Lot Description

CHEONG SOO PIENG
(Singaporean, 1917-1983)
Rice Planting
signed 'SOO PIENG 66' (centre right); signed in Chinese (lower centre) ink on paper
68 x 85 cm. (26 3/4 x 33 1/2 in.)
Painted in 1966
one seal of the artist

水墨 紙本
1966年作
簽名：Soo Pieng；四賓
藝術家鈐印

Lot Notes

Cheong Soo Pieng is a Singapore pioneer modern artist, and a key proponent of the Nanyang style of art which began in Singapore and is central in the history of Southeast Asian art. Like many artists of his generation who hailed from the southern coastal towns in China, Cheong Soo Pieng bore an outward-looking vision. He was educated at the Xiamen Academy of Fine Art at the age of 16. After graduation, he moved to Sin Hwa Academy of Fine Art in Shanghai for further studies but his education was disrupted by the Sino- Japanese war. He had to return to Xiamen and started teaching painting while maintaining his own art practice. Cheong Soo Pieng then left China in 1945, and spent some time in Hong Kong before relocating to Singapore in late 1946. In the fledging artworld in Singapore, he began to teach at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts before becoming a full-time artist in his late 40s.

Cheong Soo Pieng travelled widely within Southeast Asia, and also spent time in London in the early 1960s, living and painting with students he taught at Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts who pursued further studies in London. Sunset in Abstract Landscape (Lot 1209), was completed during the time Cheong Soo Pieng worked in London. He was quickly involved in the discussions of abstraction and modernism then, and produced a number of pictures that explored abstraction within the pictorial tradition of landscape painting.

Cheong Soo Pieng's Nanyang Style paintings are particularly acclaimed. In terms of technique and artistic philosophies, Nanyang Style painting drew upon a creative blend of ideas and artistic traditions from the West as well as the East. The subject matter for Nanyang Style painting was inspired from observations of material culture and people in the region. The key event in art history that gave birth to the Nanyang Style was a trip to Bali that Cheong and three other artists, Liu Kang, Chen Wen Hsi and Chen Chong Swee, made in 1952 where they consolidated the painting of tropical Southeast Asian subjects as their central pictorial interest. Rice Planting (Lot 1212) is an excellent example of the Nanyang Style painting where Cheong Soo Pieng was particularly interested in creating distinct compositions of agrarian life and the beauty of the countryside.

River Scene with Two Boats (Lot 1211) and Village Landscape (Lot 1210) show Cheong's continuing refinement of a semi-abstract visual language in painting landscapes in Southeast Asia. Cheong Soo Pieng is widely acknowledged as the most influential modern Singapore painter, having developed an unmistakable body of works, both in landscape and figurative painting. In a short span of time his works progressed through several phases: from post-Impressionist to Cubist; to abstract, semi-abstract and more.

Beginning from the 1970s, Cheong Soo Pieng reached maturity in his paintings of Southeast Asian figurative subjects. By the Lotus Pond (Lot 1208) and In the Village (Lot 1207) are two superlative works from his later years. Coming just three years before he passed away in 1983, the two works are exemplary of the stylistic maturity and perfection that Cheong Soo Pieng has achieved with his archetypal Nanyang figures, inspired by many years of observing and painting in the region. The two works display a timeless elegance reinforced by graceful, simplified lines, a melodious colour palette and harmony and symmetry of composition.