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拍品专文
Imbued with the strong pulsating energy of daily mercantile life, the Singapore River is considered the city’s lifeblood, anchoring it as a centre of commerce and a major trading hub in the region. The significance of the river was not lost on many of the modern Singaporean artists who were greatly inspired by it and sought to capture a key piece of Singapore’s history. Chen Wen Hsi was no exception, the iconic river a subject matter he constantly returned to in various iterations, but always executed in his signature cubist style renderings in a fresh and innovative way.
Part of a landmark find in 1999 of over twenty paintings in the attic of the old house Chen resided in at Kingsmead Road, River Scene and other works contributed in furthering our understanding the development of art movements in the 1950s and 60s, making them a historically significant and important discovery. Part of this find was also exhibited at the Singapore Art Museum in 2000, at an exhibition titled ‘Newly Discovered Paintings by Chen Wen Hsi' and also served to help chart and highlight the artist’s formative and conceptual approaches to known works of that era.
A pioneer in the Nanyang style of painting that combined Western and Chinese art traditions within their artistic practice, the oil paintings produced by Chen in later half of the twentieth century are considered some of his most dynamic and expressive. Originally trained in the art of Chinese ink painting as a student at Xinhua Academy of Fine Art in Shanghai before settling in Singapore, incorporated liberally combinations of Cubist and Fauvist aesthetics that were then converted to his own unique style of Southeast Asian narratives. Depicting a solitary boatman approaching a fleet of vessels along the river as rows of shophouses rise majestically behind them in a symphony of majestic forms, River Scene is an exceptional example of Chen’s ability to distil complex forms into the simplest of shapes, lines and angular blocks of colour. Chen purposefully employs the use of contrasting colours alongside bright, cool and dark tones, carefully applying them with both an overlapping and blending technique, to produce a perfectly harmonious balance brimming with a lively vigour, and demonstrating Chen’s ability to not just emulate the works of the Western masters but to understand their artistic sensibilities and interpret it in his own unique visual language.
A spectacular display of brilliant colour, exuberant strokes and shifting shapes, River Scene reveals a tour de force of painterly expression that is a hallmark of these rare masterpieces produced during Chen’s relatively short artistic period, and codifies him as one of Asia’s most celebrated and significant artists.
Part of a landmark find in 1999 of over twenty paintings in the attic of the old house Chen resided in at Kingsmead Road, River Scene and other works contributed in furthering our understanding the development of art movements in the 1950s and 60s, making them a historically significant and important discovery. Part of this find was also exhibited at the Singapore Art Museum in 2000, at an exhibition titled ‘Newly Discovered Paintings by Chen Wen Hsi' and also served to help chart and highlight the artist’s formative and conceptual approaches to known works of that era.
A pioneer in the Nanyang style of painting that combined Western and Chinese art traditions within their artistic practice, the oil paintings produced by Chen in later half of the twentieth century are considered some of his most dynamic and expressive. Originally trained in the art of Chinese ink painting as a student at Xinhua Academy of Fine Art in Shanghai before settling in Singapore, incorporated liberally combinations of Cubist and Fauvist aesthetics that were then converted to his own unique style of Southeast Asian narratives. Depicting a solitary boatman approaching a fleet of vessels along the river as rows of shophouses rise majestically behind them in a symphony of majestic forms, River Scene is an exceptional example of Chen’s ability to distil complex forms into the simplest of shapes, lines and angular blocks of colour. Chen purposefully employs the use of contrasting colours alongside bright, cool and dark tones, carefully applying them with both an overlapping and blending technique, to produce a perfectly harmonious balance brimming with a lively vigour, and demonstrating Chen’s ability to not just emulate the works of the Western masters but to understand their artistic sensibilities and interpret it in his own unique visual language.
A spectacular display of brilliant colour, exuberant strokes and shifting shapes, River Scene reveals a tour de force of painterly expression that is a hallmark of these rare masterpieces produced during Chen’s relatively short artistic period, and codifies him as one of Asia’s most celebrated and significant artists.