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Lot Essay
"When the story of art in Singapore is finally told, Cheong Soo Pieng will assume a preeminent stature. For that matter, he will emerge as a formative presence in accounts of modern art in Southeast Asia as a whole."
T.K. Sabapathy
In order to consider a work by Cheong Soo Pieng, one has to look at the prolific body of work he produced throughout his lifespan. At various phases in his life, following brief sojourns around the world, Soo Pieng expanded, and experimented with his repertoire of formalist techniques. Amongst his contemporaries in the Nanyang Style, a school of art melding Southeast Asian aesthetics with traditional Chinese painting techniques, Soo Pieng was the most experimental. This exploration into different formalist styles, was always grounded in a lyricism. His masterful wielding of different techniques calls for a deeper understanding of Cheong’s background from his formative years in Xiamen and Shanghai, as well as his travels throughout the Southeast Asia, and the world at large.
the Nanyang Style as we know it. However, the 1952 trip was but the first sprigs of Soo Pieng’s artistic development. In Sarawak Life (1976), we see the beginnings of a crescendo in the symphony of paintings he produced throughout his lifetime. Cheong’s understanding of different approaches to art, and the philosophies behind them began through his formalist training. His fine arts education started with his entry into the Xiamen Academy of Fine Art. The academy was led by Lin Ke Gong, an artist who spent years in the Parisian art world. Soon after, Cheong would enroll into the Xin Hua Academy of Fine Arts in Shanghai, a highly renowned institution that provided an education in Chinese and Western art. This grounding in approaching art through various lenses would prove essential in his later exploration through the Southeast Asia, and its startling new visual language.
Sarawak Life stands firmly alongside his later, more stylized Balinese and Sarawakian paintings. Though the initial output from the first trip was preoccupied with a fascination for the exotic and different, paintings from this later period reflect a maturity that could only have emerged from the passing of two decades.
The period between the 1950s and 1970s would be marked by Cheong’s wild experimentation between formalist styles. In turn, these continual shifts were the result of the close contact he came with impressionist, and abstraction works overseas. In 1963, Cheong Soo Pieng once again took a sabbatical away from Singapore, this time to Europe. In the period following this trip, his artworks display a no-holds barred embrace of new abstractionist techniques. What is unmissable is the pointillist techniques used to depict the river, as well as the surrounding foliage. Through interspersing the depiction of the natural environment of the tropics with pointillism, while rendering his subjects in more of his classically figurative portraiture style, he manages to elevate the individuals depicted. This hints at a level of reverence that has been sharpened by the passing of time. The figures are part of the landscape yet apart from it. They share the colour palette but Soo Pieng refuses to render them as mere decorative elements. The natural surroundings frames the individuals, its intricate detailing becomes the only appropriate medium that can stand on par with the elegance of his subjects.
At this juncture, beyond the aesthetic appeal of the pointillist techniques used by Soo Pieng, it is vital to keep in mind how the inclusion of this technique shifts the paradigm of the art historical canon. A figure such as Soo Pieng, in weaving pointillism into his work, engages in a conversation with his European counterparts. Questions arise on what separates pointillism from the swift calculated strokes of traditional Chinese Ink Painting. In effect, Cheong is an emblem of the wave of non-Eurocentric artist keen on marking out a distinctively Asian style. Apart from merely taking up the mantle of the formalist challenges laid down by the Abstractionists masters before him, Cheong mastered and transformed the form.
What marks Soo Pieng as an exceptional talent is his ability to meld these diverse elements into a compositionally elegant artwork such as Sarawak Life. The rocks form a sepia halo of sorts surrounding the community as they engage in a relatively domestic task of washing their clothes by the river. Not only are we treated to a contemplation of the rural lifestyle, Soo Pieng’s subjects are awash with an aura of maternal care and affection. This sense of parental protection is embodied most viscerally in the foreground with the dominant central figure of the tallest female carrying her infant baby in a wrap. This manner of carrying a baby is at once traditional to the region yet the close skin-to-skin contact of a mother and child is a tactile memory shared universally. Classically-trained western compositions of Madonna and Child also plays on this hallowed maternal-child bond. Soo Pieng’s rendering of this imagery into a more everyday scene subverts, and celebrates the Southeast Asian Woman.
Sarawak Life represents Soo Pieng’s first fully realized figurative leanings in the adoption of wayang kulit (shadow puppets) into his studies of the female form. Despite well-worn tales of the 1952 Bali trip being the inspirational spark for the use of elongated limbs in his figurative works, this has proved to be a rather contentious claim. According to curators Seng Yu Jin and Grace Tng, it was in 1950 that wayang kulit references first appeared in his sketches. The lengthened limbs are mirrored by the extended forms of the trees enveloping the background. These forms are reminiscent of imagery in traditional Chinese ink painting. The trees though precariously placed on the edge of the hills, is firmly anchored through their roots. An allegory of both Cheong’s career, as well as the strength of the maternal-child bond in Asia and beyond.
T.K. Sabapathy
In order to consider a work by Cheong Soo Pieng, one has to look at the prolific body of work he produced throughout his lifespan. At various phases in his life, following brief sojourns around the world, Soo Pieng expanded, and experimented with his repertoire of formalist techniques. Amongst his contemporaries in the Nanyang Style, a school of art melding Southeast Asian aesthetics with traditional Chinese painting techniques, Soo Pieng was the most experimental. This exploration into different formalist styles, was always grounded in a lyricism. His masterful wielding of different techniques calls for a deeper understanding of Cheong’s background from his formative years in Xiamen and Shanghai, as well as his travels throughout the Southeast Asia, and the world at large.
the Nanyang Style as we know it. However, the 1952 trip was but the first sprigs of Soo Pieng’s artistic development. In Sarawak Life (1976), we see the beginnings of a crescendo in the symphony of paintings he produced throughout his lifetime. Cheong’s understanding of different approaches to art, and the philosophies behind them began through his formalist training. His fine arts education started with his entry into the Xiamen Academy of Fine Art. The academy was led by Lin Ke Gong, an artist who spent years in the Parisian art world. Soon after, Cheong would enroll into the Xin Hua Academy of Fine Arts in Shanghai, a highly renowned institution that provided an education in Chinese and Western art. This grounding in approaching art through various lenses would prove essential in his later exploration through the Southeast Asia, and its startling new visual language.
Sarawak Life stands firmly alongside his later, more stylized Balinese and Sarawakian paintings. Though the initial output from the first trip was preoccupied with a fascination for the exotic and different, paintings from this later period reflect a maturity that could only have emerged from the passing of two decades.
The period between the 1950s and 1970s would be marked by Cheong’s wild experimentation between formalist styles. In turn, these continual shifts were the result of the close contact he came with impressionist, and abstraction works overseas. In 1963, Cheong Soo Pieng once again took a sabbatical away from Singapore, this time to Europe. In the period following this trip, his artworks display a no-holds barred embrace of new abstractionist techniques. What is unmissable is the pointillist techniques used to depict the river, as well as the surrounding foliage. Through interspersing the depiction of the natural environment of the tropics with pointillism, while rendering his subjects in more of his classically figurative portraiture style, he manages to elevate the individuals depicted. This hints at a level of reverence that has been sharpened by the passing of time. The figures are part of the landscape yet apart from it. They share the colour palette but Soo Pieng refuses to render them as mere decorative elements. The natural surroundings frames the individuals, its intricate detailing becomes the only appropriate medium that can stand on par with the elegance of his subjects.
At this juncture, beyond the aesthetic appeal of the pointillist techniques used by Soo Pieng, it is vital to keep in mind how the inclusion of this technique shifts the paradigm of the art historical canon. A figure such as Soo Pieng, in weaving pointillism into his work, engages in a conversation with his European counterparts. Questions arise on what separates pointillism from the swift calculated strokes of traditional Chinese Ink Painting. In effect, Cheong is an emblem of the wave of non-Eurocentric artist keen on marking out a distinctively Asian style. Apart from merely taking up the mantle of the formalist challenges laid down by the Abstractionists masters before him, Cheong mastered and transformed the form.
What marks Soo Pieng as an exceptional talent is his ability to meld these diverse elements into a compositionally elegant artwork such as Sarawak Life. The rocks form a sepia halo of sorts surrounding the community as they engage in a relatively domestic task of washing their clothes by the river. Not only are we treated to a contemplation of the rural lifestyle, Soo Pieng’s subjects are awash with an aura of maternal care and affection. This sense of parental protection is embodied most viscerally in the foreground with the dominant central figure of the tallest female carrying her infant baby in a wrap. This manner of carrying a baby is at once traditional to the region yet the close skin-to-skin contact of a mother and child is a tactile memory shared universally. Classically-trained western compositions of Madonna and Child also plays on this hallowed maternal-child bond. Soo Pieng’s rendering of this imagery into a more everyday scene subverts, and celebrates the Southeast Asian Woman.
Sarawak Life represents Soo Pieng’s first fully realized figurative leanings in the adoption of wayang kulit (shadow puppets) into his studies of the female form. Despite well-worn tales of the 1952 Bali trip being the inspirational spark for the use of elongated limbs in his figurative works, this has proved to be a rather contentious claim. According to curators Seng Yu Jin and Grace Tng, it was in 1950 that wayang kulit references first appeared in his sketches. The lengthened limbs are mirrored by the extended forms of the trees enveloping the background. These forms are reminiscent of imagery in traditional Chinese ink painting. The trees though precariously placed on the edge of the hills, is firmly anchored through their roots. An allegory of both Cheong’s career, as well as the strength of the maternal-child bond in Asia and beyond.