Galeri Sasha is pleased to present Being.Here, a solo exhibition by Wong Perng Fey (b.1974, Kuala Lumpur) on view from May 24th to June 21st. Perng Fey’s latest body of work marks a decisive shift in tone—away from the psychological urgency of his Beijing years and enters a space of clarity, wit, and restraint. Created between Austria and Malaysia, this series weaves together painting, sculpture, and a contemporary interpretation of Wayang Kulit, inviting us into a dialogue between past and present, self and society.
For over a decade, Perng Fey’s work was defined by emotional intensity, shaped by his experience living in Beijing. Influenced by the visceral strokes of ‘School of London’ post-war painters such as Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, Perng Fey’s abstract paintings transcribed raw internal states with immediacy and honesty. The paintings were forged in friction—between cultures, cities, expectations, and the self—each one a site of existential urgency. Now, rooted in the contemplative structure of life in Graz, Austria and the intimacy of his memories in Malaysia, Perng Fey returns to his practice with a different mindset—one guided by observation, humour, and quiet confidence. They reflect a desire to step back, to arrange, and to respond. The result is a visual language that balances looseness and control, intuition and order.
Inspired by the bright absurdity of Franz West and the observational humour of Malaysian Cartoonist, Dato Lat, Perng Fey embraces a new colour palette—pinks, yellows, ceruleans—applied with unapologetic clarity and assertiveness. Paintings unfold as structured improvisations: loose grids, silhouetted forms, and pockets of negative space evoke a kind of stage, where memory, character, and cultural reference coexist without hierarchy. West and Lat appear not as direct references, but as tonal cues—signals of playfulness, irreverence, and precision. This return to structure is not a retreat but a resolution. Perng Fey’s surfaces may appear spontaneous, but beneath them lies careful calibration: emotion distilled rather than dramatized, references integrated rather than declared.
Wayang Kulit, the traditional Malaysian shadow puppet theatre acts as both a visual motif and a way of seeing. It becomes a framework for thinking through dualities: interior and exterior, gesture and interpretation, presence and projection. Rather than focusing solely on formal contrasts, Perng Fey draws on its cast of characters to reflect the strange, animated lives he encounters—figures that are unassuming, often overlooked, but full of quiet drama. These characters become a way to speak about people in transit, in negotiation, in performance. This sensibility carries into a new series of sculptural works that extend his interest in personality and presence. Referencing Franz West’s playful and tactile forms, these objects act less as interruptions and more as stand-ins—figures in space that hint at movement, at eccentricity, at the everyday as stage.
There is a shift in narrative structure as well. These works do not seek to reconstruct home or revisit the past through sentiment. They acknowledge the layered nature of diasporic identity—its contradictions, humour, and unresolved tensions—without needing to resolve them. Cultural complexity is allowed to sit alongside formal precision, not as a statement, but as one of many elements in the composition.
In Being.Here, Wong Perng Fey invites viewers to reflect on what it means to be fully present—within the layered, often contradictory forces that shape identity. Through nuanced compositions and the integration of cultural motifs, he offers a meditation on presence without performance; on being, rather than becoming. The exhibition signals a moment of arrival. Through its measured vocabulary of colour, form, and material, Being.Here quietly asserts that to remain—attentive, grounded, and unguarded—is a radical act. In doing so, Perng Fey affirms his place within an evolving conversation around contemporary abstraction and the politics of self-representation.
