Sun Yee

Sun Yee (1919–2010) was part of a pioneering generation of artists who contributed to the development of 20^th century modern art in Singapore. Born into a wealthy family in Zhejiang, China, Sun Yee studied art and music at the Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts, and later Xinhua Academy of Fine Arts from which she graduated in 1938. She was trained in both Chinese ink painting and Western oil painting, as both art traditions were taught in the art academies then.

After holding successful solo exhibitions in Shanghai, she left for Tokyo in 1949 to further her studies at the Nihon University College of Arts in Tokyo. After graduating in 1952, she went to Paris. For the next two years, she was very productive. Apart from spending time in the studio of the French modern artist Fernand Leger (1881–1955), she took the opportunity to travel extensively within Europe, visiting places such as Italy and Spain. Five of her paintings were accepted by the Salon of the Societie Nationale des Beaux-Arts for exhibition in 1953. The Paris city museum (Musee De La Ville) also acquired one of her paintings. In 1954, she held her first show in Singapore. Buoyed by the positive response to her works, the local warm hospitality and colourful scenery, as well as the presence of friends like Huang Paofang and Liu Kang (former student and teacher respectively from Shanghai), she eventually decided to settle in Singapore, where she led an active life — painting, exhibiting, travelling and teaching.¹

In terms of her art practice, Sun Yee shared similar traits with her peers in Singapore. Many had an interest in painting en plein-air (on-site), a practice derived from their earlier art academy training in China which emphasised the importance of close observation, and accurate depiction of the physical world.² Hence, a number of Sun’s paintings depict familiar local subjects, such as Singapore’s tropical flowers and multi-ethnic population.

Chinese and Western traditions

Given her foundation in both Chinese and Western painting, Sun worked fluidly across both media, and her exhibitions usually featured both oil and ink works. This was also a common feature among the China-born artists such as Chen Wen Hsi and Cheong Soo Pieng who had settled in Singapore. Sun Yee was also among those who saw no contradiction between Western and Chinese art, and saw value in integrating both traditions. She held that the new “Malaysianised” art should evolve with the times, and synthesise the scientific techniques of Western art and the traditional spirit of Chinese art, in both form and content.³

In her ink paintings, Sun generally maintained the traditional xieyi approach, which emphasised subjective expression over objective depiction. However, for some of her figurative paintings such as Indian Dance, Sun departed from convention by injecting Western realism through a careful attention to physique and facial expressions, suggestion of light and shade, and depiction of the dancer in mid-pose, conveying the candid immediacy of a photograph.

In her oil paintings, Sun’s style was mainly naturalistic, although she was noted for boldness in her early days. In the 1950s, artist Liu Kang (1911–2004) described her style as “Fauvist”, which was reflected in her striking 1965 painting Dances of Paris which showed figures painted in highly unnaturalistic colours like pink, green and blue.⁴ However, apart from a short period in the 1970s when she experimented with painting on aluminium, she was not known to be as adventurous as her peers such as Cheong Soo Pieng (1917–1983) and Chen Wen Hsi (1906–1991), who often experimented with different Western modern art styles such as Cubism and Abstraction. On the whole, despite her belief in integrating Chinese and Western art, most of her works did not reflect any such synthesis or stylistic distinctiveness.

Nonetheless , Sun is regarded as an important early art educator in Singapore’s art scene. She spent close to three decades heading the Singapore Academy of Arts — a role which no other local female artist had undertaken before. The Academy was initiated by the China Society, a local organisation founded in 1949 with the aim of promoting interest in and appreciation of Chinese culture. Its programmes were wide-ranging including concerts, talks, publications and art exhibitions, including art classes under the name of “Singapore Academy of Arts” in 1957. During her tenure from the mid-1950s to the 1980s, the academy nurtured many students, some of whom furthered their studies overseas and later became well-known artists in their own right.⁵ The Academy was initially popular, as its evening and weekend classes attracted students who could not afford to study art on a full-time basis. Unfortunately, it later suffered from financial problems and did not succeed in obtaining its own premises. This eventually led to the school’s demise in the 1980s. With its closing, Sun slowly faded out of the art scene in the 1990s. As an art educator, Sun was well-regarded for her humility and generous spirit.⁶ As a result of her caring attitude towards her students, a few of them, such as Yau Tian Yau, helped to look after their former principal in her old age (as she never married) until she died in 2010.