Lai Kui Fang

Biography

Lai Kui Fang’s first materials were pieces of charcoal. During the war there were no pencils or pens in the house, and the boy drew on the wooden walls.

He was born on 20 January 1936 in Labis, in Malaya, the son of a fruit hawker; he had two brothers and a younger sister. He later became a citizen of Singapore and was regarded as a Singaporean artist.

In 1963 Lai won a government scholarship to study at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. For seven years he worked on figure drawing, and Professor Chapelain-Midy recommended him for five consecutive scholarships. In 1969 he received the Diplôme supérieur d’arts plastiques and in the same year began studying sculpture under Étienne Martin. In Paris he met his future wife, Leelee Koh; they were classmates. In 1968 the Italian government granted him a scholarship for advanced study in Rome, and the Lee Foundation awarded him a four-year study grant.

He worked at the Louvre, where he studied historical paintings by the old masters, among them the “Mona Lisa”, and made official copies of it. The Louvre appointed him its official copyist for reproducing the museum’s pictures. He also restored paintings and, by available accounts, developed new methods of restoring pictures damaged by heat.

Honours in France came one after another. In 1966 he received a gold medal from the Salon des Artistes Français, in 1968 he became a Knight of the French Order of Arts and Letters, in 1969 he received the Grand Gold Medal of the City of Paris, and in 1975 he became an Officer of the same order. In his fifteen years in France he accumulated 49 prizes. In 1971 his exhibition at the Galerie de Sèvres in Paris was filmed for newsreel by British Pathé, commissioned by Reuters. In 1972 the Triton Museum of Art in the United States gave him a solo exhibition.

He worked in oil, in the European classical tradition. His portraits and landscapes are seen as showing the influence of the old masters and the Romantics: Goya, Rembrandt, Delacroix. He also made sculpture in bronze, pewter, cement fondu, marble, clay and fibreglass, and for the Paris Mint he designed souvenir coins with Oriental figures.

In Singapore he was commissioned to paint the swearing-in of the country’s first prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, on 5 June 1959. There were no photographs to work from, and he reconstructed the scene from the accounts of those who had been present. The canvas belongs to the state and is often shown in state museums. In the same period he worked with the minister Sinnathamby Rajaratnam on a painting that brings together all the members of the country’s first government. Later he painted portraits of the Singaporean president Ong Teng Cheong and the Indonesian president Megawati Sukarnoputri; in 2000–2001 Megawati received him at the Istana Merdeka, and he gave her a painting of sunflowers. After the attacks of 11 September 2001 he spent 300 hours painting a canvas four metres high and two metres wide, showing the moment the south tower collapsed.

In 1987 Lai was the first Singaporean invited to inscribe a poem with calligraphy on the well-known stone in Henan by the Yellow River. In 1990, at the first Taishan international academic symposium, organised with UNESCO support, he was asked to lecture on the restoration and preservation of fresco painting. In 1991 he won the top prize and a merit prize at Singapore’s first Defence Art Competition (176 entries from 119 artists) and received an honorary doctorate in arts from the Albert Einstein International Academic Foundation; in 1993 Pacific Western University in the United States awarded him a doctorate of fine arts. In 2007 the French embassy in Singapore made him a Knight of the National Order of Merit for his interest in French culture.

His works have been collected by national, municipal and private owners: 17 pieces are in the Triton Museum of Art in the United States, two in Paris, one in Juvisy, and ten in the National Museum of Singapore, three of them historical paintings.

Lai Kui Fang died on 12 August 2022, aged 86.