Tiong Chai Heing

11 Oct – 2 Nov 2025

12 Oct
3.00pm – Opening Reception

Suma Orientalis Fine Art is delighted to present the new body of work by Tiong Chai Heing, centred on a subject both familiar and contested: the oil palm. As one of Southeast Asia’s most politically and ecologically charged plants, oil palm is often framed through narratives of exploitation, deforestation or monoculture. Rarely is it seen simply as a living form.

By choosing its leaves as her sole visual focus, Tiong offers a form of quiet recalibration. Each watercolour work renders a single frond at near-human scale. Some are painted at the height of vitality, taut with chlorophyll. Others bend with fatigue, their pigments muting into ochre and rust.

Rather than portraying these states as opposites, Tiong places them on a continuum. Growth and decline are treated as different expressions of time, not as moral contrasts. In this reframing, the oil palm shifts from a site of debate to a site of contemplation. What is typically discussed in economic or ecological language becomes, in her hands, a material record of breath and duration. Even the leaves on the verge of falling, often treated as agricultural waste, are painted with the same composure as their younger counterparts.

Tiong’s works do not present a stance but a condition: to look without haste. This solo exhibition is not a statement about nature. It is an invitation to encounter it again at a slower pace and a closer distance.


About Tiong Chai Heing B. 1986, Johor, Malaysia
Graduated from Dasein Academy of Art, Kuala Lumpur (2008), Tiong is amazed by the fact that the world is made up of tiny particles and that cultivates her interest in depicting objects beyond their superficial appearance. Infused with curiosity in the derelict state of abandoned objects, her works imply that the processes of depletion and exhaustion are part and partial of a complete cycle in nature. Her achievements include the Grand Prize of UOB Painting Of The Year Award (Malaysia, 2015) and First Prize – Charcoal Category (Tanjong Heritage Art Competition, Malaysia, 2008).