Symphony No. 4 (2008 - 2009)

Credit Line: Gift of the Artist 2017, Collection of SMU

The suite of 4 paintings titled Symphony No. 4 by Singapore artist Ho Chee Lick, belongs to an ink on paper series that the artist debuted in 2011 in the exhibition Sequenza: Ho Chee Lick's New Ink Work, at Art Retreat, Singapore. The Sequenza abstract ink series foregrounds the artist's interests in the interplay of chance and intuitive manipulation, expressed in the emotional cadences of music. Apart from holdings in private collections, works in the Symphony series are also in institutional holdings, including the National Art Gallery, NUS Museums and Nanyang Technological University.

Ho Chee Lick (b. 1950, Singapore) has actively participated in Singapore's art scene since 1990. Initiated into the Western and Chinese art traditions by pioneer artists Chen Wen Hsi and Chen Chong Swee while a student in Chinese High School, Ho's art practice is particularly driven by his attraction to vernacular culture and the transitional flows of Singapore's socio-historical landscape. In the 1990s, he produced a prodigious series of paintings based on Pulau Ubin and Tiong Bahru, picturing stories of the soulful desolation of neglect and abandonment. His favoured approach has ever been to explore and discover pictorial themes through first person encounters, and working en plein air has been a modus operandi for many years now. In 2015, Ho debuted another prodigious body of work, the mixed media on paper Singapore Faiths series, with the exhibition Homage to the Faithful, commissioned by the National Arts Council for Singapore Art Week in January 2015.

Ho has a PhD in linguistics from Kansas University (1989), and since 1990 has been teaching in the National University of Singapore, first in the Department of English Language and Literature, and presently in the Department of Chinese Studies. His passion for the arts extends equally in music and poetry and is an accomplished pianist and singer, and a published poet.