Like a pilgrim, he steadfastly made the long journey towards the "source of life", bringing with him the bare essentials - sketch books, camera, brushes and his love for his subject.
The result is a dazzling as well as intimate vision of the Tibetan plateau, so powerful that one feels like actually having been there.

Empathy infuses Fee Ming's work. "While painting the diptych Om Mani Padme Hum I became haunted by the words." The incantation resounded in the artist's mind just as it was repeatedly carved on stone in one panel, and sent in every direction of the cosmos by the prayer wheel represented in the other. Ten paintings, out of sixteen, are related to devotions and prayers. They show how Tibetans pray with the wind, sounds, stones, writings and their whole body, keeping the physical and the spiritual worlds in constant dialogue.

In Merging Mountains a woman is immersed in prayer. The movement of the lines of her clothes meeting the flow of the mountain ridges unites the character and the landscape in one strong circle, suggesting the wheel of karma and the enveloping presence of faith. There is no barrier between nature and the supernatural. The Road to Potala celebrates in dedicated minutiae the costume of a pilgrim, singling out his wooden hand-slippers and his apron made of yak hide. The rugged accessories evoke the hardships that have had to be endured. The pilgrim is one of those who make their way to Potala, alone, or in small groups, sometimes with their family, carrying the necessities for a strenuous journey that may take months or years, exhausted and happy, not thinking of what they will have when they return. In Homage a man bows forward, hat in hand, full of reverence and joy mixed with fear in front of a Buddha. He has placed his own yak butter oil lamp besides dozens of others burning on his left. The frontal perspective directs the humble look of the supplicant right to the viewer, unveiling the man's intense religious experience. In Summer Farewell, the hand of a monk emerges, holding Buddhist prayer beads, from his red garb, while a woman in blue, wearing tribal headdress, looks away. Here, perhaps, the atmosphere is different. A woman and a man she cares for - a lover, a friend or a brother - have to part at the end of the light-hearted days of the summer festival. A very long winter is coming.

Repeatedly, great powers, including those from Europe, have vied for influence in Lhassa and the control of strategic passes. Explorers of all mettle, and missionaries came. Perennité recalls the eventful history of Tibet. A Buddhist monk stands in the foreground; further up on a hill, in the background, is a Christian monastery dating from the early twentieth century. Whatever foreigners may have left behind, the Tibetan Buddhist remains on the mountains. There is no room for a weapon in this monk's extended fingers.

This series of paintings bears Fee Ming's unmistakable signature: striking close ups, cropped characters and intense colours. The spiritual sights of Tibet are figured in a slow brazier of colours on the warm side of the palette.

In A Moment in Red the folds of the cloth are like walls of flames. Strongly structured parallel crimson lines ascend towards a dark background. In contrast, the width of the cowl on a robe is displayed across the foreground in cooler nuances of carmine. In several paintings, red and orange colours float over darker tones.

Bright red, however, is not the dominant colour. Tibet is defined, rather, by the nuances seen in the diptych In my Heart on my Back where delicate golden relic boxes are set among Indian red silk and purple wool. The red mixes with light brown, heralding the rest of the series which combines blue and brown with mauve and violet shades, suggesting mystery and mysticism.

There are a few exceptions to that range. In Break at the Top, a jovial pony decorated with bells seems to experience the elation of altitude. Cool blue skies and transparent white clouds illuminate the scene. Paper white, the genie of the watercolour medium, on the edges of certain scenes gives a measure of the altitude; it adds brilliance to flames and to the metal of prayer wheels. In the copper-coloured and confined atmosphere of the Buddhist chapel of Homage, white provides a welcome visual window, a reminder of the world outside.

Earth colours predominate in Road to Potala. The pilgrim has prayed, laying his body repeatedly on the surface of the earth for kilometers. Ochre, sienna and burnt umber evoke the long path as well as extreme effort and profound humility. Fee Ming's meticulous rendering of textures, his re-creation of shapes and lines has made him sometimes labeled a hyper-realist. Art writers Ooi Kok Chuen and Beverly Yong have, however, noted how much his realistic approach borders on abstraction by taking the attention away from the mundane use of things, to the intrinsic beauty of the matter; here in Tibet, the texture of a pilgrim glove, the strings of a relics box, and, always, the folds of a robe or the creases of a coat.

A deliberate exaggeration of colour intensity - rare in watercolour- compensates for the flatness of the paper surface. When perspective is denied by the closeness of a subject that fills the foreground, the artist creates relief with pigments. Layer upon layer of patiently selected light colours enrich dark hollows. Paper white absences accentuate prominences. A glaze suitable to the atmosphere spreads over each scene, rendering the air palpable. Om Mani Padme Hum is one of example of this creative mastery. Rocks carved with scriptures shine, as if seen through a polarizing lens. The play of shadows, golden light and enhanced colours materialise the hypnotic incantation.

Other themes apart from the religious resonate through these works. They weave a personal map by which the painter finds his bearings. They suggest a brotherhood among the peoples he encounters. Special place is given to children, pictured in their familiar surroundings: the young traveller in On the Move reminds us of other children portrayed earlier, mischievously peeping from a Malay buai, (tragically) resting on a bomb shell in Laos, or asleep on a nocturnal beach in Indonesia. In the brief summer of the Tibetan mountains, at the heart of a spiralling composition, the face of the child is sunk in the cocoon of a travel cot filled with floral textiles. Almost hidden among the folds of a rugged blanket, is a hand-made gun with a wooden cross. In the background, the tribe's yaks graze down in the green and sepia valley, completing the description of a destiny.

Fee Ming also holds a deep respect for the working life of his subjects. An earlier work Morning Light (?) portrayed a man in northern Thailand, rice basket on a shoulder-strap at the beginning of a day, glad to be on his way to earn his livelihood. In Highlander, a tough mountaineer smiles, secure in the fact that he has made his life journey in a forbidding land where one has to be strong to survive. A powerful graphic correspondence is established between the dark blue backdrop of the mountains, the deep wrinkles on the man's weathered face and the purple folds of his clothes. The view is painted in perspective from below, increasing the stature of the subject. The thread-like cordyceps fungus held against a vivid red jacket in I've got One! does not look like much; yet, its central position captures the value of the medicinal fungus for the mountain women who depend on it to earn much needed money during the summer, as well as for those hoping for a cure.

People gathering at markets carrying baskets, bundles, shoulder bags, filled with goods precious for them to trade or to bring back home, are a familiar feature of Fee Ming's work. Double Happiness emphasizes the value of these markets for isolated villagers. The title of the painting refers to a Chinese character usually printed on marriage bed sheets seen in red colour on the makeshift pouch in the center of the scene.
Fee Ming has a fascination for cloth, especially cloth moving in the wind. In Prayers in the Wind, gossamer prayer flags attached to clotheslines flutter in the breeze on a slope, sending prayers into the sky with their movement. The artist has previously created this transparent effect, for example in [" ",] in where a thin veil shrouds a Thai statue of Buddha. Here, undistracted by narrative, the painting captures the ethereal texture of the prayer flags among the intricate designs of the sparse vegetation. Depth and movement are created with precise virtuosity. One can almost hear the flapping of the flags.

South East Asia has always dreamed of legends and demons. In the animist, Hindu and Buddhist cultures, deities continue to haunt the world of humans. Fee Ming never misses the chance to represent those he meets on his journey, embodied in masks (Laos), in sandstone (Bali) or like here, on a Tibetan mural in The Watcher. A blue deity hovers over an aged woman. For all his exuberance, the demon dancing on the flat plane of the painting is trapped - he is not as alive as the woman, her years written on her face. The artist shows her nonchalantly passing by, preoccupied with her prayers and her thoughts.

A familiar visual theme, originally inspired by a painting by watercolour master Andrew Wyeth, is given new meaning. It is a view of a standing personage, where only the legs are seen; in Wyeth's painting, planted on the grass. In a previous work by Fee Ming, There is a Way, a pair of rugged, makeshift shoes became an iconic symbol of determination. In Shadow Tales the theme is transformed into a meditation on the departure of a loved one. The legs of a woman in dark clothes, a basket on her back, describe her leaving towards the left. The centre of the scene is filled with the fragile shadow of the basket drawn on the ground. The unbalanced effect is deliberate. A cold violet hue is spread over the obsessive rendering of the pebbles on the ground, numerous as the days in a life. The hour of sunset is close. Soon the shadow will disappear.

The Tibetan series gives the impression of an extraordinary inner energy and technical achievement. Human observation, symbolism, humour, and nostalgia run easily through the work of an artist in full control of his medium. A certain weariness mixed with trust in the resilience of the people seems to filter through this celebration of Tibetan ways.