01 .06 // 23.06.2024

Zhuang Shengtao. Autumn Series, 1997, Chinese ink on paper, 96 x 179 cm

artcommune gallery is pleased to present this major exhibition, which features almost 100 paintings by Lim Tze Peng, Wong Keen & Zhuang Shengtao. With works spanning from the 1950s to the present, the exhibition traces the significance of dynamic gesture in each artist’s practice and provides a broad survey of how notions of Chinese art and literati traditions permeate their aesthetic ideals and approaches to painting. The show opens on 1 June 2024 at Artspace@Helutrans and is on view through 23 June 2024.

​

The visual treat encompasses a notable room of oil paintings by Lim Tze Peng (b. 1921), which focusses on the lesser known aspect of the artist’s oeuvre. While most known for his ink work, Tze Peng haddelved into oil painting in as early as the 1940s. As a teenager studying at the Chung Cheng High School, he was introduced to pioneer artists like Yeh Chi Wei and Liu Kang, who piqued his interest in exploring oils. In the 1950s, while working as the principal of Sin Min Chinese School, he already sought to establish a serious practice in oil. The selection of oil paintings in this presentation highlights the centenarian's robust experiments with oils spanning from the 1950s to the late 2000s and reflects his evolving expressions of recurring themes like Old Singapore landscape, trees, and kampong (village) life.

About the Artist  
 

Lim Tze Peng

Lim Tze Peng (b. 1921, Singapore) has been practising Chinese calligraphy and ink painting for over half a century. He became a full-time artist after retiring as the principal of Sin Min School in 1981. Though largely self-taught, he has enjoyed critical and commercial success over the years with nostalgic ink series of Old Singapore scenes that capture the bustling alleys and multicultural landscapes of early Singapore. Between the 1970s and 1980s, Tze Peng travelled outdoors almost everyday with his painting materials and spent hours capturing the Chinatown shophouses and alleys, Tanjong Rhu port, Malay Kampongs, Singapore River, and other everyday scenes that were on course to disappear as Singapore embarked on a swift and relentless phase of urban modernisation. These paintings continue to stand today as precious documents of a bygone era, reflecting a distinct cultural character of early Singapore life. By the 2000s it had become tremendously difficult for Tze Peng, then an octogenarian, to continue his fond habit of painting outdoors. However, he did continue to create paintings of Old Singapore in his studio, often painting in a more expressive and gestural style that relied on his memory and reimagination of these past, familiar places. Lim Tze Peng is also renowned for his large body of both traditional and modern calligraphic work. He arrived at another watershed of his career in 2005 when he unveiled a new signature style of Chinese calligraphy, which he self-termed as ‘hutuzi’ (糊涂字; also known as ‘muddled writing’). This new calligraphic style emphasises the expressiveness and elegance of brushstrokes, rather than the semantic content derived from the writing. He has further pushed the envelope in recent years by incorporating the use of strong, bright colours in his hutuzi, which overthrows the centuries-old tradition of Chinese calligraphy. For his invaluable contribution to Singapore arts and cultural heritage, Lim Tze Peng was conferred the Cultural Medallion in 2003 and the Meritorious Service medal in 2016 by the Singapore Government.

​

Wong Keen

Wong Keen (b. 1942, Singapore) grew up in a Chinese literati environment and as a child studied drawing and painting under pioneer artists Liu Kang and Chen Wen Hsi. He was an acclaimed young painter in the early Singapore art scene and held his first solo exhibition at the National Library of Singapore in 1961. That same year, he travelled to America to study at the Art Students League of New York, becoming the first Singaporean and earliest of Chinese artists to venture into the post-war American art scene.

​

In 1965, Wong Keen became the first Singaporean and Asian of Chinese origin to be awarded the prestigious Edward G. McDowell Travelling Scholarship in the history of the Art Students League. With the scholarship, he completed his postgraduate program at the then St. Martin’s School of Art in London in 1966.

​

Having spent over fifty years in the US, Wong Keen registered a plethora of artistic influences that melded the fast-paced American art scene. His prolific oeuvre, which encompasses oil, ink, acrylic, collage, and mixed media works, is a powerful embodiment of the delicate expressivity of Chinese ink wash aesthetics and Western inventive approach towards form and colour. One of Singapore’s leading painters, Wong Keen is most known today for his stylised and long-standing exploration of pictorial themes such as the lotus, the burger, the flesh, and the nude.

In 2007, the Singapore Art Museum celebrated his masterful oeuvre with the solo exhibition, Wong Keen: A Singapore Abstract Expressionist. In 2018, artcommune gallery and The Culture Story co-organised the landmark exhibition, Wong Keen: Flesh Matters. Wong Keen’s work is held in a number of private and public collections, including the National Art Museum of China, Minnesota State University Art Museum, Albright Knox Art Gallery, New York, National Gallery Singapore, Urban Redevelopment Authority, Singapore, Resorts World Sentosa and Fullerton Hotel.

​

​

Zhuang Shengtao

Zhuang Shengtao (b. 1944, China) moved to Singapore in 1955. He enrolled at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in 1964 and later studied Chinese ink painting and calligraphy under the tutelage of See Hiang To. The pair met when Shengtao won the first prize in a calligraphy competition, at which See was one of the judges. He subsequently

undertook a Masters degree at the then Nanyang University to deepen his knowledge of Chinese Classics. Years of training in the Chinese classics paved for Shengtao a steadfast erudition in the philosophy of Taoism and his paintings express the beauty and all-encompassing scope of this philosophy.

​

Shengtao's passion for painting saw him embark on study trips to Paris, New York and Seattle, allowing his paintings to evolve into a synthesis of traditional literati concepts and contemporary abstraction in the 1990s. His adherence to the Chinese literati values remains striking in his ink expression even as he composes with rhythmic, abstract monochromatic colour elements.

Shengtao's ink paintings are essentially poetries of nature; rather than presenting formal properties of a landscape, his work distils the physical essence of nature into motion, rhythm and atmosphere. Since the 1990s, his work often features an introspective synthesis of Western abstracting technique and Chinese xieyi painting (xieyi - literally translated as “sketching idea” - is a Chinese freehand brush technique that relies on sparse but expressive use of brushwork to reveal the spirit or essence of the subject). He retains the monochromatic scale in his contemporarising of the Chinese ink painting language and engages the complexity of Chinese ink through lyrical brushwork, tonal variations and metaphysical voids.