Chang Fee Ming’s staying power, as one of Southeast Asia’s preeminent watercolourists, lies in his ability 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, his stories of the disenfranchised, the marginalised and the unvoiced find a new lease of life. VISAGE while taking his practice in a new direction is also arguably an arrival in the sense that the series’ thematic and formal coherence owe just as much to the development of the artist’s practice over the past twenty-five years.
Those who are accustomed to Fee Ming's lush renditions of the everyday in bucolic settings from the coastlines of Terengganu to the Tibetan plateau will find a different approach in his new series. First of all, there is the very problematic notion of place, we are never quite sure which world is Fee Ming portraying -scrambled visual codes suggest both his Parisian experience of observing the shooting of Tsai Ming Liang's feature length film of the same title Visage at the Louvre Museum as well as those that signify Malaysia's current and historical socio-political problems - whereas in his previous works, the depiction of place is pronounced and direct. Secondly, the shift of subject from the rural to the urban compels the viewer into a different kind of mental space. Gone are the idyll of lapping waves, the rich colours and unhurried movements that suffused his paintings. In their place - stasis, weight, and mess.
Yet there are also continuations in Fee Ming's abiding fascination with textural surface, the socio-political history of place and his relentless push to problematise and renew our understanding of the genre of 'realism' in art. While they may not be immediately recognisable, a closer inspection of the works reveal that these underlying elements form the basis of Fee Ming's practice and VISAGE's achievement is in directing our attention to them by constructing a cinematic counterpart, a parallax so to speak, in order to throw them into high relief.
It seems that Fee Ming's recent sojourn to Paris, filtered through his experience as a guest observer on the film set of Tsai Ming Liang's Visage, afforded the artist 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. In some sense, this is always how Fee Ming has worked, favouring allusive and metaphorical codes rather than direct statements. It can be traced back to earlier paintings of his rich accounts of cultural life across Southeast Asia.
Consider Youth and Children Together, which garnered the Gold Award for the Sime Darby Art Asia 1985 competition. Here the presence of school children from a rural community is indexed by the depiction of their footwear and school bags left on the staircase leading up to a kampung house. Fee Ming’s allusive portrait throws into light the question of modern education and how it will shape the future of a younger generation as they take on the new life skills, worldviews and opportunities, that differ from their parents. In Malioboro (1990), the market street life of Yogyakarta is cropped and composed in a manner in which the details of the wrapped batik fabric on the bodies of female traders hiding under a tarpaulin canopy belie the social changes the community underwent. The painting hint at the hardship and labour of women engaged in trade, a transaction that is veiled by the canopy.
