05.05.1943–?
Tan Swie Hian
Tan Swie Hian was born in Indonesia, came to Singapore as a child, and worked for twenty-five years as press attaché at the French embassy while writing poetry, painting and practising calligraphy. His first poetry collection, “The Giant”, appeared in 1968 and his first exhibition took place in 1973. He later turned to sculpture, seal carving and ink portraits, and an open-air museum of his work now stands in Qingdao.
Biography
In 1973, at the National Library on Stamford Road in Singapore, Tan Swie Hian held his first exhibition: oil paintings on Buddhist themes. That same year he converted to Buddhism and, after the show, stopped painting for four years.
He was born on 5 May 1943 in Indonesia, by one account on the island of Pulau Halang. His family was of Chinese origin. He attended primary school in Bagansiapiapi on Sumatra, and at about the age of six, around 1946, his parents sent him to Singapore. He was fluent in Chinese and Malay, studied at the Chinese High School, and then in the department of modern languages and literature at Nanyang University, where he read English and French. He tried sculpture while still a student, from 1964, moving gradually from clay to porcelain, wood, metal and resin. Literature came before the exhibitions. His poetry collection “The Giant” (1968) is described as the first collection of modernist Chinese poetry in Singapore and Malaysia. He then published dozens of books of poems, stories and essays; the exact number of titles depends on whether translations are counted. He translated Samuel Beckett, Henri Michaux and the Romanian poet Marin Sorescu into Chinese; the first volume of an anthology of French literature, with texts by Beckett and Michaux, came out in 1970. He met Michaux in Paris in 1970 and 1982. I think Michaux’s interest in spontaneous marks explains a good deal about Tan’s own calligraphy. From 1968 to 1993 Tan worked as press attaché at the French embassy in Singapore. His French colleagues opened Western literature and art to him, while he went on with his own work. When he gave up painting, the embassy’s cultural attaché Michel Deverge threatened to end their friendship unless Tan returned to it. Tan did, and in 1978 Deverge organised an exhibition of his work at the Paul Gauguin Museum in Tahiti. After that he left his post and devoted himself to art alone.
He was self-taught in painting, calligraphy and sculpture. In calligraphy he studied classical inscriptions on stelae, copied the masters, and named among his teachers Yan Zhenqing, Liu Gongquan, Zheng Banqiao and Kang Youwei. The cursive script of the Tang-dynasty monk Huaisu became the basis of his fast, flowing hand. His sculptures use plain materials: “Scorpion” is assembled from curved lengths of reinforcing bar. He also carved seals and painted ink portraits of Gandhi, Shakespeare, Bach, Picasso, Qi Baishi and Stephen Hawking.
In 1980 he visited Zhang Daqian in Taipei, and he himself regarded the trip as a pilgrimage. His best-known project in China is the Garden of All Wisdom on Xiaozhu Mountain near Qingdao, begun in 2001. It covers about two square kilometres and holds about a hundred of Tan’s works, and a “Heart Sutra” 88 metres high is carved into a cliff. His calligraphy can also be seen at Chinatown station on the Singapore metro, on a stele at the Three Gorges (1996), and on a rock near the Yellow Emperor’s mausoleum at Huangling (2000).
In October 2014 Tan completed the painting “A Couple”: Lee Kuan Yew and his wife Kwa Geok Choo in their youth, based on a 1946 photograph taken in Cambridge. He worked on it for five years, and in 2013 it was partly damaged by fire.
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