Mention Chen Wen Hsi and most people immediately think of gibbons.

His gibbon paintings are so famous that fakes abound. Even in his lifetime, the artist, who has produced some 10,000 works, told The Straits Times that counterfeit versions of his works were rife in the art market.

The National Gallery Singapore was embroiled in a high-profile case in 2015. The institution had to remove an oil work, titled Net Drying, from its website after a private art collector who owned a similar piece produced evidence that his was authentic.

There are plenty of reasons for the forgeries, chief of which is financial gain, since Chen’s works are popular with collectors. His highest auction record was for an oil painting, Pasar, which sold for $2.2 million at a Sotheby’s sale in Hong Kong in 2013.

Unlike the Cubist-influenced Pasar, which also dates back to the 1950s, The Ferry is painted in a realist mode.

Guangdong-born Chen, like his Nanyang peers, received his foundational art training in China. It was at Xinhua Academy of Fine Arts in Shanghai that he first met Chen Chong Swee and Liu Kang.

Together with Cheong Soo Pieng, the group went on a landmark trip to Bali in 1952.

The Ferry was inspired by an encounter with a boatman during this trip. Dated 1952, it was part of the 1953 Pictures From Bali exhibition that showcased the artists’ responses to Bali’s landscape and culture.

Bali was a great source of inspiration for the artists who visited the island. Chen once said: “We went there (Bali) because of the richness of the cultural life. There was an abundance of subject matter, all so suitable to painting. In one lane, in one small vicinity, you could do so many sketches. The environment was invigorating and it induced one to work."

Chen had settled in Singapore in 1948, after World War II. Like other Chinese immigrant artists, he became engaged with defining a new identity and aesthetic rooted in South-east Asia. Singapore was where he matured as an artist.

He once said: “My foundation in Chinese painting is rooted in China, whereas my training in Western paintings was perfected in Singapore.”

His thirst for artistic knowledge is reflected in an anecdote about how, in the 1940s, he spent all the proceeds from his art exhibition in Vietnam on art books from bookshops in the then-French colony. He bought about 50kg of books on “Impressionism, Fauvism and styles of every sort”.

Chen became the first Singapore artist to receive an honorary doctorate from the National University of Singapore, although, like Cheong Soo Pieng and Chen Chong Swee, he was never awarded the Cultural Medallion. However, he received the Bintang Bakti Masyarakat (Public Service Star) in 1964 and was posthumously awarded the Pingat Jasa Gemilang (Meritorious Service Medal) after he died in 1991.

This work is on display at the National Gallery Singapore, DBS Singapore Gallery 1 till April 1, 2024.