Chinese ink paints 1Malaysia

Riches from an ancient art stir local interest

By Joy Akang and Olivia Peter
Pictures by Victor Lo

Deputy chief minister Dr Yee Moh Chai is excited. It is the first time that Sabah is holding a three-week long Chinese ink painting (水墨画) exhibition at the art gallery in Kota Kinabalu which ends on April 28. About 3,000 people, including some 300 tourists, have visited it where 95 wash paintings by 71 Malaysians are displayed. Two peninsular artists stand out: Chong Chen Chuan, 66, who sold one of his paintings for 400,000 ringgit ($131,600) in China, and Faridah Abdul Hamid Khan, 69, the only known Malay exponent of an ancient Chinese art that dates back to the Tang dynasty (618-907).

The resource development and information technology minister has also witnessed the recent launch of the Sabah branch of the Chinese Ink Painting Society of Malaysia. This, he says, is an important milestone in the development of local artists. He hopes more artistic people, particularly students, will be encouraged to take up Chinese ink painting – a simple expressionist art that captures the unseen by cutting out unneeded details. It has inspired modern western artists and influenced their philosophy.

The paintings depict Malaysian subjects such as the orang-utans, pitcher plants and the ubiquitous white egrets that fly over the streets of Kota Kinabalu and perch on traffic islands and roundabouts.

They are priced between 200 and 40,000 ringgit. The Sabah cultural board has bought a painting of orang-utans for 5,000 ringgit from David Liew Chan Hua, 45, who chairs the Sabah ink painting society. Twenty-two Sabahans are showing their work.

Chong, a famous master of the art, thrilled guests on the exhibition opening day on April 7 by showing them his skills. He painted the egrets black; that was the only colour, Dr Yee notes, used in such paintings until an eighth century Chinese poet Wang Wei (王維) introduced light green to his paintings. These days they are multi-coloured washes.

The egrets don’t look quite like them. Thus is the essence of Chinese ink painting: perfect match of form and colour is out. The goal is to depict the unseen, capturing the soul of the subject as the artist imagines it to be.

Self-taught when he was about 15, Chong has shown his paintings at China’s national gallery thrice and has three galleries named after him in the middle kingdom. He heads the Malaysian Chinese Ink Painting Society.

Faridah is Chong’s student and she is one of Malaysia’s most prolific Chinese ink painters. She has produced 10,000 paintings; about 10 a day, she says. A housewife, Faridah who hails from Brickfields in Kuala Lumpur started to paint when she was 50, encouraged by a sister and niece. She has a daughter, a manager with CIMB bank, who takes after her. But she doesn’t do ink. Her husband Rathi Issak, 76, long retired as a general manager of the Malaysia’s Social Welfare Lottery Board. She has two sons and another daughter. They aren’t artists.

But she sells few of her paintings. “It’s difficult to part with them.” She tells Insight Sabah. “I paint them with all my heart.” She can’t remember but she says she has sold between 15 and 20 paintings for between 200 and 1,500 ringgit each. She has given some of them to relatives and friends as gifts for birthday or house-warming. She has sold a painting of a Chinese plum blossom, one of her favourite subjects, and one of a hen with her chicks for 1,500 ringgit each. Last month she sold six paintings at 500 ringgit a piece.

She paints between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. because she prefers the quietude. “Everyone is asleep and there’s no one to bother me,” she says, adding that she is at peace with her art: “It relaxes my mind.”

Two of her paintings, one of a plum blossom and another of a magnolia flower, are on show at the Kota Kinabalu exhibition.

Her art has taken her to Xiamen (2002) and Hefei- Huangsan (2004) in China, Seoul (2004) and Singapore (2003). She won an award in appreciation of her paintings in South Korea in 2006. She holds frequent exhibitions in Malaysia. In 2009 she held a solo display of her paintings at the Shah Alam gallery and the national art gallery.

She finds the Chinese art edifying. It helps her understand culture better, particularly her own. Unlike other forms of painting, a Chinese ink painter doesn’t sketch his subject in pencil. He paints spontaneously, leaving no room for errors. “You can’t alter your sketch because there is none,” Faridah says.

Her only lament is that not everyone can afford to take it up as brushes, paper and ink are expensive.

A brush depending on its size, costs between 25 and 35 ringgit. The most costly ones are made from horse hair. Others are made from the hair of goats, chicken, bears, deer, leopards, foxes, wolves, rabbits and the whiskers of rats.

Rice paper, although it is not made of rice, is expensive. It sells for between 1.50 and 180 ringgit a piece depending on the type of tree bark (elm or mulberry) it is made of and its age. The older it is, the more costly. Mineral- or vegetable-based colours cost about 12 ringgit a tube.

Still, interest in Chinese ink painting has grown, according to Liew who runs classes for 80 students, 20 are adults. Some of his students are Malays and Kadazandusuns and Muruts. He charges a fee of 75 ringgit for children and 80 ringgit for adult for a two-hour lesson. A student will need two brushes, a box of paint and paper that will cost 100 ringgit, he says. – Insight Sabah