Born in 1932, Patrick Ng received his early education at Oxford English School in Singapore and his secondary education at St John's Institution and Victoria Institution (VI) in Kuala Lumpur. As a mentee of Peter Harris, Ng was one of the earliest members of the Wednesday Art Group, founded in 1952 and was secretary to the group who met at the Selangor Education Department office. Ng left for London under a British Council-administered scholarship known as the Sino-British fellow trust, now defunct, to study at the Hammersmith College of Art and Building (later Chelsea College of Art) from 1964-66. He continued his studies at Southlands Teacher Training College (majoring in fine art and textiles) from 1966-68. In his work, Ng incorporates a range of local Malaysian iconography and his distinctive style has positioned him as one of the most highly acclaimed artists in the history of modern Malaysian art. Upon comparing his painting styles across other works, this proposed work was likely to have been painted around the time of Ng’s most well-known painting Spirit of earth, water and air (1958/59), which is gazetted in the Malaysian National Heritage Register List and listed by Redza Piyadasa as one of the masterpieces in the collection of the National Art Gallery Malaysia. Spirit was used as front cover image for SAM’s catalogue Modernity and Beyond (1996). Ng’s Self-Portrait from 1958 is also rendered with similar motifs and in a similar colour scheme. The proposed painting also looks to be a probable precursor to both those paintings, where Ng is working out the landscape composition and patterns from natural elements before the inclusion of human figures.
