Lot description
Known for depicting romantic portrayal of figures immersed in local landscapes, this work contains the hallmark features of the artist, replete with a subtle yet elegant colour palette. Situated against a vast green backdrop, the artist creates atmosphere effortlessly and captures the beauty and youth of a lady in a state of contemplation. Kow Leong Kiang stamped his class when he won the highly coveted Grand Prize in the Philip Morris Asean Art Award, the only Malaysian to have done so, in the finals in Vietnam in 1998, with his work called Mr. Foreign Speculator, Stop Damaging Our Country, which established him as a major figurative artist. He graduated from the Kuala Lumpur College of Art in 1991 and showed early promise when he won the Minor Award in the Young Contemporary Artists competition in 1992 and the National Day Art Competition in Kuala Lumpur. He was awarded the Freeman Foundation Asian Artist fellowship for a two-month artist's residency at the Vermont Studio Centre in the United States in 2004. He held his solo exhibition To The Sea at Ernst and Young Gallery in Singapore in August 2012 under the Asia Outreach Programme. A member of the provocative F Klub, Kow Leong Kiang continues to create sensuous figurative images alongside his peers Bayu Utomo Radjikin, Shia Yih-Yiing, Marvin Chan, Chong Ai Lei, Gan Chin Lee and Chin Kong Yee with an exhibition titled Scent Of Bali upon returning from an inspirational trip to Bali in 2013. He also participated in the group show Art@Whiteaways, a special project exhibition in conjunction with the Georgetown Festival in Penang the same year. The ever-talented artist has explored various nuances of figurative style drawings and paintings including nudes from his Collisions series and most recently his interest in examining the male figure.