IT is rare for Malaysian artists to win international recognition and acclaim for their work, especially when the praise originates from what is currently the world’s hottest and most competitive art market, China.

This year, the People’s Republic named abstract painter Miau Wong, who hails from KL, as ‘one of the world’s leading contemporary artists of Chinese descent’.

In honour of Wong’s stellar achievement, which demonstrates that Malaysian artists can occupy a prominent place on the world’s artistic canvas, Lookiss gallery is organising a solo exhibition of the painter’s recent oeuvre, entitled Miau Wong: New Work Miau’s muse Wong’s art is based on one simple idea: that the earth we live on is a beautiful place, despite the abuse and damage we have done to it.

Depending on how and where we choose to look, there is aesthetic harmony to be found, simply because our world is infi nitesimal when placed on the scale of the larger universe.

The blue seas, high mountains and night skies — when viewed perspicaciously from a space rocket or hot air balloon — appear undisturbed, powerful and even deceptively pristine. In his genre-defying abstract paintings, we see familiar images of our world amidst the upheaval of material, matter and colours in fusion.

To Wong, abstraction in art is not the absence of form, in that any splash of paint randomly applied on a canvas qualifi es as scholarly fi ne art.

His abstractions are careful, controlled and like all great abstract artworks, do not require elements of a picture to give the presence or feeling of form.

Wong’s pieces in New Work bear Semang names (Semang is the language of the aboriginal Negrito people of north-central Peninsular Malaysia.

They have lived in the area for over 10,000 years, since before the Sundaseas rose around the Malay archipelago. For this reason, Wong’s ‘earth story’ begins with a tribute paid to the heritage and memory of these original people.

More on Miau Wong earned a degree at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in Singapore and returned home to Malaysia as a professional artist in the 1970s.

In 1982, he went to Europe to study, paint and search for his very own style of rendering, fi rst with watercolours and later with acrylic. He has, up to now, held 10 successful solo exhibitions in Malaysia and overseas, especially China.