Alex Leong

Alex's meticulous watercolour paintings of heritage buildings also contain a human story within them, personified by anonymous citizens of Penang's daily life.

In King Street, Alex paints the myriad shades of white and shadows of a sunlit building; the louvers of every window and panels of each blind depicted effortlessly. As in most of his artworks, the composition is dominated by the building while in the foreground or below them, human figures add a sense of liveliness to otherwise vacant structures. A father and child entering the main doors to a kopitiam (coffee shops), a motorcyclist waits in the heat of the afternoon, a hawker peddling his goods, a group of moustached Indian trishaw drivers in their trademark white singlet's greet a Malay mother walking her child... such are the familiar everyday activities that Alex captures so fluently with a few daubs of colour, cast before magnificent Penang architecture.

Alex spends about two days to finish a painting and his favourite painting haunt is Pitts Street in the Georgetown area, capital of Penang. Often, he paints the same building multiple times, but uses the human elements to tell a different story in each.

Sunlight is crucial to the lighting in his artworks, which he paints first. Alex believes the most important element of painting is feeling. He plans to explore indoor subjects next, such as the interiors of coffee shops, and hopes to go abroad to China to paint. He aspires to 'paint faster than time', to be able to preserve the image of aged buildings on paper before they are physically demolished by man or time.