What collecting Cheong Soo Pieng’s art taught Esplanade’s architect Koh Seow Chuan

SINGAPORE – Pioneer architect Koh Seow Chuan, 84, is observing a selection of his vast collection of Nanyang artist Cheong Soo Pieng (1917-1983) on the walls of a private show, and asks with a note of incredulity: “Can they all be from the same hand?”

Known for his figures of long-limbed, almond-eyed Balinese women, Cheong’s artistic oeuvre is more experimental than he is given credit for.

Mr Koh, who has collected “a few hundred” of his works, knows this more intimately than most.

His collection – started more than 50 years ago – includes Cheong’s earliest expressionist portraits, made after the Xiamen-born artist arrived in Singapore in 1946 to teach at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, to mixed media landscapes – glass pounded into paint – created in his twilight years.

In between, Cheong experimented with abstract styles using materials such as scrap metal sheets, nails, wires, linen and other everyday objects to render new tactile experiences in his art.

A survey of his kaleidoscopic output is on show at a new retrospective, organised by Artcommune Gallery at Tanjong Pagar Distripark’s Artspace @ Helutrans. It opened on Saturday and runs till Oct 1.

The exhibition features more than 100 of Cheong’s works loaned from 14 art collectors, most of which come from Mr Koh and ophthalmologist Lee Hung Ming, who is sponsoring the show.

Nested within the show is a section which presents a little-known and rarely seen final turning point in Cheong’s artistic career – his take on the Song Dynasty Chinese ink painting tradition.

He had dreams of exhibiting a series of these works in post-Cultural Revolution China, but died in 1983 before the show came to fruition. He never sold these works in his lifetime, says Mr Koh, who has acquired a significant number of them.

“Whenever he felt his range was limited, he created his own medium,” says Mr Koh, who adds that Cheong was “an artist, an intellectual and a scientist”, observing that his experimental output could well be the work of “15 artists”.

But Mr Koh – who is also a philatelist, philantropist and patron – could say the same of his own architectural practice. Along with architects Tay Kheng Soon and the late William Lim, he co-founded Design Partnership,  the firm which designed buildings as varied as the brutalist heft of People’s Park Complex and, later as DP Architects, and the thorny domes of the Esplanade.

Mr Koh says: “Cheong was the artist who informed me of the beginnings of globalisation – a fusion of the East and West, the convergence into a new world spirit of art.” This, at a time before the term globalisation came in vogue.

In the 1930s, Cheong studied at Xiamen Academy of Fine Arts and Shanghai’s Sin Hwa Academy of Fine Arts, where he imbibed both Chinese and Western art styles.

After arriving in Singapore – and especially after a landmark trip to Bali in 1952 with fellow artists Chen Chong Swee, Chen Wen Hsi and Liu Kang – Cheong became recognised as one of the pioneers of the Nanyang art style, which approached local subject matter with a blend of Western and Chinese artistic traditions.

Mr Koh cites the Esplanade as an example of Cheong’s effect on his own architectural practice: “We needed to do a unique project and not follow Western performing arts architectural development and imagery, so we created that building which has no other precedence.”

Noting that artists have to find what is unique, Mr Koh adds that the building, which invites the light of the tropics indoors, was fitted with aluminium sunshades that resemble leaves, comparing this with Cheong’s paintings which feature people sitting under the shade of a tree.

“We share a common philosophy in life, which is that we must value our nature, surroundings, landscape, and live in harmony with them,” says Mr Koh, who collects the works of more than 150 Singaporean and South-east Asian artists and considers Cheong one of his favourites.

The two first met in the late 1960s, when Mr Koh was president of the Singapore Stamp Club and approached Cheong to donate his painting of the Singapore River for use on one of the first versions of Singapore’s stamps featuring home-grown artists.

“His wife forbade him to give anything away for free because by then they had three children,” recalls Mr Koh with a hearty laugh, saying that he “did not feel completely disappointed” as he understood an artist’s economic predicament.

In the end, the committee decided instead to feature the work of Cheong’s student, Thomas Yeo.

When asked about the rising prices of the Nanyang artists’ works at auction – in 2023, Georgette Chen became the most expensive pioneer artist at auction, with a work selling for $2.47 million – Mr Koh is amused.

The former chairman of the Singapore Art Museum and The National Art Gallery, Singapore (now known as the National Gallery Singapore) says: “If you ask me whether it has gone up enough, in relation to the amount of money that countries are printing, it is not enough. If I had invested my money not in art but in property, do you know how rich I would be?”

But Mr Koh says he is open to letting part of his prized collection go to younger collectors. “Yes, I let go whenever I feel that they can find a better home. Because my storage is not a good home and I do not have enough walls to hang them, I work with gallery owners.”

He tends to collect a single artist’s oeuvre obsessively, so as to understand his world. For this reason, he does not collect the art of any of the emerging artists today, believing that other collectors are better suited to follow their full careers.

“I have always felt that I over-collected because of my anxiousness to gain knowledge,” he says in a moment of introspection, “But I don’t regret it because it was necessary. Knowledge is limitless.”

Book It/Cheong Soo Pieng: A Retrospective

Where: Artspace @ Helutrans, 01-05, 39 Keppel Road
When: Till Oct 1, noon to 7pm
Admission: Free
Info: str.sg/iqJ7