The Black Moon series, numbering only 14 large works and done between 1989 and 1992, catapulted Eng Hwee Chu into local art history with her Magic Realism approach to issues on faith, the feminine self and identity, tradition and heritage, social hierarchy, taboos and expectations. It was Black Moon that won her the Minor Award in the Salon Malaysia 3 in 1991 and the Minor Award in the Young Contemporary Artists competition (Bakat Muda Sezaman) in 1992. The powerful messages in the series also factored greatly in the decision in her selection for the 2nd Asia-Pacific Triennial in Brisbane, Australia, in 1996. Black Moon 13 represents one of her iconic works in the series. Eng inserts herself as the protagonist, bare and emotionally red, stripped of pretence and of the need for conformity, here astride a hobby-horse, hovering over her past happening in a flash, on the chequered top of a fortification of life with endless barricade, and surveying all. A blackened alter ego assumes the role of a guardian, with a lighted oil lamp on one hand. A new life, more sedentary and prosaic despite all that jazz perhaps, awaits her in a narrow partition of images on the left. The panoply of faux Asian classicism and quaint symbolisms have made Eng into a major woman artist in her 50s. For the daughter of a grocer in Batu Pahat, Eng Hwee Chu paid great dividends in her decision to study Art, graduating from the Malaysian Institute of Art, and later teaching there briefly. Her early success includes her Black Moon series, 1st Prize in the Malaysian edition Philip Morris Asean Art Award in 1994, with her Cry Freedom; and in 1996, she was selected to represent Malaysia in the 2nd Asia-Pacific Triennial in Australia. She was also selected for the Art in Southeast Asia (Hiroshima, Japan, 1997) and the Women In Between: Asian Women Artists 1984-2012 in Fukuoka and Tochigi in Japan (2012).