Forest
Medium: Mixed media on rice paper
Size of Work: Dimensions variable
*each piece sold separately
SGD 4,000 - 8,000 (Each Piece Sold Separately)
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The 3-dimensional installation, Forest, features 50-60 original rice paper paintings that are suspended at a height from a wooden structure hand built by the artist. These hanging rice paper objects consist of varied sizes and are mostly two-sided, sculptural and meat-like; they alternate between forms that are variously flesh-hued and visceral, or pastel and velvety in flourishes. Under lights from a distance, some appear particularly jagged and sun worn like taut hides with rough-hewn stitches, while others evoke patterns of ribs at a butcher’s display. This installation leverages the spatial qualities of both painting and sculpture. Wong Keen specifically refers to these rice paper paintings as his ‘flesh sculptures’, expressly situating them in a liminal space that negotiates between the abstract two-dimensional form of a painting and the concrete three-dimensional formulation of a sculpture.
About the Artist
Wong Keen (b. 1942, Singapore) grew up in a Chinese literati environment and as a child studied drawing and painting under pioneer artists Liu Kang and Chen Wen Hsi. He was an acclaimed young painter in the early Singapore art scene and held his first solo exhibition at the National Library of Singapore in 1961. That same year, he travelled to America to study at the Art Students League of New York, becoming the first Singaporean and earliest of Chinese artists to venture into the post-war American art scene.
In 1965, Wong Keen became the first Singaporean and Asian of Chinese origin to be awarded the prestigious Edward G. McDowell Travelling Scholarship in the history of the Art Students League. With the scholarship, he completed his postgraduate program at the then St. Martin’s School of Art in London in 1966.
Having lived over fifty years in the US, Wong Keen registered a plethora of artistic influences that melded the fast-paced American art scene. His prolific oeuvre, which encompasses oil, ink, acrylic, collage, and mixed media works, is a powerful embodiment of the delicate expressivity of Chinese ink wash aesthetics and Western inventive approach towards form and colour. One of Singapore’s leading painters, Wong Keen is best known today for his stylised and long-standing exploration of pictorial themes such as the lotus, the burger, the flesh, and the nude.
In 2007, the Singapore Art Museum celebrated his masterful oeuvre with the solo exhibition, Wong Keen: A Singapore Abstract Expressionist. In 2018, artcommune gallery and The Culture Story co-organised the landmark exhibition, Wong Keen: Flesh Matters. Wong Keen’s work is held in a number of private and public collections, including the National Art Museum of China, Minnesota State University Art Museum, Albright Knox Art Gallery, New York, National Gallery Singapore, Urban Redevelopment Authority, Singapore, Resorts World Sentosa and Fullerton Hotel.