a quiet life

[warning: very long post!]

We have finally found the artist on J's side of the family! And more...

As advocated by a senior politician to "take seriously the electoral process" (no jokes allowed please! Confucius says we cannot display the slightest sense of humour disrespect to political powers, or we will incur the wrath of the heavens!), Pa J sat us by the dining table last week and continued his tales of Singapore's more serious political past.

Last week's special was Uncle DS, Pa J's youngest brother.


Uncle DS is the guy with the glasses. Pa J is the guy with the biggest hair.

When Pa J got off the boat from China, he was already too old to get back to school. There were also, of course, more pressing needs of the stomach. So being the youngest, Uncle DS was the one in the family who stood the highest chance of getting a decent education. And in the traditional sense of the scholar, a renaissance man, Uncle DS was also an artist. When he was a student in the 50s at Chung Cheng High School - hotbed of student left-wing activism, he was also a member of the Zhong Zheng Art Society, taking part time classes at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in western and modern art.

In a general mood of participatory politics throughout the 50s and into the 60s, both Pa J and Uncle DS were looking for avenues to contribute to their community. Pa J joined the activities of PAP and had urged Uncle DS to do the same.

With the slightest of sighs, Pa J said, "if only he had listened to me."

That same week Pa J extended the invitation to Uncle DS to be part of the lightning rod party, but Uncle DS, with that Zhong Zheng blood running in him, had already joined his friends of the red star at Barisan Sosialis (社会主义阵线) instead.

I am not sure what was the exact context. Perhaps it was when there was clamp-down on the activities of the Barsan Sosialis and a query into their leftist leanings during Operation Coldstore. But according to Pa J, Uncle DS was arrested and detained for his associations to the Barisan Sosialis.

Pa J described to us his brief visit to see Uncle DS in that underground, windowless detention centre (in our Hollywood-washed minds, J and I imagined V's prison setting). During his detention, Uncle DS, according to Pa J, completed a whole stack of drawings. However, after Uncle DS was released, he stopped drawing and painting for a long time and lived, generally, a quiet life. He got a job, a wife and that was that. It was a life so quiet he hardly talked.

Last night, Uncle DS was at Pa & Ma J's home for a visit.

Uncle DS is a small, dark squirrel-like man with bright eyes, bushy eyebrows instead of a tail. In an old photograph that Ma J had brought with her to China to be touched-up/re-coloured, the young Uncle DS wore large black-rimmed glasses and looked every bit the serious, malnourished Chinese-school student.

Today he wears your regular gold-rimmed frames, a striped Chinatown polo tee tucked into grey tailored trousers that are held up by a cheap gold-buckled belt, and a pair of sports shoes from Bata. He carries with him a faded canvas sports bag, the kind travel agencies give out for free. He is your nondescript uncle. The man who sits beside you, unsmiliingly, on the bus. Or the man who wolfs down a bowl of meepok, alone, beside you at the hawker centre. Or the uncle sitting by a bench outside a Chinatown shopping complex, a copy of Xin Min Wan Bao sticking out of his bag, watching as a skimpily-dressed woman of the night walks by.



With an introduction from Pa J last night ("She also draws, draws comics" - yes, how I wish I could or did, Pa J!), Uncle DS and I slowly started our chat.

Just me and him. We didn't talk about anything serious, no, we talked about art. Simple, painfully mundane things like how...

1) the grasp of timing is different for oil painting versus Chinese ink painting
2) ink paintings with more colours sell better
3) abstraction is not a western concept
4) he taught himself chinese ink painting some years ago, and he seldom paints now though maybe, just maybe, he should find himself a chinese art master to learn from
5) he still keeps in touch with this Zhong Zheng art society friends
6) it would be nice to have a room or just a small space where all the necessary art materials are laid out, so that anytime you do want to paint, action catches up quickly with inspiration
7) I use a computer now and that is also acceptable as a medium
8) it is so good and enjoyable, to be able to draw and paint

But the conversation ended abruptly. Brother J interrupted with a joke about how he is the real master of paints (he being in the car paint business) and J followed up by asking Uncle DS to demonstrate his art next week. Then Uncle DS stood up, smiled and apologised that he had to be going.

On our way home in the cab, J said that perhaps Uncle DS was suddenly inspired and was rushing home "to paint gold fishes and peonies". Never before has Uncle DS talk so much and in so animated a fashion, perhaps next week he would bring his brushes and ink and paint us all something. Perhaps. After all, it is so good and enjoyable, to be able to draw and paint - whether in our darkest or quietest of moments.

good day

Yesterday J/TOHA received a phone call he's been hoping for. I was reminded not to say too much for fear that I jinx tomorrow's test. So instead, to mark a good day, I dug out an image of a happy and somewhat slimmer (?) J, taken a couple of years ago at the Art Museum.


background from yet another of my unfinished illustration projects "Turtle Time" - this composite image is by J

Better dead than...

amps attempt a sketch of Soo Bin...ehem, so did renowned artists Chen Wen Hsi and Ye Qian Yu, albeit without photoshop. heh.

...be alive without art - or more accurately "要艺术不要命".

Those were the words Teo Han Wue (executive director of private museum Art Retreat) used to describe Chua Soo Bin who, in the 80s, spent several years, money and over 200 rolls of film photographing 14 renowned Chinese ink masters, despite the intervention of a major illness.

I admit both J and I had little knowledge of thse 14 artists, but Soo Bin has always intrigued us. So we made time this afternoon to be at the Singapore Art Museum where there was a forum and exhibition on Soo Bin's portraits of the renowned Chinese artists, and the launch of the 2nd edition of his book.

But first, who is this Chua Soo Bin? And why did he so intrigue us both?

I know him to be the owner of Soobin Art Gallery, a gallery that has consistently showcased leading contemporary art from China. But according to L&G, Soo Bin has always been a strong supporter of young Singapore artists as well - offering them his warehouse space for storage, and more often than not, collecting their works. More recently, we learnt that Soo Bin is actually an accomplished photographer himself. In 1988, he received the Cultural Medallion for his contrbutions to photography. And last, but certainly not least, superficial amps are most impressed by how cool the elderly Soo Bin looks (on the cover of his catalogue, he wears a really amazing pair of spectacles) - stylish in an understted, even somewhat untidy fashion.


fan girl Y getting an autograph (the words are in the images below)

After the talk, I think our admiration for the man was deepened. He did not spout any grand theories about art, nor did he exclaim the difficulty of the shoot, the complexity of techniques employed. He merely described each artist and his approach in photographing them - not as they painted, but in the context of their loves, idiosyncracies and daily lives. He impressed us with his modesty, his quiet dedication. He impressed me most with his understanding of what was valuable about art itself - not the art, but the life lived. His portraits of these ink masters showed that these were indeed masters, not only because their art was accomplished, but because that accomplishment grew out from the way they conducted their lives - their conversations and relationships, their indulgences and discipline.


composite images of signing, autographed book, forum and Soo Bin by J

The title of the book and exhibition <留真> is therefore apt (the literal translation of "留真" would be something like "the real/honest truth that is left behind"). To Soo Bin's credit, these portraits of the artists, all now dead, are indeed instances of a certain truth or even innocence they have left behind. There is a portrait of an utterly disciplined Chen Wen Hsi before a small fire, where each day he would burn up paintings he was not satisfied with. There is a moving portrait of fiery, passionate Ye Qian Yu (known for his love of dance and his paintings of traditional dancers), composing his last calligraphic work on his decision to 封笔 (literally to "seal the brush/pen", i.e. stop painting). In this portrait, his gaze is distant and still.

Perhaps Mr Teo was not quite accurate after all in pronouncing Soo Bin to be "要艺术不要命". These portraits show instead how inextricably the two are bound - the man/his life and his art.

Thus inspired, we went next to the Utterly Art gallery in Chinatown to see Wong Shih Yaw's latest and 5th show Out of the Grey. Wong is a "veteran" from Tang Da Wu's Artists' Village, and though it was only in the last 2 years that we've noticed his works, we've come to enjoy his classic illustrative style, and the refreshingly unfashionable and unapologetic moral and religious direction of his later works (ah, so tempted were we to purchase a painting today, having missed the show last year!). And there, we again saw the works of an artist whose life and art serve something or someone beyond themselves.

J and I have had a couple of conversations wondering how art figures in God's plans, or vice versa. I guess one answer I got from that exhibition was "none - art does not need to figure." In a twist of Mr Teo's words abuot Soo Bin, this is a case of "Better be without art than be without God." Yet Wong's works also demonstrate that it can - that art can be a powerful illustration of the struggles man face - Christian or not - on this earth, as well as equally powerful expressions of God's saving grace.

Seeing that all this does seem a little heavy for April fool's day, I think I'll just get myself to bed now. If you have survived reading this far, you may want to check out Wong Shi Yaw's blog "Sealed Man".

Good night.