This work hails from a series, To The Sea, which was shown in Kow Leong Kiang’s eponymous solo at the Ernst & Young Singapore exhibition in 2012, his seventh solo. In a departure from his usual, the artist painted a full-body actioner as opposed to his usual half-body or face-only depictions; relished in the acrylic medium instead of the more luminescent oils; invested greater details in the nubile Malay girl model portrayed in both her clothes and the surroundings. Compared to her other works in the series, this one has a touch of melancholy and gelora (tension), with the frothy, foamy waves creating a poetic empathy to her innermost emotions. Here, he superbly captures the allure, innocence, alacrity and ordinary nature of the kampong girl finding solace by the sea. The series also represents a return to clothed modesty after an excursion into depicting large nudes shown in Intimate Collisions (Kuala Lumpur) and Soft (Yogyakarta, Indonesia) in 2010 and 2011 respectively. Kow Leong Kiang is a mid-career artist who extends the parameters of the figure in terms of representation, action and metaphor. He is best known as Malaysia’s only winner of the Grand Prize of the Philip Morris Asean Art Award in 1998, for his work, Mr. Foreign Speculator, Stop Damaging Our Country. Kow’s other major accolades include the Minor Award in the 1992 Bakat Muda Sezaman; an award for student artists in the Savannah College (USA) international art competition (1993); and Major Award in the National Day Art Competition organised jointly by the National Art Gallery and Isetan (1991). A graduate of the Kuala Lumpur College of Art (1989-1991), he was chosen for a two-month Asian Freeman Foundation fellowship at Vermont Art Studio in the United States. He set an auction record of RM88,000 twice in The Edge auctions in June 2013 and March 2015.