Chen Chong Swee

Biography

In 1952 four Singaporean artists set off for Bali. They had been persuaded to go by Lim Hak Tai, founder of the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, to seek inspiration for their art. The four who went were Cheong Soo Pieng, Chen Wen Hsi, Liu Kang and Chen Chong Swee. In the same year they held an exhibition, “Pictures of Bali”, of works painted on the island.

Chen Chong Swee was born in 1910 in Swatow (now Shantou). He studied at the Union High School in Swatow and graduated in 1929. He then entered the Xinhua Academy of Fine Arts, which he finished in 1931, and in the same year he arrived in Singapore. There he began by teaching drawing in secondary schools; from 1936 to 1970 he worked in various schools in the city. Later he lectured in the Chinese ink painting department at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts. In 1935 he and other artists founded the Salon Art Society (also known as the Singapore Society of Chinese Artists). He sat on advisory and management committees of art societies. In 1969 he took part in founding the Singapore Watercolour Society together with Lim Cheng Hoe and Loy Chye Chuan, and for many years he was its treasurer.

The Xinhua Academy gave him a firm grounding in traditional Chinese painting. He was drawn to the old idea of a painting as the “writing of an idea”, in which an inscription on the sheet strengthens the meaning of the image. At the same time he believed that the tradition was ripe for renewal in those years: in Shanghai and elsewhere in China, artists of his generation were trying to combine Modernism with the methods of ink painting. He himself held to tradition in his manner of painting. What mattered most to him was that the viewer should understand what the artist wished to say; he did not follow the Modernist view that the artist’s personal feeling matters more than accessibility to the viewer. To my mind, this explains why his ink landscapes and figure scenes remain restrained in form.

In his work he turned to local and Southeast Asian subjects: the sea, beaches, the life of fishermen. Among his well-known works are “Returning from the Sea”, “Trengganu Beach” and “Drying Fish”.

Chen Chong Swee died on 15 February 1985 in Singapore. Nine years later, on 15 January 1994, his family gave 151 works, mostly in ink, to a charity auction, and the proceeds went to the National Arts Council’s Chen Chong Swee scholarship for Singaporean artists continuing their studies abroad. In March 1994 the Singapore Mint issued gold and silver ingots in his memory, bearing the image of “Drying Fish” and a portrait of the artist.