1971–present
Ng Woon Lam
Ng Woon Lam (黄运南), a Singaporean watercolourist and oil painter, was born in 1971 in Johor. He trained first as a materials engineer, then took a Master of Fine Arts at the New York Academy of Art. His work has been shown at exhibitions of the American watercolour societies and at the 2003 Florence Biennale; since 2019 he has taught at Nanyang Technological University.
Biography
Ng Woon Lam's first education was not in art: he graduated from Nanyang Technological University with a Bachelor of Applied Science in materials engineering, and then from the National University of Singapore, where he took a Master of Science in the same field. He came to painting later, but he did not give up his interest in the exact sciences.
He was born in 1971 in Johor, in Malaysia; his whole professional life is connected with Singapore. His name in Chinese is 黄运南.
He learned watercolour from the Singaporean master Gog Sing Hooi, founding president of the Singapore Watercolour Society. His other teachers include Cheng-Khee Chee, Associate Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota Duluth; Don Southard and Susanna Coffey of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and Edward Schmidt at the New York Academy of Art. At that academy he later took a Master of Fine Arts in figurative painting. His brushwork shows the strokes of Chinese calligraphy, and the influence of Gog Sing Hooi is evident. The artist himself derives his approach to the image from Taiji (太极) philosophy: he looks for balance and harmony in the dynamic process of making, and this is close to the foundations of Chinese painting.
His exhibition record is mostly American. His work was shown at the 80th and 82nd international exhibitions of the National Watercolor Society, at the 139th, 140th and 142nd annual international exhibitions of the American Watercolor Society, at the 2003 Florence Biennale and at the 15th Annual National Show of Oil Painters of America in 2006. He became a full member of both watercolour societies. His awards: the Philadelphia Water Color Society Award at the National Watercolor Society’s 82nd international exhibition (2002); first prize in Western representational painting at the Singapore Art Society’s national open juried show (2007); and the American Watercolor Society’s Bronze Medal of Honor in 2009 (142nd exhibition) and again in 2014 (147th). His watercolour “Trafalgar” was included in the collection Watercolor Splash 8. He has contributed to the magazines Watercolor Magic, The Artist’s Magazine and International Artist. His work is represented by the Singapore gallery Li Fine Art.
Alongside this he does research on colour and the brush. His articles include studies of the practical use of browns and grays based on a vector model, of a three-dimensional colour space for teaching colour theory, of tonal design for constructing mood and weather, and a comparison of Chinese calligraphy and ink-painting brushes with Western water-media brushes. He has also published books: “Practical applications of color theory & design concepts”, “Alchemy of color and brushwork”, “A jazz of colors and shapes” and “Perception and Delusion”, as well as the catalogues “Ng Woon Lam watercolor & oil painting 2011: live & alive” and “A tale of 3 cities” (2013). His journal on Chinese and Western calligraphic brushwork was published in 2016.
Since 2019 he has been a tenured Associate Professor at the School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
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