Cheon Soo Pieng's Drying Salted Fish at National Gallery Singapore by Vidya Schalk

Drying Salted Fish: The Allure of the Nanyang Style

By Dr Vidya Schalk artwork using oil paints and with influences from PostImpressionism to Fauvism and Cubism, combining East and West to varying degrees, to portray Southeast Asian subject matter.

The Nanyang style included local landscapes featuring villages (the Malay kampung), domestic utensils, mosques, temples, rivers, seascapes, various ethnic groups and stilllifes consisting of local fruit such as durians, rambutans, mangoes and mangosteens. It also featured rituals, festivals and various types of daily work. Each of these artists had a unique take on the subject matter. Looking at the collection on display, one can see each artist addressing the same subject matter in his own individual style, but always with a fusion of Eastern and Western modalities of expression.

These practising Nanyang artists were not local-born Chinese, but were in fact Chinese artists who had received their art training either in Shanghai or Paris (as had Georgette Chen) and had emigrated to Singapore between the 1930s and 1950s. They also shared a similar background in that they were all trained in Western painting and had come to Singapore during chaotic political times in China.

After they had settled down in Singapore, they did not return to China or migrate elsewhere. They were prominent art teachers in Singapore and at one point or another were affiliated with NAFA, mostly as teachers, and played a role in the creation, development and evolution of the Nanyang style and the footprint it has left behind.

The word ‘Nanyang’ 南洋 means Southern Seas or South Seas in Chinese, and referred to the entire South China Sea region. From the perspective of China, Nanyang lay to the south, encompassing Indonesia, Singapore, Malaya, Thailand, coastal areas of mainland Southeast Asia and the Philippines. Malaya, which included Singapore at that time, was considered the heart of Nanyang.

In the early days of colonisation, the British were more interested in commissioning sketches of the flora and fauna for study and record-keeping, in the spirit of scientific inquiry. Many of these artworks were created by Chinese artists living in Malaya, but not much is known about the artists’ lives or their activities. These painters were mostly portraitists, calligraphers and commercial artists. A classic example of the work of these unknown Chinese artists can be seen in the natural history collection of Farquhar watercolour paintings, on display both in the National Gallery as well as at the National Museum of Singapore.

In China, by the turn of the 20th century there was a massive change underway as to how art was conceptualised and practised, overturning the cultural isolation and petrification which had set in since the Ming period. A typical student of Chinese painting and calligraphy Cheong Soo Pieng, Drying Salted Fish, 1978, Chinese ink and colour on cloth, National Collection, was one who came from the literati or

On display at the newly opened National Gallery in the DBS Singapore Gallery section is one of my favourite artworks from the Nanyang style of art, by Cheong Soo Pieng called Drying Salted Fish. Cheong Soo Pieng was born in Xiamen (Amoy), China, in 1917 and was a member of the minority She (畲) group who live along the east coast of China, primarily in the provinces of Fujian and Zhejiang. The She are known for their artistic abilities, especially in music and the decorative crafts. When Soo Pieng decided to pursue his art education at the Xiamen Academy of Fine Arts in 1933, he received support and encouragement from his family.

He studied from 1933-1935 under teachers such as Lim Hak Tai who later played a very important role in his life. After graduating, he went on to study at the Xinhua Academy of Fine Arts, a very prestigious art academy in Shanghai that offered a curriculum based both on Western and Chinese art forms.

The Xinhua Academy of Fine Arts was destroyed by Japanese air raids during the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) leading Soo Pieng to return to Xiamen in 1938 to teach at the Yi Zhong School from 1939-1943. After the war ended in 1945, the country was in turmoil with civil strife between the Chinese Communist Party and the Kuomintang.

Many of the intellectuals and artists fled China to avoid conscription, and to pursue their artistic practices elsewhere. Soo Pieng left Xiamen in late 1945, and came to Singapore by way of Hong Kong. In Singapore he was encouraged by his former teacher Lim Hak Tai to join him at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA).

Cheong Soo Pieng along with Lim Hak Tai, Liu Kang, Chen Wen Hsi, Chen Chong Swee and Georgette Chen are considered pioneer Singapore artists or Nanyang artists, and sometimes as first generation artists, and their style of art is referred to as the Nanyang Style. The Nanyang style is a term with varied interpretations, at times mired in confusion. As a very loose definition, the Nanyang style draws from two major sources, namely the Eastern traditional one of Chinese ink and brush painting and the modern Western style of

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the scholar-elite class. As trade and exchanges with the West increased, artists became familiar with a greater variety of artistic ideas and materials, including oil paints. As the social crisis deepened in China, there was an internal re-evaluation of various aspects of traditional life and art, and many artists came to believe that traditional Chinese art was antiquated and had reached stagnation.

The infusion of Western art concepts and techniques, especially after the opium wars, began the Western art movement of the 20th century in China. With the arrival of Western religious and commercial paintings, the influence on traditional painting became more pronounced. One of the breakaway schools was the Shanghai School that challenged and broke the literati tradition of Chinese art while yet paying homage to the ancient masters. Members of this school were themselves educated literati who had come to question their very status and the purpose of art and had anticipated the impending modernisation of Chinese society.

In 1864, during the reign of Tongzhi (1862-1874), Jesuit missionaries established the Tousewe or Tushanwan Orphanage to house orphans after Taiping troops attacked Shanghai. The orphans learned various skills, including oilpainting. The seeds of Western culture, art and technology were planted in fertile young minds and took root as the orphanage grew to house 10,000 children by 1949.

To produce religious paintings, the Jesuits opened a fine arts school (Tushanwan Art School also known as Ziccawei), where numerous students received training in the European painting style. Many later became the most recognised names in China’s art circles and even travelled to Europe to expand their knowledge. The school was hence lauded as “the cradle of European painting in China.” Prominent artists such as Zhang Chongren, Ren Bonian, Liu Haisu and Xu Beihong studied there.

Specimen copy of a 50 dollar Singapore currency note, portrait series featuring Drying Salted Fish, first issued on 9 September 1999

In 1912, the Shanghai Art Academy, established by Liu Haisu, together with the Xinhua and Hangzhou academies, became the three important centres for the development of western art in China before World War II. In Singapore, Lim Hak Tai, a Fujian native who had migrated in 1937 at the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war, founded NAFA. His ideas more than his art set the stage for the establishment of the Nanyang style. Most of the teachers he recruited to teach at NAFA had strong ties to Xiamen or Shanghai and most were graduates from either Shanghai or the Xinhua Academy of Fine Arts.

In 1906, a Belgian artist by the name of Adrien-Jean Le Mayeur, aspired to follow in the footsteps of Paul Gauguin and on his way to Tahiti stopped in Bali and decided that he had discovered his paradise. He exhibited three times in Singapore (1933, 1937 and 1941) and his Bali exhibitions attracted the attention of the Nanyang artists. They were so taken with the beauty of Bali that they visited the island in 1952 and met Le Mayeur and his wife Nji Polok.

Captivated by the exoticism of Bali in its colours, sights and sounds, they incorporated these elements into the emerging Nanyang style.

Cheong Soo Pieng (1917 to 1983), courtesy of TRIBUTE.SG

What started as a continuation of the modern Chinese art movement, carried from Shanghai to Singapore with its roots in Shanghai, found its expression in a new identity and a new land. It became part of the cultural landscape of Singapore and resulted in what is now referred to as Nanyang Style.

Drying Salted Fish is a lovely example of Nanyang-style painting where the overall effect is of Chinese ink and wash painting accentuated by the use of meticulous brushstrokes taken from the traditional gongbi, Chinese ink painting, to outline the local subject matter, namely drying salted fish.

The rendering of the detailed foliage in the foreground bears a strong resemblance to representations of foliage in Song dynasty scroll paintings. Yet this artwork is not done in a scroll format, but with Western-style dimensions and perspective, with a strong focal point to which our eyes are drawn. This is achieved by the use of contrasting colours as well as large branches in the forefront, the angular back of the goat and the fish, all lined up like arrows pointing to the centre of the painting where the three women are rendered in a svelte, elongated and stylised depiction. There is a decorative element, perhaps alluding to the works of Balinese artists. Soo Pieng remembered seeing them during his Bali trip. They are also seen in the batik clothing on the human figures.

Our visitors’ eyes light up when they learn that they carry this iconic artwork in their pockets on the $50 Singapore banknote. On the back of the portrait series, first released in 1999, the arts theme reflects the coming-of-age of Singapore’s art scene. We see a depiction of four ethnic musical instruments complemented by portions of two local artworks in the national collection entitled Drying Salted Fish by Cheong Soo Pieng and Two Gibbons Amidst Vines by his fellow Nanyang artist, Chen Wen Hsi. There is a certain allure and enchantment to this lovely artwork. Looking at the original we are left with a feeling of nostalgia and perhaps a sense of the loss of a bygone era, of sights and sounds that have long since disappeared, but were such an everyday and important part of the landscape that they captured the attention of the Nanyang artists who painted them as the subject matter that was so representative of everyday life in the heart of Nanyang.

Dr Vidya Schalk enjoys being a docent at the ACM, NMS and STPI. She is delighted to have completed her docent training at the National Gallery, Singapore and is taking visitors around the newly opened galleries to talk about art, history and architecture.

PASSAGE January / February 2016

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