Valentine Willie Fine Art is delighted to announce the launch of Chang Fee Ming’s latest publication of his travel sketches, Sketching Through Southeast Asia. In conjunction with the launch, an exhibition of Chang Fee Ming’s sketches, accumulated from his twenty years of travelling across the region, will be held at the gallery from 21 July to 14 August 2010.

Sketching Through Southeast Asia tells a different story about Southeast Asia than the dominant narrative that has largely preoccupied itself with the region’s modernity, urbanisation and economic growth.

As a collection of sketches, it demonstrates Chang Fee Ming’s insatiable appetite for travelling and recording the realities that are increasingly threatened by the homogenising forces of modernity and his sympathy towards our cultural inheritance and traditional ways of life.

Sketching Through Southeast Asia is not a lamentation of vanishing worlds but a commitment to the spirited yet unassuming courage of the ordinary people of Southeast Asia. It draws from them a lesson about other models of living, other ways of relating to one’s environment as well as one another.

The book divides the artist’s travel into five easy to follow categories: Market and Meeting Place, Culture and Tradition, Work and Livelihood, Rest and Leisure, Garden and Landscape. From the fishing coasts of the Nusantara to the farming communities of Indochina, this body of sketches illustrates the complex socio-cultural make up of the region and once again proves Chang Fee Ming’s artistic versatility as Malaysia’s unrivalled contemporary watercolourist.