Chen Wen Hsi

Chen Wen-Hsi, Paintings by Chen Wen-Hsi, Old and New Gallery, Singapore, 1979, p. 17, colorplate 5

The work is in good condition overall. There is light wear and handling along the margins of the painting, along with a gentle network of craquelure on the lower right margin (blue paint), but is only visible upon close obseravtion. Examination under ultraviolet light reveals evidence of a general touch-up scattered throughout the surface, in particular along the four margins. The condition is not visible with the naked eye. Framed.
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Chen Wen Hsi’s achievement as a painter and an art-educator established him as one of the most influential individuals in Singapore’s modernist art movement. Leaving his hometown in Guangdong Province for Singapore in 1948, Chen Wen Hsi found inspiration in the lush tropics, and began to forge a new kind of style that blended traditions from both the East and West.

The first Singaporean artist to ever receive an honorary doctorate from the National University of Singapore, a Gold Medal by the National Museum of History in Taiwan, as well as the ASEAN Cultural and Communication Award for outstanding artists, Chen’s legacy has been commemorated on the back of the country’s fifty-dollar bill, where his painting Two Gibbons Amidst Vines has been printed.

The saying by the great scholar Su Tung-Po, “Judging a picture by physical likeness is being juvenile, and that a true poet does not permit his writing to be restricted by the rules of poetry”¹ is a theory of painting that stays close to Chen Wen Hsi’s conception of art-making_^.

Evident within his Chinese ink and Western oil repertoire is a highly analytical approach to structure and composition. It may be implied that his aesthetic vision is one that strives for a total image of harmony and beauty. Executed in the 1960s, the present work entitled Puppet testifies to the artist’s fluency in the oil medium, and demonstrates his awareness and understanding of Western styles and painterly techniques.

The work Puppets is in many ways a revelation of the artist’s ideas and visions. He composed the painting with a simple color palette, as means to arrest the viewer’s attention to his aesthetic principles. Thus, the picture is one that is didactic rather than descriptive, and self-critical rather than self-forgiving. Filling the background in a cerulean blue, Chen layers his composition with bold red shapes and sharp expressive lines. To create a visual depth on a two-dimensional surface, he modifies the picture with the high and low color tones of blacks and whites. Black being the deepest color tone creates shadows, while white being the brightest, floats upon the surface, illuminating the canvas. The sparing use of grey as an intermediary tone ties the colors into a cohesive whole, while countering the chaos between the disparate forms.

 Chen once wrote, “Black, white and grey are colors that must be applied with good control during painting. Forming the basis on which other colors can be harmonized, these three colors should permeate the entire artwork. Without them, there would be an immediate sense of dissonance”^2_. Moreover, the seemingly haphazard appearance of green circles is a tongue-in-cheek way to make apparent the interactions between the binary forces of light and shade, solid and void, color and tone.

In Puppet, Chen Wen Hsi articulates his fascination with pictorial structure, for he asserts that, “Beauty in art is not dependent solely on feelings and sentiments. It has to be regulated by reason and structure. In this sense Abstract Art is one of the most pure and absolute form of painting”^3_. Comprised of autonomous visual elements, the artist deconstructs the visible world to pure lines, shapes and forms, and with a strong emphasis on color-theory. The engagement with geometric abstraction recalls the radical Suprematist paintings of Kazamir Malevich. Declaring “the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless”^4_, the Suprematists redefined the artist’s relationship to the universe for they looked towards art that had no immediate and discernible reference to recognizable objects. While serving as a compelling example of Chen Wen Hsi’s intellectual rigor, the present painting also reveals the very core of his aesthetic preference, where beauty is conveyed through an irreducible simplicity.

¹ Wen-Hsi Chen, Chen Wen Hsi Paintings, Old & New Gallery, Singapore, 1976 Exhibition Catalogue

² Chen Wen Hsi, Convergences: Chen Wen Hsi Centennial Exhibition, Singapore Art Museum, Singapore, 2006, P. 80

³ Siewmin Chen, Paintings by Chen Wen Hsi, The Old & New Gallery, Singapore, 1987, P. 6

⁴ Kazimir Malevich, The Non-Objective World: The Manifesto of Suprematism