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拍品专文
As a major Southeast Asian artist, Cheong Soo Pieng’s portrayal of the tropics and its people is often assessed in reference to the pivotal artist trip to Bali in 1952, a journey he made with a group of fellow Singapore pioneer artists. While the landmark trip to Bali in 1952 certainly inspired a greater familiarity with the region and propelled the development of a uniquely representative style of the artist, the present lot Forest (Lot 48) is crucial to our understanding of Cheong Soo Pieng’s innate talents and abilities. This present lot suggests an alternative viewpoint to the prevailing focus on the seminal trip, revealing strong inspiration from his surrounding environment in the years prior, while encapsulating his innovative spirit through his amalgamation of the techniques and styles of both the East and West.
Painted in 1948, Forest is one of the earliest works by Cheong Soo Pieng to ever come to the market, and one of the exceedingly rare oil on board pieces produced by the artist in the late 1940s. Completed just two years after Cheong Soo Pieng’s arrival in Singapore, the work marks the transition of the artist’s identity from a native of China to a resident of Southeast Asia. Cheong made the decision to relocate to Singapore in 1946 to take up a teaching position at the new Nanyang Academy of Fine Art, established by his mentor and former tutor, Lim Hak Tai. The term ‘Nanyang’ was used in association with the Southeast Asian overseas Chinese regional identity during the Sino-Japanese war. It was later adopted to reference a style of art that sought to synthesise Chinese traditional art styles and the influence of Western Modernism as taught by the Paris School, to create a unique form of expression for the depiction of the localised subject. As a new migrant to the region, Cheong was accosted by an array of new visual stimuli that he spared no time in translating into his works. It was this first decade upon his arrival on the island that was instrumental to his understanding of the lives of the people and the cultures of the region, as he examined his new environment as the subject of his paintings.
Under the shade of the trees, the verdant forest floor glows a rich, emerald green. Further behind, vermillion strokes and canary yellow patches brighten up the scene, while the clear skies of a tropical paradise peek through the leaves in a bright blue. The artist traded in the soft and gentle washes of ink he was accustomed to through his formative training at the Xiamen Academy of Art for a much bolder aesthetic that reflected the intensity of these new sights. The vibrant, chromatic palette imbues the scene with the warmth of the tropics, reminiscent of the colours favoured by Gauguin in his paintings of Tahiti. However, unlike the more logically formulated areas of colour positioned by Gauguin in works like Pastorales Tahitiennes , Cheong’s use of colour appears more effortless and intuitive like his Southeast Asian contemporaries. In Hendra Gunawan’s Mountain Landscape (Lot 51) and Affandi’s Merapi Landscape (Lot 49), the artists’ choice of a vibrant palette reflect the intensity of the sunlight and the colours that bounce off of the lush landscape. These artists were responding directly to the climate of their unique environments, placing colour onto canvas not on a cognitive basis, but aligned with their emotive response to the kaleidoscopic visuals that surrounded them. Similarly, while Gauguin may have been preoccupied with asserting a detachment from the prevalent Impressionistic style, it was Cheong’s genuine excitement at the changing light of the tropics that is captured through his paintings, with a bright, bold palette that was a direct response to his impression of the tropics. Where Gauguin’s forest floor is a calculated combination of blue and green, Cheong Soo Pieng’s glistens an iridescent emerald with dashes of yellow and red, mimicking the movement of light in the tropics.
Gauguin’s painted scene seems almost like a posed snapshot of the moment, a stillness in his figures emphasised by the abundance of space that surrounds them. Unlike Gauguin, Cheong’s Forest seems alive. A gentle breeze wafts through the trees, illustrated through relaxed, languorous strokes that flow horizontally across the painting. Opting for thicker swaths of paint, the brushstrokes are deliberately made visible to the viewer’s eye, catching only slightly at the grain of the board to give the painting a highly textured surface. The sense of movement is not solely born out of the oil painting technique that Cheong chose to adopt, but is developed from his innate Chinese ink painting sensibilities, as he opts to build up the multi-dimensional perspective that the Chinese ink masters pioneered. Instead of the static, single viewpoint of the Western Modernist style, the Chinese ink tradition favoured additional perspectives to enhance the visual effect of the scene. Cheong was not intentionally looking to the ink tradition for its compositional structure, but arrived at it in an earnest attempt to capture the fast-changing light of the tropics. With the sunlight beaming against the trunk of the tree and the clouds passing through the captured scene, creating shade in areas and concentrating light on others. It is almost imaginable to be present in the sweltering heat, trying to refocus one’s eyes to the brilliant colours that change inadvertently in the blazing sun.
Created in the same decade as Lin Fengmian’s Hamlet (Lot 46), both works display an adherence to the classical Chinese painting compositional structures despite their use of a more Western oriented medium. The overlapping green pastures in Hamlet inadvertently draw the eye into the space, framed by the clusters of trees on both sides of the image. In Forest , the tree in the foreground is used as a structural device to anchor the painting and to develop a sense of depth in reference to the focal point. The trunk of the tree is thrusted to the fore with Cheong’s stark delineation of its form, distinguishing it from the dense background. One would not be entirely incorrect in their comparison of Cheong’s dense layering of elements to the works of Paris School proponents such as Paul Cezanne and Vincent Van Gogh, with their rolling hills and depth of perception, but the web of cultural exchanges revealed when examining the roots of the famed Western movement draws links back to the tradition of Chinese painting, through the layered elements of the popular Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints. It is in the poetic landscape paintings of the Song Dynasty that one is able engage with the compositional dynamism pioneered by the masters of Chinese ink painting. So advanced in their compositional strategies, they were often painted from an imagined bird’s-eye view with a dense layering of elements, like the forested areas in the lower foreground in Fan Kuan’s work, overlapping the foot of the mountain to establish a sense of distance between the viewer and each layer that builds the painted scene. Negative space is created where the mountain fades into a translucent cloud of mist at its base, drawing the viewer into the painting. Cheong does similar in framing his negative space amidst the trees to the left of the painting, creating imagined pathways through the trees with their decisive layering, creating spaces within the painted scene that invite the eye into the imagined realm.
Forest expresses the artist’s deep desire to capture the astonishing sights that inspired him in his new home, fusing the cross-cultural influences of East and West while retaining the essence of the region. An early indication of the technical mastery and artistic vision that would earn Cheong his place as one of the foremost artists of his generation, Forest allows us a rare, glimpse into the early inspiration and ambition of this key figure in Singapore’s art history as he successfully synthesises these two entangled trajectories in the development of his own unique and enigmatic style.
Painted in 1948, Forest is one of the earliest works by Cheong Soo Pieng to ever come to the market, and one of the exceedingly rare oil on board pieces produced by the artist in the late 1940s. Completed just two years after Cheong Soo Pieng’s arrival in Singapore, the work marks the transition of the artist’s identity from a native of China to a resident of Southeast Asia. Cheong made the decision to relocate to Singapore in 1946 to take up a teaching position at the new Nanyang Academy of Fine Art, established by his mentor and former tutor, Lim Hak Tai. The term ‘Nanyang’ was used in association with the Southeast Asian overseas Chinese regional identity during the Sino-Japanese war. It was later adopted to reference a style of art that sought to synthesise Chinese traditional art styles and the influence of Western Modernism as taught by the Paris School, to create a unique form of expression for the depiction of the localised subject. As a new migrant to the region, Cheong was accosted by an array of new visual stimuli that he spared no time in translating into his works. It was this first decade upon his arrival on the island that was instrumental to his understanding of the lives of the people and the cultures of the region, as he examined his new environment as the subject of his paintings.
Under the shade of the trees, the verdant forest floor glows a rich, emerald green. Further behind, vermillion strokes and canary yellow patches brighten up the scene, while the clear skies of a tropical paradise peek through the leaves in a bright blue. The artist traded in the soft and gentle washes of ink he was accustomed to through his formative training at the Xiamen Academy of Art for a much bolder aesthetic that reflected the intensity of these new sights. The vibrant, chromatic palette imbues the scene with the warmth of the tropics, reminiscent of the colours favoured by Gauguin in his paintings of Tahiti. However, unlike the more logically formulated areas of colour positioned by Gauguin in works like Pastorales Tahitiennes , Cheong’s use of colour appears more effortless and intuitive like his Southeast Asian contemporaries. In Hendra Gunawan’s Mountain Landscape (Lot 51) and Affandi’s Merapi Landscape (Lot 49), the artists’ choice of a vibrant palette reflect the intensity of the sunlight and the colours that bounce off of the lush landscape. These artists were responding directly to the climate of their unique environments, placing colour onto canvas not on a cognitive basis, but aligned with their emotive response to the kaleidoscopic visuals that surrounded them. Similarly, while Gauguin may have been preoccupied with asserting a detachment from the prevalent Impressionistic style, it was Cheong’s genuine excitement at the changing light of the tropics that is captured through his paintings, with a bright, bold palette that was a direct response to his impression of the tropics. Where Gauguin’s forest floor is a calculated combination of blue and green, Cheong Soo Pieng’s glistens an iridescent emerald with dashes of yellow and red, mimicking the movement of light in the tropics.
Gauguin’s painted scene seems almost like a posed snapshot of the moment, a stillness in his figures emphasised by the abundance of space that surrounds them. Unlike Gauguin, Cheong’s Forest seems alive. A gentle breeze wafts through the trees, illustrated through relaxed, languorous strokes that flow horizontally across the painting. Opting for thicker swaths of paint, the brushstrokes are deliberately made visible to the viewer’s eye, catching only slightly at the grain of the board to give the painting a highly textured surface. The sense of movement is not solely born out of the oil painting technique that Cheong chose to adopt, but is developed from his innate Chinese ink painting sensibilities, as he opts to build up the multi-dimensional perspective that the Chinese ink masters pioneered. Instead of the static, single viewpoint of the Western Modernist style, the Chinese ink tradition favoured additional perspectives to enhance the visual effect of the scene. Cheong was not intentionally looking to the ink tradition for its compositional structure, but arrived at it in an earnest attempt to capture the fast-changing light of the tropics. With the sunlight beaming against the trunk of the tree and the clouds passing through the captured scene, creating shade in areas and concentrating light on others. It is almost imaginable to be present in the sweltering heat, trying to refocus one’s eyes to the brilliant colours that change inadvertently in the blazing sun.
Created in the same decade as Lin Fengmian’s Hamlet (Lot 46), both works display an adherence to the classical Chinese painting compositional structures despite their use of a more Western oriented medium. The overlapping green pastures in Hamlet inadvertently draw the eye into the space, framed by the clusters of trees on both sides of the image. In Forest , the tree in the foreground is used as a structural device to anchor the painting and to develop a sense of depth in reference to the focal point. The trunk of the tree is thrusted to the fore with Cheong’s stark delineation of its form, distinguishing it from the dense background. One would not be entirely incorrect in their comparison of Cheong’s dense layering of elements to the works of Paris School proponents such as Paul Cezanne and Vincent Van Gogh, with their rolling hills and depth of perception, but the web of cultural exchanges revealed when examining the roots of the famed Western movement draws links back to the tradition of Chinese painting, through the layered elements of the popular Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints. It is in the poetic landscape paintings of the Song Dynasty that one is able engage with the compositional dynamism pioneered by the masters of Chinese ink painting. So advanced in their compositional strategies, they were often painted from an imagined bird’s-eye view with a dense layering of elements, like the forested areas in the lower foreground in Fan Kuan’s work, overlapping the foot of the mountain to establish a sense of distance between the viewer and each layer that builds the painted scene. Negative space is created where the mountain fades into a translucent cloud of mist at its base, drawing the viewer into the painting. Cheong does similar in framing his negative space amidst the trees to the left of the painting, creating imagined pathways through the trees with their decisive layering, creating spaces within the painted scene that invite the eye into the imagined realm.
Forest expresses the artist’s deep desire to capture the astonishing sights that inspired him in his new home, fusing the cross-cultural influences of East and West while retaining the essence of the region. An early indication of the technical mastery and artistic vision that would earn Cheong his place as one of the foremost artists of his generation, Forest allows us a rare, glimpse into the early inspiration and ambition of this key figure in Singapore’s art history as he successfully synthesises these two entangled trajectories in the development of his own unique and enigmatic style.