Cheong Soo Pieng

Private Collection, Singapore

Singapore, Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Soo Pieng, 2 February - 3 March 2013

Soo Pieng, Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore, 2013, Fig. 11, p. 14 and p. 111, colour illustration

This work is in good overall condition as viewed. The paint layers are healthy overall. Examination under ultraviolet light reveals very tiny and minor spots of restoration in the upper left quadrant, lower right quadrant and on the right edge. Framed.
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Sotheby’s is honored to bring to auction a truly special work by Cheong Soo Pieng, a pioneer of the Nanyang style and an artist who assiduously reinvented his practice. As one of only two known works of this miniseries, Cosmos 2 offers a rare glimpse into the radical forays taken by a burgeoning artist who was on the verge of a major artistic breakthrough. A display of an extraordinary acuity for composing movement, abstraction and colour, the present lot brings the early leaps of Cheong’s highly experimental approach to the fore.

Painted a few years after Soo Pieng relocated from Shanghai, Cosmos 2 bursts with the spirit of the artist’s unbounded imagination and exhibits his ability to weave together multiple conceptual threads whether Eastern or Western in origin. An evolving web of abstracted forms, seemingly maneuvering within a red and blue vortex, Cosmos 2 reflects Cheong’s fascination with the tittering lines of order and chaos that bind the notion of the cosmos. 

Working with a combination of organic contortions and angled shapes, the artist renders an untraceable map that is at once illusive yet innately magnetic. Circular formats, which would later populate his abstract series as the nucleus of the compositions, emerge and dissolve simultaneously in Cosmos 2.  Their movements are traced by overlapping wavy lines that accentuate both the fluidity of motion between fragmented planes and a vibrating tension across the work’s surface. Cheng’s tendency to probe viewers with quasi-recognizable elements—a circle, half a sphere or a sail—recall Joan Miro’s Constellations series, by juxtaposing the artist’s imagination with a touch of the real world. Broken into rounded contours, these biomorphic forms suggest orbits of celestial bodies and cosmic forces.

Upon viewing this 1950 painting, Cheong’s growing interest in organism and exploring the very forces that order our lives—its cyclical and bewildering nature—becomes more vivid. While his late series dives into microscopic, cellular themes, Cheong here deals with creation on a macro level. What holds Cosmos 2 in perfect balance is the artist’s virtuosic play of cool and warm hues. Yellow, cyan and deep magentas are tactically applied, layer by layer, to evoke an illusion of depth and a faint glow emanating from within the work. Cheong’s meditative process stirs in viewers a sense of gravitas, which underpins the painting’s seductive quality. Indeed, Cosmos 2 echoes the musical gestures of Wassily Kandinsky as both artists reveal their inner feelings through a symphony of colour.

As with the most iconic of Cheong Soo Pieng’s abstract works, Cosmos 2 possesses a visual authority that summons the viewer to imagine colour and forms as constantly evolving phenomena. A compelling reflection of the artist’s fluency in a diverse range of artistic approaches, the painting sheds light on Cheong’s search for harmony that would come to inform the most prolific moments in his career. Cosmos 2 remains one of the two known works from this especially rare series and reinstates a formative chapter in the artist’s oeuvre.