Valentine Willie Fine Art Singapore presents the latest body of work by celebrated Malaysian painter Chong Siew Ying. Infinity is an interrogation of landscape, memory, space and place. Informed by both traditional Chinese ink painting and European sensibilities Siew Ying creates imagined charcoal mindscapes that play with texture and formal composition to communicate the infinite qualities of landscape. By embracing the limitless symbolic and physical possibilities of the land, cinematic vistas unfold connecting intangible feeling to the world around us. These sites of meditation, inspiration and drama present a stage for philosophical consideration of Man’s place and purpose in the world.
In this recent body of work the artist showcases her commitment to process and technique. Created in both her Paris and Kuala Lumpur studios, large scale paper-mounted canvases were attached to her studio walls for the artist to draw her charcoal forms. Once complete and laden with grainy textures from her plaster backdrops, she then placed her work on the floor to layer it with a clear emulsion. Whilst wet she sweeps brushes across the surface and immediately pulls and lifts the canvas merging charcoal and emulsion. The result of this labour-intensive process is an animated and atmospheric surface that has similarities to the fluid and meticulous strokes of ink painting.
The influence of this traditional medium and its philosophical subject matter acts as a type of image inventory for Siew Ying to create her own imagined scenes and compositions, whether isolated trees, grand seascapes or vast skies. These locations then become places of contemplation for religious and intellectual philosophies. However, the universal human response and connection to the natural environment creates common feelings of nostalgia as well as experiences of the sublime and epic. Triggering memories of places we have been, dreamt of or simply yearn to experience Infinity therefore represents the power of nature to prompt self introspection and notions of solitude, conflict, freedom and ultimately peace.
About the Artist
CHONG SIEW YING (b. 1969, Kuala Lumpur) left Malaysia in 1990 to pursue her studies in arts in Paris, France. She returned to Malaysia in 1998, holding her first solo show in Kuala Lumpur that year. She was artist-inresidence at Rimbun Dahan in 1999 and at the Vermont Studio Centre in the United States in 2001. Her career has spanned a large number of solo and group exhibitions in Asia, as well as across Australia, Europe and the USA. Today she is based in France and Malaysia. A lyrical and elegant painter, her work is profoundly emotive, embracing broad themes such as nature, human psychology and emotions.
