Apprenticeship

After secondary school, Fee Ming went up to Kuala Terengganu, to work in a sign board shop in the middle of a busy street, by the estuary of the Terengganu River. Green scenery called to him from the opposite bank. On weekends, the young man asnwered, taking his brushes to the village of Seberang Takir - home to the blind fisherman and poet J.M. Aziz, or to the island of Pulau Duyung where the last of the merchant schoorners carrying salt were anchored.

From an aesthetic point of view, the years 1975-1985 were years of plenty for Terengganu. In the kampongs around town and especially in Pulua Duyung, Fee Ming found again the harmony of a traditional way of life. For years he returned to the island in the estuary, always sketching and working. He made friends with the likes of Wan Ahmad Khoda, a sea captain, and Wan Abdullah, an iman with a ready smile. They called him Hassan. “Pulua Duyungn was my academy,” he says today.

He descended steep beaches to paint boats pulled on shore and penetrated into unknown areas, capturing tirelessly everything he saw. Later, in Kuala Lumpur, some of the landscapes of these early days were well received. Fee Ming was regularly invited to participate in exhibitions. Soon, he would be able to – albeit living frugally-devote himself only to painting, learning directly from the world around him.

Beyond the myriad of subjects in Terengganu, nature bestowed three gifts of special importance to the artist. The first was movement. Located on the “shoulder” of the east coast of Malaysia, the state bears the full force of the north-east monsoon. It is the theatre of a vast shifting operation, on a background of thunder, pounding waves and the frightening swirl of the bending coconut trees. Even during calms, rectangles of kain batik with flowery red and green patterns sail and flaps on the hanging lines, forming a mesmerizing sight that Fee Ming caught many times. In December, 1986, an early painting of clouds, river and boats – everything moves.

The second gift from nature was transparency of the air, a precision in the appearance of things that led Fee Ming towards more realism than is usual in watercolour. For days on end, rain and wind compete to clean the air, brushing away every speck of dust, revealing the raw colour and the detailed texture of things. Fee Ming zoomed in on pots, stairs, vines, stone or fishermen’s nets with renew attention. The wet brush of the earlier fast sketches was replaced by a painstakingly meticulous rendition of matter. To obtain a desired effect – the curve of a jar, the fungus on a plank, Fee Ming applied his paint layer upon layer using a dry brush technique, until he achieved the right glitter and the right suggestion of thickness and volume.

The third gift was light – a gift that earned him the nickname of “Apollo’s Prince of Terengganu” (J. Elizalde Navarro, 1991). At six – degrees latitude above the equator, the sun is strong, even in the morning. Fee Ming studied carefully the effect of the light in surfaces. In his series of windows, filled with cascading bolsters and pillows, and balconies half covered with batik sarongs, his paintings make the heat at various hours of the day appear tangible. (Caressed By the Sun, 1993, page 19) “Fee Ming catches the sun in such a way….One probably has to be born here…” commented visiting Canadian artist Keith Miller.