The Artist, NG Fong Chi

Women Can Be So Lovely: Artworks of Ng Fong Chi

by Jeremy Tew
Shanghai upon the Sea
March 10, 2011


Currently based in Marseille, France practicing her art works, Ng Fong Chi has always known as a part of her life the Nusantara form regional to South East Asia, where she is from. Her being in Europe opens up vantage views for her to enjoy delving into as well as by naturally permitting herself to embrace influences from the various painting styles and forms through the ages of Europe.

Fong Chi’s current painting series concerns the subject of women, nature and objects, for e.g. floral and bird, butterfly and leaves, wallpaper and fabric prints, etc. Her artworks in oozing manner are immersed with the Nusantara form. Stemming from both Nusantara and European influences, however, there are varying fan pop applications swinging from the 60s to 70s as in wavy bob, flip or chic hairstyles, petal curls and bubbles, and flower power. Generally, Fong Chi’s artworks are considered apt to integrate both illustration structure and graphic communication.

Merely to conjecture, there is a kind of metaphysical form that gently seeps through her works, not in creepy, sheepish way but in wide, unabashed pride of esthetic display. Perhaps, the metaphysical form is due to the all too familiar classical forms of primeval and aboriginal art. And aside from contemporary stage makeup or bridal makeup, Fong Chi’s artworks are about body art or body painting per se, incorporating indigenous batik, commercial manicure or pedicure, and the age-old tattoo.

When women are Fong Chi’s showcased subjects, women can appear to be so lovely. More than suggesting sensuous feminity, women sensibility and human tenderness, there is a certain ethereal mystic latently projected from these paintings; however, they are not ceremonial and not spiritual in religious sense. Explicating from another approach, her artworks do inherently exude subtle sense of surrealism while sub-consciousness at work with psychedelic sense.

The said ethereal and surreal ambience is rather strong. The voyeuristic sense of ventilated atmospheric depth can be felt, for e.g. due to pictorial plane being cropped or subdivided into parts, or as in the profiled silhouettes. More so, the common saturated colors and even tones throughout the silky canvas planes altogether transcend the said ethereal spirituality. In turn, beaming off these collective images, the glazed transparency lightly highlights textural feel and lovely touch of these paintings, ultimately leading to that surreal mystic mildly ruffling the viewers.

Looking through again, with images superimposed onto each other, there is an increasing desire eager to search for more interesting visual information in these paintings. The seemingly curious search explains the richness of these paintings, in their judicious coloration, selective contents and painting qualities, etc. Fong Chi’s delirious joy, enthusiasm and passion are also reflected in her very alluring artworks.