- 131
Cheong Soo Pieng
Description
- Cheong Soo Pieng
- Two Figures
- Signed and dated 59
- Oil on board
- 61 by 51 cm.; 24 by 20 in.
Provenance
Condition
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Catalogue Note
– Kwok Kian Chow, Director of National Art Gallery, Singapore, Cheong Soo Pieng: Visions of Southeast Asia
Cheong Soo Pieng is recognized globally as one of the most important and significant pioneers of Singaporean modern art. His oeuvre draws attention to the country’s evolving political and cultural identities, and establishes the Nanyang artists as a multi-ethnic milieu. The legacy he left behind is one that has undeniably shaped the artistic identity of the country.
Along with a group of artists who sought to capture the rich cultures and lush landscapes of Southeast Asia, Soo Pieng was crucial in developing a vision that was distinctively Nanyang, and throughout his career experimented with different styles, mediums and genres. Notable mediums included watercolours, metal reliefs, and batiks. His artistic practices reflect an intellectual synthesis of Asian and Western modes of expression. His works are “about a way of thinking and expressing modernity”1, and is a “conscious effort to make new art for a new kind of belonging, a new way of seeing the world”2. Thus art-making for Cheong Soo Pieng was a road to self-discovery, as well as an unrelenting pursuit for excellence.
To fully appreciate the artist’s prolific body of works, one must trace his footsteps in and around Southeast Asia and Europe. His many sojourns had a lasting influence upon his evolving styles and ideas. The present lot Two Figures is an early oil painting that demonstrates Soo Pieng’s academic exploration of Post-Impressionistic techniques within Western art. Executed in 1959, Two Figures was influenced by his travels in Malaya during the years 1959 to 19613. The painting depicts two boys crouching on the ground. Their attention is drawn to a little black bird, while the immediate surrounding remains a mystery.
A deeper analysis reveals an exciting melting pot of influences: the use of tracing the figures in black is reminiscent of the Fauvist technique in artist André Derain’s Fishing Boats, Collioure (Fig. 1), while the geometric shapes recall the tribal sculptures (Fig. 2), that inspired the Cubist movement. If modernism is defined by a self-critical tendency in art, Two Figures reflects the awareness of the two-dimensionality as an inherent and essential attribute of the canvas. This aesthetic is shared in Frank Stella’s artwork The Marriage of Reason and Squalor (Fig. 3).
The backdrop is painted yellow, pushing the figures forward from space and .compressing any sense of depth (Fig. 4)4. The figures are stylized, and their anatomies simplified by a strong contouring. This is best illustrated by the figure on the left whose body is represented by a rectangular shape. As a result, we see an inclination towards the flattening of the canvas and the schematising of composition. Cheong Soo Pieng consciously restricts his palette to primary colours. In fact, the use of bright bold colours was an exuberant response to the tropical light and a characteristic of his earlier works, such as Untitled that shows a like subject matter5.
By lessening the details in his composition, the artist aims to focus on the purity of lines, and amplify the emotions expressed via forms and colours. Furthermore the highly textured surface is created by applying successive layers of paints and impastos with the combination of a brush and palette knife. In this instance, Soo Pieng’s depiction is metaphorical rather than descriptive, for the rough lines may also suggest notions of hardship or a humble way of life. The picture then becomes a vignette of the social condition in Malaya during the 1950s. The artist revealed during an interview in 1962, that he “will never forget the glory and splendour of the beauty [he] found in Singapore and Malaya and that the place “has given [him] all the inspiration an artist can ask for”6.
In Two Figures, Soo Pieng conveys a visual vocabulary that is well versed in the traditions of Western modern art. However, his rendition is far beyond mimicry. Visiting Bali, Sarawak and Sabah for the first time in the 1950s, allowed Cheong Soo Pieng to pair his own observations and experiences as a Chinese migrant living in Southeast Asia, with artistic principles such as Expressionism and Cubism. The abstract tenor in Two Figures foreshadows the artist’s turn towards pure formalism that began in the early 1960s (Fig. 5)7.The present painting therefore epitomizes the thoughts, ideas and expressions, that he culminated during an intense period of experimentation and discovery.
1 Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Soo Pieng, Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore, 2013, P. 11
2 Yeo Wei Wei, Cheong Soo Pieng: Visions of South East Asia, The National Art Gallery, Singapore 2010, P. 137
3 Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Soo Pieng, Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore, 2013, P. 5
4 The American artist William Morris Hunt painted a self-portrait in 1866 with a creamy yellow background. “The light background creates a means of thrusting the figure forward from the space, fiving emphasis to all the features of the figures being profiled. The light background hides nothing and provides a raw , almost self assured and untraditional element that draws the image out of the dark shadows of the past and into the future” Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Soo Pieng, Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore, 2013, P. 13
5 Yeo Wei Wei, Cheong Soo Pieng: Visions of South East Asia, The National Art Gallery, Singapore 2010, P. 88
6 Yeo Wei Wei, Cheong Soo Pieng: Visions of South East Asia, The National Art Gallery, Singapore 2010, P. 76