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Lot Essay
‘It is a way of bringing order and intelligence to what an artist is doing. It is a memory maker and also a means of connecting different ideas and emotions, fusing them into a creative force.’ – Cheong Soo Pieng.
(quoted in T. K. Sabapathy, ‘New styles from a turbulent era’, The Straits Times, 2 August 1983.)
For Cheong Soo Pieng, art was not an expression of deliberate invention; rather, it emerged intuitively, connecting memories, ideas and emotions into a unified visual language. Painted in 1962, Paysage belongs to a pivotal moment in Cheong's artistic development, coinciding with his first extended journey to Europe between 1961 and 1963. Far more than a period of travel, these years marked a significant breakthrough in his exploration of abstraction and the refinement of his celebrated thin-oil technique, enabling the evocative, ink-like translucency and atmospheric effects that became a hallmark of his mature style. Re-examining the dialogue between his cultural roots and artistic vision through an increasingly sophisticated exploration of ink aesthetics. The experience proved instrumental in shaping his artistic development and helped propel his growing international reputation in the decades that followed. The resulting works stand among the most ambitious of his career, reflecting a growing confidence in abstraction and a sophisticated synthesis of Eastern aesthetics and international modernism.
This very synthesis of East and West finds its most compelling expression in Paysage. The paintings produced during Cheong’s travels in Europe reveal a strikingly consistent aesthetic: luminous expanses of crimson, vermilion and yellow serve as the stage for interwoven passages of calligraphic marks, layered with remarkable energy and control. Central to many of these compositions is the horizon, where earth and sky converge beneath a rising or descending sun, evoking themes of regeneration, transformation and the eternal cycle of nature.
Born in Xiamen, China, in 1917, Cheong Soo Pieng received rigorous training in Chinese ink painting at the Xiamen Academy of Fine Arts before studying Western art at the Xin Hua Academy of Fine Arts in Shanghai. By the time he settled in Singapore in 1946, he had acquired a rare fluency in both Chinese ink traditions and Western painting. This dual foundation became central to his practice, informing a lifelong exploration of the relationship between artistic modernism and cultural identity through the language of ink. His significance was increasingly recognised internationally, culminating in a landmark presentation at London's Redfern Gallery in 1963, where he exhibited alongside the rising Chinese modernist Zao Wou-ki. The exhibition marked an important milestone in his international career, followed by a series of solo exhibitions across Australia, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Taiwan from the mid-1960s through the early 1980s. His legacy has since been reaffirmed through the National Gallery Singapore’s recent exhibition, Cheong Soo Pieng: Layer by Layer (2024), while a smaller painting from the same year, with a closely related palette, A Vision (1962), is held in the National Gallery Singapore Collection further cementing his name as one of Singapore’s most preeminent artists.
(quoted in T. K. Sabapathy, ‘New styles from a turbulent era’, The Straits Times, 2 August 1983.)
For Cheong Soo Pieng, art was not an expression of deliberate invention; rather, it emerged intuitively, connecting memories, ideas and emotions into a unified visual language. Painted in 1962, Paysage belongs to a pivotal moment in Cheong's artistic development, coinciding with his first extended journey to Europe between 1961 and 1963. Far more than a period of travel, these years marked a significant breakthrough in his exploration of abstraction and the refinement of his celebrated thin-oil technique, enabling the evocative, ink-like translucency and atmospheric effects that became a hallmark of his mature style. Re-examining the dialogue between his cultural roots and artistic vision through an increasingly sophisticated exploration of ink aesthetics. The experience proved instrumental in shaping his artistic development and helped propel his growing international reputation in the decades that followed. The resulting works stand among the most ambitious of his career, reflecting a growing confidence in abstraction and a sophisticated synthesis of Eastern aesthetics and international modernism.
This very synthesis of East and West finds its most compelling expression in Paysage. The paintings produced during Cheong’s travels in Europe reveal a strikingly consistent aesthetic: luminous expanses of crimson, vermilion and yellow serve as the stage for interwoven passages of calligraphic marks, layered with remarkable energy and control. Central to many of these compositions is the horizon, where earth and sky converge beneath a rising or descending sun, evoking themes of regeneration, transformation and the eternal cycle of nature.
Born in Xiamen, China, in 1917, Cheong Soo Pieng received rigorous training in Chinese ink painting at the Xiamen Academy of Fine Arts before studying Western art at the Xin Hua Academy of Fine Arts in Shanghai. By the time he settled in Singapore in 1946, he had acquired a rare fluency in both Chinese ink traditions and Western painting. This dual foundation became central to his practice, informing a lifelong exploration of the relationship between artistic modernism and cultural identity through the language of ink. His significance was increasingly recognised internationally, culminating in a landmark presentation at London's Redfern Gallery in 1963, where he exhibited alongside the rising Chinese modernist Zao Wou-ki. The exhibition marked an important milestone in his international career, followed by a series of solo exhibitions across Australia, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Taiwan from the mid-1960s through the early 1980s. His legacy has since been reaffirmed through the National Gallery Singapore’s recent exhibition, Cheong Soo Pieng: Layer by Layer (2024), while a smaller painting from the same year, with a closely related palette, A Vision (1962), is held in the National Gallery Singapore Collection further cementing his name as one of Singapore’s most preeminent artists.