The superbly accomplished monochrome painting looks like a black-and-white photograph. An elderly woman with a homemade cheroot rolled with leaves in mouth, carrying a toddler in a strapped sarung cradle, the background looking like a dark interior of a spartan abode. This has nothing to do with adults passing second-hand smoke to children, but something more sombre. The woman and grandchild were among the hordes of Penans displaced forcibly by the massive Bakun and Murum dam project, which submerged several villages of the indigenous people. A cultural genocide. They were resettled into makeshift longhouses. This caused problems like schooling, loss of livelihood, access to water and food. Tan Wei Kheng goes into the interiors regularly to bring provisions, medicine and educational materials to these Penans, and has been dubbed a true modern-day Penan warrior. Ï paint portraits of the unseen heroes of the nomadic Penan tribe and other indigenous tribes of Sarawak… A large number of indigenous people in Borneo are struggling to live in their forest homeland, with the encroachment on modernization, logging and deforestation; they are fast losing their homeland and their unique way of life.” Self-taught Tan Wei Kheng worked as a ceramist until he took up painting and has a great aptitude for painting portraits, specializing on indigenous people in the interior habitats, and he has been doing it for more than a decade. After several solos in Sarawak, Kuala Lumpur and Brunei, Wei Kheng got international attention in his Nostalgia of Tribal Borneo exhibition, at the Gallery Avanthay Contemporary in Zurich, Switzerland, in 2009. All the works were sold out.