Large stout head looms over Ng Bee's canvas in caricature form to hint little homilies about life, mostly about human foibles. The comment could be an ugly social trait or on political events. Instead of prominent facial features like pockmarks or pores, you get Ng Bee's trademark of intricate network of oil-based cross-hatches, spirals and odd oval shapes within the configurations. Ng Bee must have been in a pensive mood, for this one has a positive take, about a dreamer with a positive outlook, who always moves on and goes forward despite the obstacles. Follow the heart, beat the obstacles, forget the naysayers. When tired of painting figures or figure-heads, he opts for human-like abstractions of hippopotamus and rhinoceros. Ng Bee is better known as Mr. Sasaran for the Sasaran International Art Festival that he founded in 2008 with 35 artists from nine countries taking part. Believing in the mantra, Art Belongs To Everyone, he has put Sasaran, a sleepy fishing village in Selangor on the world map, but its unique quality is that it has the support of the whole village - fishermen, farmers, traders, schools… It now boasts of its own museum and a sculpture park besides murals and artworks all over town. Ng Bee's early education was in the Pik Hwa School in Klang, known for producing artists. Good in art but not in studies, he enrolled at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in Singapore, graduating in 1976. He pursued further education at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts in Paris, graduating after four years in 1979. Since his first solo at the New Straits Times' Balai Berita called Intensity, Emotion And Enigma in 2001, he had several other solos including one at the Blue Space Art Centre in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, in 2006.