The Canvas Hotel commissioned veteran artist Wong Chee Meng to come up with “In Love with Illumination”, a series of 20 paintings that help define the individuality of the hotel. Who is Chee Meng? What inspires his paintings? Here is his story.

Contemporary artist Wong Chee Meng is a man always in motion. His fluidity is reflected in his pieces, as well as the way his career has progressed since he started out some 20 years ago.

His early work reflects his happy childhood. Growing up in the small town of Taiping, he suffered neither angst nor stress. He was secure in the love of his family. Whatever he wanted, it was there.

“My earlier work was a little naive, comprised simple designs, simplication of shapes, forms and composition,” he remembers. “Art was a way to express what I see.”

Chee Meng’s art has since evolved into more complex pieces with subtle messages, but at its heart, the theme of joy and hope remains. Indeed, Chee Meng saw no reason to paint anything dreary or disturbing, simpy because he feels there is enough pain in the world without adding to it. “When I paint, I like my art to provide happiness and I want to project positivity.”

Chee Meng says he is just an ordinary boy who likes to paint. While growing up in the small town of Taiping was idyllic, it was also lonely. “I am the only son; my sisters were much older, so I was always home alone. Painting was an activity I felt confident in; I used water colours, it was simple but it brought me a lot of cheer.”

So, what started out as a hobby to fill his loneliness turned out to be the career path he chose to pursue in 1996. He decided to go to art school and from then, there was no looking back.

When he was just 16, Chee Meng met with an accident that impaired his eyesight. It was a defining moment in his life. “The accident changed my life; my period of recovery was long and I see things differently.”

Moving from Taiping to Kuala Lumpur to continue his art education and later, to work, also changed the way he view things. City life didn’t knock off his rose-coloured glasses entirely but it forced him to contend with shadows and shades of grey.

His art grew in subtlety and complexity and it became textured and many-layered. “It’s about illusions. I want to share how I perceive the world in layers and lines and double images,” he says, adding that this is a reflection of how he now sees the world.

It is about more than painting; it is a way of seeing. He wants his audience to look beyond the surface image to the hidden message underneath.

He moved from water colours to oils to acrylics (mainly because his housemates could not stand the smell of the oils). His technique, legacy of his education and his early exposure, was Western until later on when he starting embracing the subtlety and ambiguities of the East.

It was no longer enough to convey simple shapes in happy colours. Chee Meng wove together lines, always including embedded imagery. The world, so to speak, had become his school and he soaked up many different things, like a sponge.

For instance, it was not enough for him to paint the dancer or the dance; he has to become the dancer. He studied dance so he could appreciate the beauty of human gestures at a visceral level, using his entire body to be able to depict it realistically.

“I need to feel the movement to be able to properly convey it to an audience,” he says.

Being a sponge, he soaks it all up joyfully and is still learning, evolving and embracing the new. However, with all the changes in his expression through the years, one thing has remained constant: he still projects images of happiness, hope and joy.

He talks about moving out of his peaceful home town to discover that the rest of the world was neither as cool nor as peaceful. “People would harp on negative things. The whole thing was frankly, so demotivating,” he shrugs.

But negativity, as he came to see it, was a choice. You didn’t have to play to the gallery. You did not have to sing the same inharmonious tune. “I thought, why don’t we look at things through a different perspective, so we could better appreciate our lives?

“I wanted to use my art to share happiness. This is why my last series, Opportunity, which was exhibited in the Wei Ling Gallery, was about beach balls,” he says.

Why beach balls? “I know, it seems like a common subject matter but images can retrieve a story, convey a language. Beach balls remind us of our childhood and fun. They signify opportunity, aiming for the best.”

Basically, what he wants to convey, through a series of associations, is a sense of joyousness and innocence. Anyone looking at these beach balls would remember some instance from their past, associated with such an object, and it would bring a smile, a feeling of lightness, perhaps.

Every one of his pieces is imbued with his spirit. For instance, before coming up with his stylised birds and butterflies, he spent a great deal of time in bird and butterfly parks, studying the subject, practically living with them, so he could soak up their essence before he transferred it to the canvas.

And so he continues to grow. “Art for me is not only a canvas; it’s so much more than that. I study images, ideas and what creativity really means. For me, it is related to life. Art historians say that art is for the artists. I don’t agree. For me, it is for the people. You share ideas with the audience, you have a conversation with them.”

That’s why behind every series there is always an idea, sparked perhaps by an event, or a scene. Sometimes, he puts a positive and negative image together, such as a man holding both a ball and a gun. “In life, the good and the bad go together. It depends on how you handle it. I want the audience to think!” he reiterates.

Chee Meng not only wants his audience to think; he wants them to be aware that they have a choice. “A coin has two sides. Don’t always see the negative. Turn it around and see the opportunities the situation presents. You need to act and move on. Some people just wait...they don’t go for it.”

He is no longer a naive, callow youth. He has gone through his own fair share of hard times. “After school I went through so many different things. I was jobless, I found work, then jobless again. I moved into education, got the chance to study again...it was like a roller coaster. This is what I want to share. That you can remain positive, even in the face of uncertainty.”

At the same time, life has taught him to bend with the wind. “Be like water my friends, be flexible.” This philosophy, he says with a chuckle, comes from the late Bruce Lee, an actor from Hong Kong famed for his kungfu movies.

 Indeed, the pieces in the series he did for The Canvas Hotel, titled “In Love With Illumination” are a restatement of the beauty that is within and around us; and an encouragement for people to keep finding the excitement, joy and inspiration that life has to offer.

In the paintings, patterns intersect with outlines to create rhythm and harmony, projecting a feeling of happiness and spontaneity.

For Chee Meng, art is an continuation. When he was approached to do work on the paintings for The Canvas Hotel, Chee Meng already has an idea of what his next series of paintings would be.

The idea, he says, comes from his surroundings. “What can we discover and what are we sharing? The environment is about relationships, people with people, with plants and animals; its about culture.”

He was also excited, because for the first time, he would be combining Chinese and Western techniques in the new series.

“For many years, I have been studying the western style of art. But in recent years, I have also begun to look at Chinese art, discovering the uniqueness of Chinese ink paintings. Basically they are guided by six principles - energy and feel; brush strokes; lines and shapes; colours; layers; value and tones and composition.”

“You learn from the master and develop your own style. Western art is more about perspectives while Chinese art is more about lines, bones etc to create mood and a sense of distance.”

The In Love with Illumination series comprises 20 paintings; and can be arranged in five clusters of four paintings – Blooms of Joy, Enchanted Tropical Gardens, Rhythm of Pollen, Dancing with Butterflies and Catch the Blissful Moment.

Who inspires Chee Meng most? “David Hockney  is my idol. Artists don’t retire. He is more than 70 years old but he is still progressing, moving from one medium to another. He comes up with new ideas and new techniques. He keeps up with trends.”

“So, for me, I see myself as a practising artist. I am continually learning and looking for new ideas.”

“Being famous is not the end goal of my career, the byproduct, perhaps. Art is ongoing, always developing and evolving. As we age, we discover more things, learn more about life. For me, I dont’ know how my art career will turn out to be, the medium or form, it is still an unknown. It will develop as I move from each of my work.”