Soo Pieng Cheong (1917-1983)

Cheong Soo Pieng's artistic development is a remarkable cohesion of Eastern and Western sensibilities; combined with a deep awareness of localised Southeast Asian subject matter; the region where he spent the majority of his life and achieved his greatest artistic developments. Born in 1917, Xiamen, China, Cheong Soo Pieng studied Chinese ink painting in the Xiamen Academy of Fine Arts, and later merged this foundation with modernist Western principles at the Xin Hua Academy of Fine Arts in Shanghai. By the time he migrated to Singapore in 1946, he had a solid grasp of Chinese ink and Western oil painting history, techniques, pictorial formats. This was coupled with the unique ability to reinterpret the local subject matter of this new environment - an early foreshadowing of what was to later become the acclaimed 'Nanyang' style of Cheong, and his artistic compatriots such as Chen Wen Hsi and Liu Kang. Satay Sellers is a rare artwork by Cheong; depicting a group of three 'satay' (skewered meat) vendors taking a mid-day break under the shelter of verdant trees. Its compositional format and colour tones are reminiscent of Cheong's other works, however the details are rendered in a subtle, gestural style reminiscent of ink and wash painting; for instance in the way Cheong sketches the outlines of the faces, and the brushstrokes that he employs to create the trees. The 'pointillism' which he uses to fill in the ground foundation is classic Cheong, a simultaneous acknowledgement of his Chinese training but also a modernistic device to introduce a sense of contrasting texture to the overall pictorial plane.