There is no telling how one’s fortune can change overnight, even for the nomadic Penan who had regular bases in a once uninhabited jungles in Sarawak but now encroached by increasing development. Tan Wei Kheng, an artist who regularly joined a charitable group into the habitat of the tribes people espied this Penan man in 2010, newly resettled in Sungai Asap. The Penan and his tribe were displaced by the massive Bakan Dam construction, covering the size of Singapore, and were herded into a place with no access to hunting and fishing, or good farming land. And the allotment of land was reportedly too small for their extended families, what more fallow. Some of the estimated 10,000 nomads have since left Sungai Asap because they could not sustain their livelihood. Their old homes had been flooded and they had to start everything anew. Wei Kheng, a superb self-taught portraitist, has captured well the expressions of the Penan man, though in profile, enigmatic, a bit troubled but stoic and as fabled of the Penan warriors, capable of surmounting in their own way the changes brought about by others who now rule their lives. Through the canvas of Tan Wei Kheng, the world is appraised of the lot of the Penan, Kenyah, Kayan, Kelabit, Iban and other tribes, in the flesh, all eking a living in the deep Sarawak interiors. Wei Kheng found fame in 2009 in an exhibition in Zurich, Switzerland (Gallery Avanthay Contemporary), when all his portraits of the indigenous people in Sarawak were sold out. Self-taught, he held his first solo at the Miri Boat Club (1991), followed by Hilton Hotel Kuching (1992), Holiday Inn Miri (1993), Rihga Royal Hotel Miri (1994), Hornbill House Miri (2001), Art House Gallery Kuala Lumpur (2003), Penanga Club, Brunei (2009), Metro Fine Art, Kuala Lumpur (2012). His latest solo called Vanishing Jungle Childhood was held at RKFA in July 2020.