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A new ideal of the Balinese Girl, of modern times, must be found. Not like those with the portraiture classicism and cultural novelty circumscribed by the great Indonesian masters like Basuki Abdullah, Lee Man Fong and Trubus Sudarsono or through the foreign ‘lens’ of Adrien Jean Le Mayeur de Merpres, Willem Gerard Hofker, Rudolf Bonnet and Antonio Blanco. A face as a landscape of a place and as a metaphor of time and timeless. Not the dancers, heavily rouged up and looking matured beyond their years and where one can’t even tell the age. Kow Leong Kiang, with the seasoned brushes of having painted portraits of little nubile girls of the East Coast of Malaysia, has captured the Balinese Girl with “bare and powerful lyricism” (in the words of curator and fellow artist, Noor Mahnun Mohamed, in her article, ‘Floating World Revisited’), “to suggest a gentler way of living” and with “each painting suffused with a warm light.” With only a hairband ‘accessory’ for her ponytail, the Balinese Girl reveals a rustic innocence still unravaged by globalization and commercialization all around. At Bazaar Art Jakarta in 2015, he staged Facescape of Bali II with Sayang Artspace, Indonesia. Some more of his Balinese girls were shown in The FKlub’s Scent of Bali exhibition at G13 Gallery, Kelana Jaya, in 2013. In Sept 27-Oct 18, 2004, he had a dual exhibition with Lui Cheng Thak called Sojourn of Bali at the Townhouse Gallery, Kuala Lumpur.Kow Leong Kiang won South-east Asia’s highest art accolade with the Grand Prize of the Philip Morris Asean Art Awards in 1998, for his work, Mr Foreign Speculator, Stop Damaging Our Country. On the national level, he won the Minor Award of the Young Contemporary Artist (Bakat Muda Sezaman) competition in 1992. He was also awarded a two-month Freeman Foundation fellowship in Vermont in 2004 apart from residences at Tembi Contemporary in Yogyakarta. Under G13 gallery, he had taken part in Art Busan (2016) and Art Formosa (June 30-July 2, 2017). His solos include Silent Conversation (VWFA, 2005), Other People (VWFA, 2007), Intimate Collisions (VWFA, 2010), Soft (Jogja Contemporary and Sangkring Art Space, 2011), Yogya Constellation (Tembi Contemporary, Yogyakarta, 2009), Floating World (VWFA, 2003), Human (Red Mill Gallery, Vermont, USA, 2003), Inner Line (Metro Fine Art, KL, 2004), To The Sea (Ernst & Young, Singapore, 2012) and Blue Sarong (Whiteways, Penang, 2013). He was commissioned for the cover of the movel (movie-novel) titled, Mahsuri: A Legend Reborn (Ooi Peeps Publishing, July 2016), written by Ooi Kok Chuen. Leong Kiang graduated from the now-defunct Kuala Lumpur College of Art in 1991.