The beginnings of art activities in the Chinese community of Singapore

Generally, art activities in Singapore had tended to be divided along ethnic and linguistic lines until after the war, when a more multicultural consciousness emerged. Here we trace the development of art in Singapore back to its formative years, with a special focus on the Chinese in the context of Singapore’s multiracial and multicultural society.

The story begins a few decades into the founding of modern Singapore, when the colonial British, Straits-born Chinese and China-born Chinese pursued art quite independently of each other. Discrete as these groupings might be in terms of their organisation and activities, there were occasional interactions between them over the years.

The first Chinese painting studio was established in Singapore in 1849 by Lam Qua or Kwan Kiu Cheong (1801–1860), a celebrated artist from Canton, who placed a newspaper advertisement in The Straits Times offering portrait services in oil and watercolour at a place “adjoining the New Carriage Bridge” (now known as Elgin Bridge). Another advertisement in Thien Nam Sin Pao, placed by a company in 1898, claimed to have offered seal carving and calligraphy services for over three decades in the vicinity of South Bridge Road — meaning that its operations would have begun around 1868. Chinese photographers from Canton and Shanghai, previously employed as painters, became active in Singapore and the Malay Archipelago as early as the 1840s, and arrived in greater numbers in the second half of the 19^th century.

Sketching Club and Amateur Drawing Association

An art group called Sketching Club is known to have been formed by Lieutenant Colonel Taylor (birth and death years unknown) and his sister between 1878 and 1881. It mounted an exhibition in 1882 under its new name, the Singapore Art Club. Likely established exclusively for British residents, it subsequently invited artists from an art group known as the Amateur Drawing Association (ADA) to participate in its competitions in 1919. The ADA was a Peranakan organisation dedicated to drawing, literary pursuits and physical culture, established in Amoy Street in 1909 by a group of Straits-born Chinese keen to promote art.

The more educated among those who arrived from China at that time were concerned about the low literacy and cultural levels of the rapidly growing population. To address this, Tso Ping Lung (1850–1924), China’s first Consulate-General in Singapore from 1881 to 1891, established the Huixian she (Celestial Reasoning Association) to encourage the Chinese to improve their English through debates. Tso’s successor Huang Tsun Hsien (1848–1905), who served from 1891 to 1894, continued with the effort of the society under a new name Tu Nan she (literally “advancing the South society”). Later, poet and reformer Khoo Seok Wan (1874–1941) established the Lize she (Society of Mutual Learning) to improve the appreciation of culture and the arts.

Demand for ink painting and calligraphy

Singapore’s earliest known ink painting came in the form of a Chinese album with a portrait of Khoo Seok Wan, painted by Teochew artist Yu Tao in 1898 and titled Fengyue qinzun tu, or, “Picture of a man playing the zither over a bottle of wine on a breezy moonlit night”. It was a typical romanticised setting for a scholar-poet to express himself in the literati tradition. In this case, Khoo had commissioned the work to reflect his disillusionment with the failure of the Hundred Days’ Reform in China in 1898.

Khoo Seok Wan, the founder of Chinese-language newspaper Thien Nam Sin Pao, enthusiastically promoted calligraphy by publishing classic examples for wider circulation apart from introducing them in his newspaper. A poet, journalist and keen collector of paintings and epigraphic works, Khoo became a staunch promoter of this literati art form during the end of the 19^th century and early 20^th century. As reflected in newspaper reports during this period, it was common for many artists arriving from China to place advertisements offering to sell their paintings and calligraphic services in order to raise funds for their travel expenses. This was often on the advice of editors who were themselves art aficionados.

The practice of artists selling calligraphic and seal-carving services through advertisements in the newspapers, common in the late 19^th century and beginning of the 20^th century, reflected a real demand for works such as shop signs, couplets and interior decorations for commercial buildings as well as private homes. Seal stones that were essential for business documents and correspondence had to be carved by calligraphers skilled in the highly specialised epigraphic art. As business activities expanded, the demand for more sophisticated calligraphic and seal-carving skills also grew.

In 1906, there was a studio offering painting lessons in watercolour, oil and charcoal by Soo Pun Ting, a well-known artist and photographer in South Bridge Road. Soo advertised regularly in The Singapore Free Press, offering lessons in drawing and painting at $15 per month and $150 for the complete course. The advertisement on some days listed the names of those who had passed the examination. From the list we could tell that most of them were Chinese people who spoke Cantonese, Teochew, Hainanese, Hokkien and Hakka. Some were women, and there were also one Portuguese and one Malay student.

Education in Chinese schools also helped shape the development of art in Singapore from the 19^th century to early 20^th century. Early Chinese private schools followed the traditional curriculum from China consisting of Confucian classics, calligraphy and zhusuan (arithmetic with the abacus). The later schools continued to teach calligraphy. One might assume that the rigorous daily drill of writing characters with ink and brush in school — under teachers proficient in calligraphy — would have led pupils to imbibe the rich visual culture of the Chinese tradition from an early age.

The teaching of art in the early Chinese schools was an important part of art activities as the Chinese community was beginning to set up schools for their children.  Education in Chinese schools also helped shape the development of art in Singapore from the 19^th century to early 20^th century.