Page 108 - The Pioneers, November 26, 2016 Hong Kong

Lot 2513 Detail 局部
It is creation of harmony of colours and variation in tones which are my main objects in painting.
I paint when I am in the mood, but I would stay at one subject for days, if necessary,
to complete the expression of the idea in my mind
Upon his arrival in 1946, Cheong Soo Pieng was fascinated
by the unique features of cosmopolitan Singapore. Cheong
left China as part of the wave of Chinese migration into
Southeast Asia, or what was termed Nanyang, the South
Seas. Having come from a largely homogenous society
with a singular narrative of social and political history,
the coexistence and overlapping of different cultures in
Singapore was to be a continuous source of fascination and
inspiration for the artist.
Distanced from the prescriptive rules of traditional Chinese
painting that had been his main artistic foundation, Cheong
found himself able to experiment with alternative modes of
art production, and turned his attention to painting on oil
and canvas – the Western medium that until then he had not
felt free enough to explore. Cheong along with his artistic
contemporaries and fellow migrant such as Chen Wen Hsi,
Liu Kang, and Chen Chong Swee, began to develop what is
now widely referred to as the Nanyang school of painting.
So-called due to the association of these early pioneers
with the Nanyang Academy of Fine Art where they were
educators, the term also referenced the emergence of a
regionally specific artistic style that saw the assimilation of Asia: the food vendor with his cart and the selling of fresh
Western painting techniques with Eastern sensibilities in the
rendering of uniquely Southeast Asian subjects.
Executed mainly between the early to mid-1970s, these
mixed media works represent a turning point in Cheong's
98 THE PIONEERS 先 鋒 薈 萃
- Cheong Soo Pieng
career. Following a brief, but enormously energetic and
creative period of experimentation with abstraction that was
begun during his time spent in Europe from 1961-1963, the
1970s saw Cheong in search for a radically different means
of expression that went beyond the canvas. Composed of
materials ranging from plastic and wood, to all manner of
scrap metals, the works from this period are imbued with
a refreshing sense of materiality as they emerge from the
pictorial plane into three-dimensional space.
Kampong Spirit (Lot 2513) is a work replete with brilliant
tactile details, and coming from this distinctive period of
Cheong's artistic practice in the 1970s. Chinatown Scene
(1970) and Singapore Scenery (1970) and Kampong Spirit
form a series comprised of only three unique works – each
celebrating the cultural diversity and unique features of the
key cultural groups in Singapore.
Kampong Spirit is an ode to interconnected fabric of cultural
life in Singapore. Cheong brings together an intricate
collection of vignettes and characters that immediately
place the work within a visual language of Southeast
tropical produce in the lower left, chattering groups of
women interspersed with free-roaming farm animals in the
right foreground, domestic activities of hanging laundry
and pounding rice in the upper right background, and the
immediately distinctive scene of fishermen drying their nets