Anthony Poon

Biography

In 2002 Anthony Poon’s five-metre stainless steel sculpture “Success” represented Singapore at an international exhibition of 230 new sculptures at the City Sculpture Park in Beijing.

Poon was born in Singapore on 21 April 1945; his full name was Anthony Poon Kin Soon (in Chinese, Fang Jinshun). He studied at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA) and graduated in 1964; his first exhibition, at the old National Library building, took place the same year. In 1968 he enrolled at the Bynam Shaw School of Art in London: his studies were paid for by a Lee Foundation grant, supplemented by a scholarship from the school itself. Poon returned to Singapore in 1971. His first years back are tied to the Alpha Gallery. It was opened at 7 Alexandra Avenue by the prominent architect Datuk Lim Chong Keat. The gallery’s first manager, Khoo Sui Hoe, helped the young artist develop and put on regular exhibitions. From 1973 to 1978 Poon himself succeeded him as manager.

Poon’s early works still bear traces of NAFA’s academic teaching and of figuration, but already lean towards semi-abstraction. He soon found his own interest: the relationship of line and colour in space. Before returning home he made the Kite series: geometric abstractions and aerodynamic shapes on shaped canvases. The Wave Series dates from the late 1970s; he replaced the shaped canvas with a square one, but order and symmetry remained the basis of the construction. In the early 1980s came the Frequency series, a truncated variant of the wave motif, in which the illusion of three dimensions began to interest him, and at the same time he explored ranges of colour in the Colour Theory series. In the mid-1980s the Wave relief carried his work on canvas into three dimensions. In the early 1990s the reliefs were followed by sculptures in which form plays on the relation between volume and void. These are precisely engineered constructions of geometric solids.

Among his Singaporean contemporaries he was perhaps the most orderly and analytical: he built his abstraction in a reasoned, controlled way. It seems to me that precision is what chiefly links his paintings and his later sculpture.

More than twenty of his works are in public places in Singapore, from the Singapore Turf Club to the National Library, the Ministry of Information and the Arts and the HDB Hub. Public collections holding his work also exist in Brunei, Beijing and Washington. For the 2008 Olympic Games his work was selected by China’s Ministry of Culture in Singapore. Poon sat on expert panels of art advisory boards, including the Singapore National Arts Council, and was a member of the Third Singapore Note and Coin Advisory Committee, helping to design new banknotes and coins. In 1990 he received the Cultural Medallion for Art, Singapore’s highest award for artistic excellence.

He kept working to the end: he finished a sculpture for the Beijing Olympics shortly before his death. “I would like to end my life with a paint brush in my hand,” he said. Among his friends Poon was known as a disciplined, organised professional; the artist Teo Eng Seng recalled that, contrary to the usual view of artists as disorganised, Anthony was highly organised.

Poon died in Singapore on 2 September 2006. In accordance with his last wishes, 23 of his works were donated to the Singapore Art Museum: three sculptures, two three-dimensional reliefs and 18 paintings. They joined the 16 pieces already in the collection and filled its gaps, so that it now spans his work from the 1960s to 2005.