In making this fine drypoint etching, Ong Wen Xin wanted to “recreate the bustling scene of the market so vividly that it feels like you're right there—almost as if you can inhale the special smell of the market.” It’s a smell and experience which brings back mixed feelings for the artist, as it surely does for many of us who, dragged along marketing with our parents as children, would have held our noses and nagged them to take us home as soon as possible.

And yet it is loving detail and attention that has made this scene from “Pasar” so compelling. It seems impossible that so much could be contained within the small area of this print. Deft, neat hatching in various densities and directions shape a great array of textures – especially of baskets and other containers of all kinds. We take note of the two different types of weighing scale, the ways in which each figure is dressed. Not much attention is given to the kinds of produce on offer as one might find in a more typical, “exotic” and colourful market scene. Rather, we are brought into the thick of the action of this pasar. Directly in front of us are a middle-aged or older woman and a young man sitting down to clean or sort some kind of food item – perhaps fish, since they are wearing thick rubber boots and dark rubber gloves. Their ease with each other as they concentrate on their task suggests they could be family. In the background, a woman in an apron seems to be weighing and preparing packs of sold goods while a shopper with a trolley looks over what’s for sale on her table. It’s the labour and business of this everyday experience, of a local Malaysian market, that we are engrossed in, “the ordinary life of the working people”.

In black and white, the scene appears timeless in many ways, a part of local life not just since the artist was a child, but since the earliest big villages and towns. We only recognise we are in the present day from the kinds of clothes and the “Covid-era” face masks worn by the people in the picture.