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Lot Essay
Balinese Lady (Lot 36) by celebrated Singaporean artist Cheong Soo Pieng is an exquisite work of exceptional quality, featuring some of his beloved classic motifs that have come to embody his artistic achievements, and enthusiasm for constant innovation and experimentation that has made him a pioneer and pivotal figure in the Nanyang style of art. Emerging in Singapore during the late 1940s, this style combines classical Chinese painting methods with the compositional techniques of Western still life and figurative scenes. In 1952, Cheong Soo Pieng, in search of a new environment to provide fresh inspiration, embarked on a trip to the Indonesian island of Bali with Liu Kang, Chen Wen Hsi, and Chen Chong Swee, hopeful of capturing the true essence of life in Southeast Asia. As a result, this epoch in Cheong Soo Pieng’s extremely diverse oeuvre has come to be characterised by works that focused on Balinese female figures, village scenes or pastoral landscapes.
One of his late works, Balinese Lady features an idiomatic motif of the Balinese female figure, rendered in his iconic visual styling of long elongated torso and limbs, as well as exotic almond-shaped eyes inspired by the traditional shadow puppets of Indonesia known as wayang kulit. This particular work exhibits remarkable detailing, from the delineated lines of the fantastically large banana leaf the figure reclines upon, to the intricate batik motif of her sarong; this is typical of works from his decorative phase, which were executed towards the end of his life and epitomised the beauty he saw in Southeast Asia. In the background, a mosaic of foliage in a variety of warm golden tones, shimmer like paillettes and evoke the textured background of Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I .
Colour for Cheong Soo Pieng is never subordinate to other structural devices, but the “main theme” through which he achieves the “creation of harmony of colours and variations in tones which are the main objects in painting.” The use of colour in Balinese Lady is carefully considered: the canvas is dominated by warms hues of browns and yellows, rendering the cool tones of the green dotted pattern in the headscarf, the fruit in the basket, and the ambiguous circle in the foreground look ever more striking. Cheong Soo Pieng’s penchant for elliptical motifs is an interesting element within many of his works, including his abstract paintings such as Abstract Triptych, providing a sense of tranquillity and perfection much in the way that an ensō in Japanese ink painting can be seen to represent nature and the universe.
Interestingly, the balanced composition of Balinese Lady, along with her benevolent downcast expression, and the patterned headscarf lightly draped over her head, brings to mind the classic religious iconography of Madonna paintings by great Western Masters from the likes of Jan van Eyck, to Raphael, and Sandro Botticelli. Indeed, Cheong Soo Pieng’s love of the people of Nanyang is well documented through his decision to remain in Malaya, because he was moved by “a very warm feeling among the people.” Perhaps in some way, Cheong Soo Pieng wanted to employ the posture typically used to represent such emotional scenes, to simultaneously elevate his female figures, as well as to express his own reverence for a subject matter that had continued to fascinate him throughout the decades.
Cheong Soo Pieng’s works have often been likened to the forms and structures of Western Cubism, in the way that he manipulates and defies conventions of space and volume through the flattening of perspective. However, looking at Balinese Lady , he still manages to retain an overall sense of harmony, achieved through a delicate balance of opposing planes and forces, which the artist undoubtedly adopted from the philosophy of traditional Chinese ink painting, in which he was formally trained at the Xiamen Academy of Fine Art. In Balinese Lady, a dense inky overhanging branch stands out sharply, thrusting diagonally across the dense verdure like a lightning bolt. This compositional device draws the eye towards the basket of tropical fruit, whereupon the elegant curved stem of the bunch of bananas continues to lead the eye toward the main figure, which intersects the branch and completes the visual flow reiterating his sustained interest in circular elements.
Cheong Soo Pieng’s oeuvre is rife with features that fuse both Western modernist sensibilities with subjects that are uniquely Eastern, and “bespeak a conscious effort to make new art for a new kind of belonging, a new way of seeing the world.” This is profoundly evident in Balinese Lady, which displays a visual vernacular that combines both products of his earlier artistic preoccupations with decades of observations and experiences within the region, resulting in an affiliation to the quotidian that elevated the everyday to the divine.
One of his late works, Balinese Lady features an idiomatic motif of the Balinese female figure, rendered in his iconic visual styling of long elongated torso and limbs, as well as exotic almond-shaped eyes inspired by the traditional shadow puppets of Indonesia known as wayang kulit. This particular work exhibits remarkable detailing, from the delineated lines of the fantastically large banana leaf the figure reclines upon, to the intricate batik motif of her sarong; this is typical of works from his decorative phase, which were executed towards the end of his life and epitomised the beauty he saw in Southeast Asia. In the background, a mosaic of foliage in a variety of warm golden tones, shimmer like paillettes and evoke the textured background of Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I .
Colour for Cheong Soo Pieng is never subordinate to other structural devices, but the “main theme” through which he achieves the “creation of harmony of colours and variations in tones which are the main objects in painting.” The use of colour in Balinese Lady is carefully considered: the canvas is dominated by warms hues of browns and yellows, rendering the cool tones of the green dotted pattern in the headscarf, the fruit in the basket, and the ambiguous circle in the foreground look ever more striking. Cheong Soo Pieng’s penchant for elliptical motifs is an interesting element within many of his works, including his abstract paintings such as Abstract Triptych, providing a sense of tranquillity and perfection much in the way that an ensō in Japanese ink painting can be seen to represent nature and the universe.
Interestingly, the balanced composition of Balinese Lady, along with her benevolent downcast expression, and the patterned headscarf lightly draped over her head, brings to mind the classic religious iconography of Madonna paintings by great Western Masters from the likes of Jan van Eyck, to Raphael, and Sandro Botticelli. Indeed, Cheong Soo Pieng’s love of the people of Nanyang is well documented through his decision to remain in Malaya, because he was moved by “a very warm feeling among the people.” Perhaps in some way, Cheong Soo Pieng wanted to employ the posture typically used to represent such emotional scenes, to simultaneously elevate his female figures, as well as to express his own reverence for a subject matter that had continued to fascinate him throughout the decades.
Cheong Soo Pieng’s works have often been likened to the forms and structures of Western Cubism, in the way that he manipulates and defies conventions of space and volume through the flattening of perspective. However, looking at Balinese Lady , he still manages to retain an overall sense of harmony, achieved through a delicate balance of opposing planes and forces, which the artist undoubtedly adopted from the philosophy of traditional Chinese ink painting, in which he was formally trained at the Xiamen Academy of Fine Art. In Balinese Lady, a dense inky overhanging branch stands out sharply, thrusting diagonally across the dense verdure like a lightning bolt. This compositional device draws the eye towards the basket of tropical fruit, whereupon the elegant curved stem of the bunch of bananas continues to lead the eye toward the main figure, which intersects the branch and completes the visual flow reiterating his sustained interest in circular elements.
Cheong Soo Pieng’s oeuvre is rife with features that fuse both Western modernist sensibilities with subjects that are uniquely Eastern, and “bespeak a conscious effort to make new art for a new kind of belonging, a new way of seeing the world.” This is profoundly evident in Balinese Lady, which displays a visual vernacular that combines both products of his earlier artistic preoccupations with decades of observations and experiences within the region, resulting in an affiliation to the quotidian that elevated the everyday to the divine.