Cheong Soo Pieng

This work is in good overall condition as viewed. There is evidence of some wear along the edges of the work, but this does not affect the overall image as the paint layers are healthy overall. Examination under ultraviolet light reveals some very small areas of restoration on the edges of the work, including a small area of restoration near the upper left corner. Examination under ultraviolet light also reveals a horizontal (8cm) area of restoration on the lower left corner. Framed.
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“It is the creation of harmony of colors and variations in tones which are my main objects in painting.”
- Cheong Soo Pieng^[1]

The preeminent Singaporean artist Cheong Soo Pieng left a prolific body of work, including figurative drawings, mixed media compositions and abstract paintings. As part of a generation of artists in the “Nanyang Style,” Cheong wished to create art that was radically Singaporean: demonstrative not only of Singapore’s cultural and geographical identity, but also of its artistic and philosophical potential.

Yellow Abstract is a synthesis of two of Cheong’s main pictorial interests in the 1970s: Three-tier Compositions, in which paintings are divided into a bottom third and a top two thirds, and the Horizon series, in which landscapes take on cubistic forms and often feature a round circular motif. The bottom third of this piece features a dark green, almost black, field, applied as a thick paste to create a fascinating quality of unevenness. The top two thirds are covered with a textured ochre yellow background, while the center of the painting features a series of Pollock-like paint splatters and drips in brown, yellow and green contained within a vaguely elliptical shape. The painting is crowned with round form to the top right of the paint splatters, rendered in a clear, bright yellow as if to suggest a sun.

While Cheong’s abstract pieces tend to resist definitive interpretations, in the light of his other pieces from the same period, we can begin to understand the dark green bottom as a “visual motif that relates to the chaotic beginning of [the] universe.”^[2] It is heavy and looks almost like a trance-inducing void of darkness, a foil to the brightness of the yellow. This dark green texture bleeds into the rest of the composition: there is a light greenness that permeates the background of the central composition, perhaps a reminder of the inextricability of beginnings and ends, a rebuke against the linearity of time as we understand it today.

There exists a remarkable sense of disorder in this work focused on the central composition, reminiscent of his lyrical abstractions of horizons in the 1960s created with ink and color. However, this painting does not attempt to translate the fluidity of ink into oil, instead embracing the nuances of oil as a medium in its density and movement. This turn in Cheong’s paintings can be attributed to a trip to Europe where, for the first time, he saw works by the Spanish painter Joan Miro, the British landscape artist J. M. W. Turner and the revered modernist Pablo Picasso. In this piece, we may see traces of the intentionality in color, form and stroke that permeate the oeuvre of these artists.

Aggressive splatters of paint are foregrounded with drips of yellow that penetrate the green field at the bottom third, uniting the entire composition. As it crosses the boundary between green and yellow, it takes it remnants of undried burgundy and green pigment, muddying the colors on as they flow down the composition. This is a drastic turn in Cheong’s body of work: gone are the soft, earthy colors of his early figurative Nanyang works. Instead, we have disturbance and sudden bursts of movement: a harmony that is more uneasy, but perhaps more indicative of the uneasy identity from which he was painting.

^[1] Yeo Wei Wei. Cheong Soo Pieng: Visions of Southeast Asia. The National Art Gallery, Singapore, 2010, p. 178.

^[2] Hou Sou Ping. The Story of Cheong Soo Pieng. Oxford Graphic Printers, Singapore, 2015, p. 159.