Maroubra

I had climbed out onto the headland rocks and the light was doing something extraordinary – pouring warm orange over the sandstone while the suburb across the bay sat in the cool haze of a cloudy afternoon. The contrast arrested me: these ancient, warm-toned rocks in the foreground and the everyday life of houses and streets across the water, separated by that band of still grey-blue. Working in oils, I wanted to hold that tension between the geological and the human, the timeless and the inhabited. The streaked clouds overhead press down gently, keeping everything in a kind of suspended quiet. Sydney gives you these views constantly – places where the suburban and the primordial exist side by side without comment. I never stop finding them extraordinary.

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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.