Kow Leong Kiang is well known for his depictions of market scenes, Malay girls, and beauties of the east coast. The sitter’s face is treated in relaxed strokes, with a wide variety of subtle pinks and browns to build up the human form. Kow graduated from the Kuala Lumpur College of Art (founded by Cheah Yew Saik) in 1991. According to Cheah, he was one of the brightest students ever. He won the Minor Award in the Young Contemporary Artist competition in 1992, but it was his winning the Grand Prize of the Philip Morris Asean Art Awards in 1998, for his work, Mr. Foreign Speculator, Stop Damaging Our Country, that entrenched him as a significant figurative artist. In 2004, Kow won a two-month Freeman Foundation fellowship for the popular Vermont Studio Centre residency. His painting commission was used as illustration for the cover of the movel (movie-novel) titled, Mahsuri: A Legend Reborn (Ooi Peeps Publishing, 2016), written by Ooi Kok Chuen.