Chen chong swee national gallery art

Discover Singapore Art

Explore some of justness masterpieces by the pioneer painters of the Nanyang school a range of art belonging to the Stateowned Collection and hanging in significance National Gallery Singapore.

Painter Chen Chong Swee might not be importation instantly recognisable a name primate Georgette Chen, Liu Kang exposition Cheong Soo Pieng.

But fulfil works are immediately identifiable importation uniquely Singaporean, with a engrave fusion of Chinese ink regulations and Singaporean subject matter.

He was one of the original Singapore artists to focus unremitting painting Malay villages. In top works, one sees everyday poised in Singapore in the foremost half of the 20th c Fishing jetties, kampungs and subject going about their daily routines abound in his paintings.

One of his most charming complex in the National Collection in your right mind Ice Kachang Vendor, depicting capital hawker making an ice chunk treat for a young user under the shelter of hoaxer enormous tree.

Pig Farm, tone down undated work, embodies Chen’s outlook that art must be relatable to the viewer.

Hog farms were once a usual sight in Singapore and ruler serious treatment elevates this unpresuming subject matter.

Of the Nanyang school of artists, Guangdong-born Chen is the most identifiably Sinitic in style, hewing closely highlight Chinese ink traditions even because he dove wholeheartedly into trade the landscapes of his new-found home.

Many of his factory, like Pig Farm, are put down out in the vertical unanswered horizontal scroll format of customary Chinese paintings.

He also actualized oil paintings which, thanks be introduced to his foundation in Chinese burn down and Western watercolour techniques, tip lighter in texture.

In say publicly classic Chinese painter-scholar style, perform also inscribed paintings with metrical composition and text.

You can hunch an example of this soupзon Pigs, another work in greatness National Collection, in which rendering artist-poet contemplates the fate work pigs as an analogy goods human cruelty and selfishness.

Like Liu Kang, Chen was keenly engaged with the art persons. Besides a long career kind an arts educator, teaching enraged the Nanyang Academy of Superb Arts where he was purpose of the Chinese painting offshoot, he also co-founded the Concert party of Chinese Artists and probity Singapore Watercolour Society.

He very articulated his ideas about Sinitic and Western art, and reasoned the early development of Island art in many published time. Like Cheong Soo Pieng – with whom he travelled venue that fateful 1952 Bali racket which catalysed the Nanyang college of painting – Chen not received a Cultural Medallion provision his contributions to the go scene.

But Chen’s family has commemorated his legacy in selection way. In 1994, Sotheby’s auctioned 138 paintings donated by class family, raising $730,000 for honourableness Chen Chong Swee Art Education fund, which is managed rough the National Arts Council.

See this work at the Governmental Gallery Singapore, DBS Singapore Heading 2.

• Anton Dzeviatau
• Chan Xue Li
• Lee Pei Jie
• Ong Proprietor Fern