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IMPORTANT SECOND-GENERATION
ARTISTS SERIES (2)
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17 June 2006 - 2 July 2006
(12pm -- 8pm)
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The second of this exhibition series features the works of Wee Beng Chong, Tay Chee Toh, Anthony Poon, Chieu Shuey Fook, Jaafar Latiff and Leo Hee Tong.
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These six artists are well-known figures in the arts community. Their works appear often in the arts discourse, in various publications on the arts and art reviews shows. As second generation artists who gained prominence in the 70s, they hold a historically significant place: they are members and even founding members of the Modern Art Society1; many were affiliated in some way with Nanyang Academy of Fine Art as students or lecturers, some going abroad to further their art education overseas in the UK, Paris or Japan; three (Wee Beng Chong, Tay Chee Toh and Anthony Poon) are Cultural Medallion awardees; and all brought a fresh perspective to the art of the 60s and 70s when they veered toward the abstract art tendencies of the modern art world.
So what is their work about, and what is their contribution to art in Singapore?
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Prior to the second generation, the art of the 60s is characterised as being sensitive to notions of multiculturalism2. Further, as Chinese sentiments of nationalism trickled away after the Second World War, there was a need to adopt art with a Nanyang character - artists strove to produce art with a distinctively regional character, which is provoked by difference, geographically and culturally. These second generation artists, however, going against the grain, invoked a different art manifesto – that of universalism and internationalism – in formalism and their abstract non-objective art. Another opinion was that their art, “revealed an aesthetic dimension that located their works within concepts of self, identity and place, which drew particular significance in a time of nation-building3”. The 60s were a time of political shifts – the separation of Singapore from Malaysia, and then, independence.
In abstraction, works are subjective – a mirror of the artists’ internal world and subject to their ideas of emotional expressiveness. However, it is not entirely just purely intuitive renderings or gestures, or purely formal concerns in these six artists’ works. There are assertions of observed phenomena in their works.
Jaafar Latiff had a solo exhibition at Sculpture Square last year. In the essay by Constance Sheares, she quoted him as saying: “My paintings are about feelings, sometimes joy and exuberance, sometimes some darker emotion like anger and frustration. In essence, they are about myself”. There were also allusions to Nature (as an avid gardener) and to the external experiences that affected him deeply – like the separation of Singapore and Malaysia in the 60s, the separation of self from community (which is the kampong).
Tay Chee Toh was a founding member of the Modern Art Society (MAS). He applied decorative elements as part of his abstract language. From tribal textiles and body accessories to batik or dayak motifs his work was self-consciously exotic. Insertions of industrial objects (persistently present in his environment) became more pertinent in his later oeuvre, although they were worked into Tay’s dreamscapes, which were described as “futuristic fantasies”4. These current paintings are much in the same vein: tubular or shell-scalloped creatures hover high in a strange landscape. The titles clue us in to the representational - references to lovers, festivals and birds.
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Wee Beng Chong was also a founder of MAS. He is a talented and versatile artist who worked in several media from Chinese ink to western realism. In as much as he espoused modern abstraction, his body of works crossed several disciplines as a solo exhibition of his in 1970, was reported to show “oil paintings, sculptures, seal carvings, calligraphy and ceramic plates”. He was quoted as saying that between each tradition (Chinese and western) there is no clear boundary”. He employs the aesthetic and techniques of Chinese traditional ink in the abstract paintings, and conversely, that of modern abstraction to Chinese ink. “For our art to have a special identity…we must also infuse our work with our traditional values and cultural heritage”5. Here in this series, entitled Winners, he maintains his stance on infusing traditional ink with abstract characteristics, and textual effects.
Described in Channels & Confluences as an outstanding artist, Chieu Shuey Fook works often in metal reliefs. He makes the complex organisation of lines appear facile. In the Centenary exhibition catalogue of 1987, his work Rhythm was described as “complexity implicit within what may seem to be simple geometric configurations”6. Perhaps it is the feel and texture of the embossed lines over the metallic surface that helps his configurations. The shapes in the two works, Relationship, and Parallel Life, invoke eyes, face, fish, living creatures, in one’s imagination. The proclivity of intersecting lines are reminiscent of Paul Klee’s own linear drawings of cat or bird, but at the same time, also less so, as the unusual organisation suggest creatures unknown to us.
Leo Hee Tong began focusing on producing works that bore his own signature style after his trip to Japan in 1973. Prior to that, he was strongly influenced by his teacher, pioneer artist, Cheong Soo Pieng. Although working in the abstract particularly with heavily textured effects and thickly scored lines, he is always intent on bringing recognisable forms into his work, although, abstraction is for him a way of expressing the essence or spirit of the subject of what he sees. The subject of his early work, largely semi-abstract, was pigeons, clearly represented through his adopting a certain arrangement of lines, colour or texture. As with this current works at the exhibition, inspired by a trip to Bali, works entitled Offering, Morning Dew and The Beach, are worked in his familiar semi-abstract style.
Of them all, Anthony Poon is the one who fiercely maintains a pure formalist stance in his precise, geometric explorations of line, colour and shapes. In the 70s however, there were external references in his series Kites, which is his poetic reference to Flight to the Moon, and that perhaps also pinched its nuanced shape from the local Malay kites. As his titles began losing references to the external world, his work, BG-P on Blue Circle, of 1985, was regarded as “purely geometric in character and contains all basic ingredients of modernist painting: non-illusionistic, self-referential, and a colour programme”7. Poon sees “strength and potential in the elements of precision, balance, clarity and above all, order”8. His present works reflect this consistency. And I should add some words regarding his sculptures. The move to sculpture seems a natural one as the paintings already predicated optically suggestive 3-dimensional forms. In the 80s, Poon developed his paintings into reliefs, and in the 90s, worked on freestanding sculptures.
So finally, what is their contribution to art in Singapore? These second generation artists have boldly marked the 70s and 80s with a profound sense of persistence and belief in the abstract mood of the modern times. Perhaps I shall leave it to curator, Constance Sheares, who wrote in 1987: the “non-objective artist want to create art which reflects the dynamic, material forces within modern day society which stimulates an understanding of our world”9.
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Writeup by:
Susie Wong
Artist/Art Critic
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