In Om! The Jewel in the Lotus, 1994-95 a senior monk is meditating, half hidden by a red cloth. Fee Ming represents the wood of a nearby altar with moulds in opalescent greens and veins of spiralling moiré. He catches the moment of transmutation when man is as if petrified, molecules melt and matter becomes liquid. The artist does not deliberately set to express such a tenuous reality. He intuitively captures it. An English writer, himself a Trappist monk and the son of an artist, describes the phenomenon: “After all, from my very childhood, I had understood that the artistic experience, at its highest, was actually a natural analogue of mystical experience. It produced a kind of intuitive perception of reality through a sort of affective identification with the subject contemplated. The kind of perception that Thomists call con-natural”. (Thomas Merton “The Seven Storey Mountain”).

Study of Mandala, from Fee Ming's sketchbook, 1994

“While I was painting Pillars of Enlightenment, 1993,” says Fee Ming, “the upward movement of the robes,?going up in waves, seemed to me like the gesture of a prayer”. In Mandala, 1995, (a mandala is a geometric design made to lead the faithful through the deployment of the actual prayers) a monk wraps himself in a red robe. The lines are almost symmetric. Ripples in a background river repeat the ripples in the cloth, reflecting the oneness of all things.