Symphony No. 4 (2008 - 2009)

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

This artwork is part of 25x25 Campus Art Tour.

Listen to the audio description of the artwork here.

Transcript:

In this suite of four paintings titled Symphony No. 4, Singapore artist Ho Chee Lick abandons the brush for found and recycled materials like cloth rags and cardboard stencils, and non-traditional techniques like pouring, wringing, dripping and sweeping. These he brings together in an improvisation of chance and intuitive manipulation to express the emotional cadences of music as suggested by the title.

He mimics the emotive resonance and movement of music by creating textures and varying its intensity. He plays with the layering of ink into many tones of blacks and greys: at times amassing density as in the first and fourth painting, and at other times modulating the intensity of black as in the second painting. In the third painting, he captures a powerful sense of movement through splashes of expressive vertical lines.

The four paintings here correspond to the four movements in a symphony, and each has its own distinctive quality. As you look at the varying intensity of textures and compositions in each painting, consider the kind of musical quality it holds and the movement it corresponds to: the first movement is typically brisk and lively, the second more slow and lyrical, the third a playful and energetic dance, and finally, a rousing and cacophonous finale.

--

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.