Supported by artcommune gallery, Singapore, the exhibition features forty works by modernist Singapore artist Cheong Soo Pieng, many of them revealed to the public for the first time. The exhibition promises to be the first and most significant overseas survey exhibition of Cheong Soo Pieng ever since his passing away in 1983.
As one of the most significant of overseas Chinese artists active in the 20th century, Cheong Soo Pieng was a ceaseless innovator, never settling for an established style. In the process, he developed a highly iconic personal visual vocabulary, both reflective of an modernist internationalist bent and a commitment to depictions of the Nanyang region he found himself settling in as an émigré Chinese artist.
Wang Zineng, founder of Art Agenda, S.E.A. notes “the story of Cheong Soo Pieng is intertwined with the story of modern art’s introduction from Europe and America in the 20th century to Asia. Cheong Soo Pieng’s adaptations and reworkings of dominant strands of western modern art stands as some of the greatest achievement of 20th century Asian modern art.”
Arising from his training and knowledge of the inherited traditions of the School of Paris and traditional Chinese ink painting, Cheong Soo Pieng synthesised the aesthetic paradigm of Chinese and Western art, moving between oil painting and traditional Chinese ink painting seamlessly, straddling the spectrum of abstraction and figuration throughout his oeuvre.
Steven Lee, Managing Director of Asian Art Center, says “Cheong Soo Pieng was academically trained, and alongside his brethren of overseas Chinese artists, painted simply but with great potency what they observed, creating the aesthetic foundation of the so-called Nanyang Style, unifying idealist notions and a nostalgic vision of the past.”
Some of the most significant artworks in the exhibition are on loan from important private collections in Taiwan, including the large-sized Balinese Dance, which is also the present highest priced Cheong Soo Pieng painting to have sold at auction. By The Lotus Pond is a mature period work of the artist, and was exhibited in Taiwan in 1980, and featured on the cover of The Artist magazine. From a private collection in Singapore, it comes full circle back to Taiwan for exhibition for the first time in nearly 40 years. A multi-faceted artist, Cheong Soo Pieng turned to the tenets of geometric abstraction in the late 1960s, early 1970s, producing Red Motion, an abstract piece pulsating with a sense of kinetic energy.