A Composition of Angular Forms

Credit Line: Gift of Artist 2006, Collection of SMU

This artwork is part of 25x25 Campus Art Tour.

Listen to the audio description of the artwork here.

Transcript:

As the title suggests, A Composition of Angular Forms shows the artist's interest in form and representation over pure subject matter. The painting presents a skewed elevated perspective of a stylised arrangement of walls and roofs in overlapping planes.

The tiled roofs are painted in muted warm washes and overlaid with short line strokes for each layer of tile. The surrounding walls are washed in ink with brush strokes of varying degrees of coarseness that leave streaks of exposed white, imparting a sense of weathered surfaces scratched and peeled. A narrow strip of clean white wall, with rectangular windows in deep dark opaque ink, brings to focus the many tonal and textural effects that envelope it.

As with the painting Under Clear Skies (Seah Street), Ek Kay's interest here is in the simplification of representation towards a formal focus in tones and textures.

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Artist's Inscription:
八九年画

Chua Ek Kay (1947-2008) was one of Singapore's leading contemporary Chinese ink painters. Born in China, Chua came to Singapore with his family in the 1950s. Here he studied Chinese ink painting under Fan Chang Tien. In 1991, he was the first Chinese ink painter to win the United Overseas Bank Painting of the Year Award. He later took up formal training in contemporary art, receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Tasmania in 1994 and a Master of Arts (Honours) in Visual Arts from the University of Western Sydney in 1995. He was awarded the Cultural Medallion in 1999.

This artwork is from the Street Scenes Collection, a suite of 30 paintings donated by the artist in 2006 and currently housed at Lee Kong Chian School of Business. The Street Scenes Collection spans two decades of Chua's artistic practice, from 1986 to 2006, and pictures narrow alleyways, temples of worship, old shophouses and historic sites in Singapore, Kathmandu, Yogyakarta and Jiangnan. In later years, he was keener on evoking feelings rather than rendering actual physical architecture. Particularly, his depictions of Singapore city streets—from Little India to Ann Siang Hill—are suffused with feelings of melancholy as he captures history passing through the once-familiar streets he has seen grown, thrived, and waned over time.