If you have a $50 bill from the Portrait Series of Singapore currency, you hold in your hands a Cheong Soo Pieng artwork. Drying Salted Fish, found on the back of the note, is a bustling village scene depicting people busy with the work of preserving fish.

Cheong is best known for his lanky, sloe-eyed women, painted in etiolated forms that recall Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani’s elongated female figures. His distinctive style of painting indigenous women stemmed from a 1959 trip to Borneo when he visited Dayak longhouses.

Born in Amoy, Cheong came to Singapore in 1945 and taught at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, the art school founded by his former teacher Lim Hak Tai, for more than a decade.

Part of the troupe of painters who went on the landmark 1952 Bali trip, which is credited as a milestone in the birth of the Nanyang school of art, Cheong created this work – aptly titled Landscape – in 1981.

This is a great example of his mature style, using a synthesis of both Chinese ink and Western painting techniques to depict South-east Asian subject matter in classic Nanyang fashion.

The painting depicts two slender, sarong-clad women with a dense jungle in the background. The humans are dwarfed by the natural setting, a composition that harks back to the monumental landscape style of Song Dynasty paintings.

In 1979, Cheong travelled to China – his first trip back to the country since settling in Singapore in 1946 – and rediscovered the aesthetics of Chinese ink painting, which are evident in this work.

Like the other pioneer Nanyang artists, Cheong spent time in Europe. An extended sojourn from 1961 to 1963 saw him experimenting with abstraction. He also held solo exhibitions in London and Munich.

On returning to Singapore, he made three-dimensional and relief works incorporating found objects in the style of the Dada art movement. His adventurous spirit makes his oeuvre one of the most diverse among Singapore’s pioneer artists.

Most people associate Cheong with Nanyang paintings of sarong-clad women and South-east Asian scenery. But collectors have been zeroing in on his abstract works. In November 2023, at Christie’s auction of 20th/21st Century Art evening sale in Hong Kong, Cheong’s abstract Nature’s Inspiration (1963) fetched HK$11.5 million (S$1.9 million). This broke his previous auction record, set in 2015, of HK$7.7 million for Balinese Dance (1953).

Cheong was never awarded a Cultural Medallion, though he received a Meritorious Service Medal in 1962 for his contributions to the art scene.

See this work at the National Gallery Singapore, DBS Singapore Gallery 2.