Cairns Botanic Gardens

I arrived at the Cairns Botanic Gardens on one of those tropical afternoons when the sky is building toward a storm — that particular quality of light where everything seems both darker and more vivid at once. The still pond at the centre of the scene held the whole sky in it, and a beautiful eucalypt with striking pink and lavender bark anchored the right side of the composition, its colours almost too extraordinary to believe. Working with oils, I was drawn to that tension between lushness and drama — the dense tropical palms and ferns pressing in from every side, the mountain silhouette going blue in the distance, and all of it doubled in the water's reflection.

Growing up around tropical landscapes in Sarawak, there's always a particular emotional register these scenes activate in me — a sense of abundance, of nature operating at full intensity. In this garden, though, that wildness is held in a kind of ordered peace, and I found something very moving in that balance between cultivation and the untameable.

I hope when you look at it you feel a little of that lushness, that sense of a world overflowing with itself.

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Min Leong is a painter born in Kuching, Malaysia and based in Sydney. His work centres on landscape from Malaysian forests to Australian coastlines. His paintings demonstrate a confident, expressive approach to colour — often pushing beyond naturalistic palettes into saturated purples, pinks, and oranges that capture the intense light of the Australian environment.

Leong gravitates toward subjects that emphasise the vertical and the immersive: towering eucalypts seen from below, dense rainforest canopies, and expansive vistas from elevated viewpoints. His work conveys a direct engagement with place and an interest in how light transforms the familiar into something vivid and heightened.