Fuan Wong specialises in stained glass and fused glass (Photo: Goh Choon Ean)
Those who were lucky enough to catch Men With Plants last year, a duo show by Fuan Wong and landscape architect Tan Wei Ming of Sputnik Forest fame, will be delighted to know a second chapter is ongoing right now at the same venue, ChinaHouse in George Town, on Penang’s Beach Road. Reprising his role as the primary agent provocateur, Fuan, as he is popularly known, adds M K Cheah, Esther Geh, Hoo FanChon, Zack Low, Howard Tan and Jonathan Yun to the original line-up.
“Expect enough works to fill two good-sized halls,” he says. “There will be paintings, glass and metal sculptures, metal work and sculptural jewellery, collage art, mosaics and one large installation. Wei Ming and I had such fun last year, so we thought we would do a bigger show.”
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Fuan was “in search of a medium, so to speak” and dabbled in everything from designing gardens to graphics and painting. “My ambition was to be a complete wastrel but I ended up working harder than anyone I know,” he says half-jokingly. “My day starts at 4am and ends at 9pm. I can get a lot done while the rest of the world sleeps. But regarding glass as a medium, I was stumbling from one experiment to another and was instantly hooked after I chanced upon it. If I had not been an artist, I think I would have been a carpenter, for sure. I am completely self-taught and, you must remember, all this happened pre-internet, so [learning to work with glass] was a great struggle.”
Struggle or not, Fuan and his coterie of creative friends have certainly brought lustre to the island’s burgeoning arts and culture landscape. “The artists, gallerists … each of us does our bit and it all adds up,” he says. “The future looks bright, shiny and full of hope, with all manner of things glimmering on the horizon but it really is a lot of hard work. Kudos must go to Narelle McMurtrie of ChinaHouse, Shih Thoe Tan of Hin Bus Depot and Blank Canvas’ K Y Leong, who are three of the greatest contributors and growth drivers of Penang’s art scene.”
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Speaking of which, should you happen to be on the island, you must also make time (if you haven’t already) to visit Fuan’s iconic Art & Garden, a living outdoor gallery set on a 10ha parcel of land in the hills of Teluk Bahang. Sharing part of the land with a durian orchard, it is home to his botanical menagerie of weird and wonderful plants (think air plants, bromeliads of all sorts, Spanish moss and more, collected in the manner of Sitio, the garden grown by the famous Brazilian landscape architect and artist Roberto Burle Marx near Rio de Janeiro as a landscape laboratory in which to create living works of art) while his own glass art installations, as well as works by artsy pals, infuse the garden with an otherworldly, Alice in Wonderland-like quality. Guided tours may be arranged but the entire experience is mostly self-explanatory. In-the-know visitors arrive in the morning to enjoy a good wander before sitting down to a pre-ordered lunch of what is arguably the island’s best crab laksa, prepared to perfection by Fuan’s cooks.
This article first appeared on Jul 22, 2024 in The Edge Malaysia.
