陳文希

直接購自藝術家
私人收藏，台灣

Excellent overall condition as viewed. Any inconsistency is due to the artist's working method. Framed under Plexiglass.
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“[A] point of utmost importance concerns “spirit”. We often pay attention only to the objects and paint them without giving thought to the surrounding spirit. This spirit is sometimes fuzzy. How do we make it clear? How do we show it by means by dark colors? This is always variable. If we are only painting objects, there would be a lack of sense of energy or vibrancy… We have to judge and create, going by our own feelings”.

- Chen Wen Hsi

CONVERGENCES: Chen Wen Hsi Centennial Exhibition, Transcript of Oral History Interview with the Artist, Singapore Art Museum, Singapore, 2006, pg. 47.

Chen Wen Hsi was born in Guangzhou in 1906 where he lived for several years, before relocating to Singapore in the late 1940s. He was a founding member of the Nanyang art movement that defined Singapore’s artistic heritage, and which had a lasting impression on the country’s role in Southeast Asian creative expression. An avid naturalist, his oeuvre was largely dedicated to the tropical wildlife that populated the Singaporean and Malay landscape. Gibbons, herons, and cranes featured prominently throughout his paintings, notably with the ink on paper works where he paired his classical Chinese painterly skills with cubist-inspired compositions and styles.

The present work Cranes perfectly exemplifies the artist’s favored aesthetics and motifs. As per the title of the work, Chen Wen Hsi has chosen to depict the birds in their natural setting, the gracefulness of their postures and movements captured succinctly in the framework of the painting. The artist often incorporated a free brush technique in his paintings that garnered the subjects with a special vitality and energy. Cranes also alludes to cubist styles and aesthetics. The sharp, angular and normally elongated figures are paired with complimentary shades of green to create an illusion of depth. The work was created via the finger painting technique that the artist oftentimes employed in his paintings.  The interplay between the colors and composition illustrated Chen Wen-Hsi’s aesthetical preferences, for he believed abstract art to be one of the purest forms of creative expression.