Chen Wen Hsi

Chen Wen Hsi (1906–1991) is regarded as one of Singapore’s most significant 20^th century modern artists. Born in a small village in Guangdong, China, Chen’s interest in art started early. As a child, he was fascinated by Chinese paintings and calligraphy displayed at home, and enjoyed watching traditional folk-painters decorate the eaves and pillars of buildings. Despite initial objections from his family, he left for Shanghai in the 1920s to study art after completing his secondary school education in Shantou.

While at the Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts and, later, Xinhua Academy of Fine Arts, Chen’s exposure to the Chinese ink painting tradition deepened. This was a period when ink painting underwent much change and debate, against the backdrop of China’s new status as a modern republic in the early 20^th century.  In the wake of China’s humiliating defeat to a technologically superior West, many Chinese like political reformer Kang Youwei (1858–1927) felt that China’s progress needed to be propelled by science and technology. On the cultural front, the May Fourth Movement in 1919 had ignited the drive to strengthen China through cultural reforms. Many artists regarded ink painting, with its traditional emphasis on copying from old masters, as fossilised and irrelevant to a new China. Ink painting was seen to have fallen behind in the international competition for modernity, and there was intense debate over the building of a new nation and the role of art in the new era. Different schools of painting emerged. There were artists such as Wu Changshuo (1844–1927) of the Shanghai School, whose ink paintings appealed to the city’s rich merchants through the use of rich colours, bold calligraphic strokes, lively compositions, and accessible subject matter such as birds and flowers. At the same time, there were others, like Gao Jianfu (1879–1951) from the Lingnan School, who were inspired by Nihonga (Japanese-style painting) which synthesised Chinese and Western traditions, by incorporating Western realist techniques of shading and linear perspective into ink paintings. During those formative years in Shanghai, Chen gained a sound understanding of these different developments and built a strong foundation in ink painting. Coupled with his keen powers of observation, Chen’s paintings often married the Lingnan School’s naturalistic depictions with the expressive brushwork and dynamic compositions of the Shanghai School.

East meets West

At the same time, like many artists of his generation, Chen was also exposed to Western art. This was especially so for Chen, who was enrolled in his school’s art education department, and therefore received training in both Western and Chinese painting. The cosmopolitan city of Shanghai also offered many opportunities for him to encounter diverse art forms and ideas. There were frequent exhibitions by artists who worked in different media such as ink, oils, sculpture, architecture, design and photography. Foreign concepts like Impressionism and Surrealism were taught in local art schools and discussed within the wider art circles. In the late 1940s, Chen left his job as an art teacher in China and eventually settled in Singapore. Life in Singapore further consolidated his understanding of and exposure to Western modern art — more than would have been possible in China. In the ensuing decades after the Chinese Communist Party came to power in China in 1949, modern art, with its foreign associations and emphasis on individual subjectivity, was discouraged by the authorities. By contrast, Singapore-based Chen had access to international art books, and opportunities to meet different artists and travel overseas. In his new home, Chen could discuss art with like-minded colleagues and explore different ideas about making art. This led him once to remark: “My foundation in Chinese painting is rooted in China, whereas my training in Western paintings was perfected in Singapore.”¹From the 1950s to 1980s, Chen experimented with diverse international movements such as Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism and Abstraction.²

Chen’s openness to innovation may be attributed to a few factors. His art teacher Pan Tianshou (1897–1971) was an important influence. Pan advocated that both Chinese and Western art traditions should maintain their own uniqueness and originality. He taught his students to apply Western principles of mass, space, movement and balance, and the relationship between lines and the picture plane, to ink paintings. At the same time, Pan promoted the Chinese literati ideal that regarded art as expressing an artist’s ethical values, character, learning and talent.

Chen also much admired the works of earlier ink masters such as Huaisu (725–785), Bada Shanren (1626–1705), Huang Shen (1687–1772) and Xugu (1824–1896). These artists were known for their eccentric personalities and highly individualistic practices that paid scant heed to convention. Hence, over time, Chen came to believe that “an artist would inevitably be influenced by tradition, but following tradition slavishly should not be his goal. He must break away from tradition to create his own style.”³ Chen further held that “(t)he world is evolving in every aspect, not just in politics, but also in the field of painting, where improvement and originality is constantly being sought”.⁴

Chen’s open attitude towards Western painting styles was also due to his familiarity with Chinese literati traditions. The traditional scholar-artist was focused on capturing the spirit or essence of his subject, rather than physical likeness. Hence, Western modern styles such as Fauvism and Cubism, with their emphases on subjectivity rather than representation, were not inconsistent with literati xieyi principles.⁵ In the end, Chen always maintained that both Chinese and Western painting had their own strengths, and he aimed to combine and continue in both traditions. The path he took was one of “fusion of the East and West”.⁶

In the last decade of his life, Chen concentrated almost exclusively on ink painting, which was a less time-consuming medium than oil painting. He sought to use ink painting techniques in innovative ways that incorporated his understanding of Western modern art. Although his paintings were still based on reality, he freely distorted and transformed them. In the process, they became abstract compositions that integrated different traditions.⁷ From Cubism, he incorporated the notion of fragmenting or distorting the subject into geometric shapes within a space that had no definite light source or horizon. From Fauvism, he used the idea that colours had their own individual characteristics that could be exploited to enhance visual impact. From Expressionism, he realised the affinity between the Western gestural stroke and the feibai (flying white) brushwork associated with Chinese literati artists. And from Abstraction, he saw the value in emphasising pure form and its relevance to contemporary life. These led to his well-regarded body of semi-abstract ink paintings of egrets, herons and ducks where bird forms were deconstructed and then reconstituted into powerful compositions of lines, shapes and colours.

Apart from being an influential art teacher, Chen’s years in Singapore were marked by commercial and critical success. His works were well-collected, and he had major retrospective exhibitions in Singapore, Beijing and Taipei in the 1980s and 1990s. After his demise in 1991, he received posthumous national honours, and his paintings were commemorated on stamps and currencies issued by the Singapore government.