studio LDA : Condolence to Yong Ching Sui

“Challenge” 51cm x 61cm oil on canvas by Ching Sui, a Malaysian artist

(Due to the dark painting, it may be necessary to adjusting contrast of your screen to have a better view of the pictures published in this blog.)

23rd May 06 afternoon, I got a message from Hon Loong read “Ching Sui passed away yesterday 6:30pm in Kuching.” That afternoon, my heart just went down and down with the news. I couldn’t quite explain why. After all, I have not even met the artist. I got a painting at his medical fund raising exhibition few months ago. And I read a little about him and know he was a pleasant guy, and I know he made good cakes. That’s about all. That night, I excused myself from the LAM exam group study session to go home earlier. I wanted to look at his painting “Challenge” again.

The painting hung in the store next to our living area. As the store room door was left ajar, light cut right into the store room when I came into the house switching on the living area wall lamp. The store room was barely lit, and I could see the dark silhouette of the canvas hung heavily on the wall. It looked pretty much like the black heavy canvas I first saw during the exhibition, isolated and lonely on a gloomy dimly lit wall. Other than the heavy blackness, I couldn’t possibly make up anything else from the distance. In fact, it’s so heavy, so dark, neither my wife nor I could bear the weight, so we decided to hang it in this store room, where I keep my working tools and books. The store room used only a 60watt yellow bulb, so I brought in a torch light to view the painting.



The pontoon ( partt picture )

On closer look under the torch light now, I noticed the background was filled by a two tiers steep cliff, with a choppy seascape set at the bottom of the painting. There was no sky in the painting. It felt stifled and there was no way out. Right on the top of the cliff, was a little timber shack. I had seen this shack now and then in Ching Sui’s other paintings. I liked to believe it must be somewhere close to his heart, somewhere he was familiar with. Where he grown up maybe? Extending from the shack, there was a timber gangway connecting all the way to a pontoon rest at mid height of the cliff. The platform was dry and covered with colorful shingles barely visible even under the strong torch light. I could not understand why was the pontoon set at this height. I don’t believe the sea water would reach this height even at the highest tide of the year. There was no connection link way from the pontoon to the rough seascape below. So I imagined the swimmer took a cliff dive to jump into the sea. My torch light moved on and shined on to the swimming figure. It suddenly came to my mind that the swimmer after taking the dive, was swimming away from the cliff, in the choppy black sea. And there would be no return.



The swimmer ( part picture )

My friend, rest well. Maybe you could now rest on a pontoon on a sunny day, where the colorful shingles gleam like corals under calm shallow sparkling sea.

look from studio LDA