By Choy Weng Yang
Curator of Art, National Museum, SIngapore
1992

CHEN WEN HSI: THE ARTIST AND HIS ART

A major first-generation artist, Chen Wen Hsi is an outstanding painter of great consequence. He has been a key figure in an epoch of Singapore art which began in the forties and which has witnessed the emergence, rise and maturity of a cluster of art movements and numerous aspiring individual artists. Like key artists in any place and any era. Wen Hsi has to fulfill leadership roles. Since the time he came to Singapore, he has made impressive contributions to the art scene in three crucial capacities: as pioneer, as teacher and as pace-setter.

Together with a few exceptional contemporaries, Wen Hsi quickly pioneered serious art in his newly adopted country. One of their urgent tasks was to open up new avenues for the germination and growth of a serious art form backed by traditions and history with universal criteria. The other task seen with equal urgency was to simultaneously from a new generation pioneer artists were ready. All professionally trained in top colleges either in Paris or Shanghai, they felt equipped for their mission. Moreover, they were individuals of character and determination who had been inspired to inspire.

Chen Wen Hsi was an inspiring and magnanimous art teacher which he had to be several years. In the teaching of art, as in the practice of art, he has few equals. He passed on to his students, - and there were many - not only techniques but also aspirations and values. He had the rate ability to recognize raw talent instantly and the equally rare generosity to see discovered talents through to fruition. Many of his students became significant artists in their own right.

Art, like many other disciplines, must undergo constant change before it can make progress. And major established artists, because of their influence, have been among the most effective agents of change in the milieu of art. As an indefatigable, prolific pace-setter, Wen Hsi did much to elevate art in Singapore. He did this in many ways. Again and again, he would surprise fellow artists by breaking new grounds in his art. In his long career he has moved through many phases of personal development. A very different contribution to changing the course of art came out of the fact that Wen Hsi is an exceptionally ambitious artist. Spurred on by this burning ambition, he would not hesitate to face tasks of impossible scale. Perhaps the most useful and certainly the most basic of Wen Hsi's examples as pace-setter to the new generation of artists is his undaunted commitment to art. For it was this commitment strengthened by rare personal courage and a breathtaking stamina which fortified Wen Hsi and saw him through the lonely battle of the artist to be a true artist.

As an artist, Wen Hsi has many strengths. A dynamic force which has seen him through an eventful career has been his firm mastery of and exceptional talent in the art of Chinese Painting. This has resulted in him being a part of a formidable artistic tradition which has stood the test of time. Choosing to align himself not with the conventional school but the `avant-garde' artists, he found himself naturally seeking inspiration from the brilliant works of Pa Tah Shan-jen, Wu Cheng-shiu, Chi Pai-shih and Pan Tien-shou who once tutored him. Like them he seeks in his works essence through diversity. No Chinese painting by Wen Hsi is ever a repetition. At his best - and this is often - Wen Hsi commands the fullest range of emotions expressed through beguiling composition-arrangements which are adventures of lines, tones, space, always satisfying but full of surprises.

Wen Hsi is an exceptional artist-innovator. If there is one element which runs through his life's work it is the innovative spirit. It is this ability to innovate which enables him to bring infinite variety into his compositions of Chinese art to Western art. As with the highly innovative artists like Picasso and Matisse, vision has long triumphed over tradition or medium. Indeed, Wen Hsi's art is characterized by distinct phases of high innovation. In the early fifties, he forged an art form with a 'local' identity resulting in many highly imaginative, powerful works. In the late sixties, his restlessness moved him to create a series of semi-abstracts and abstracts which remains the most important series of his art in modern style. Recently, he again went into the realm of innovation by exploring a series of 'blue mountain' paintings bringing into fusion the strengths of Chinese art and Western modern art.

By any estimation, Wen Hsi is a prolific artist. In half a century of persistent hard work he has built with single-mindedness a mountain of creative efforts. The range is breathtaking: sketches, drawings, portraits, landscapes, figure-compositions, semi-abstracts, abstracts and a staggering number of essays in the form Chinese art which has from the start been the artist's main preoccupation. Yet it is not the number and variety but the breadth of Wen Hsi's ideas and emotions within this works which leaves a lasting impression. And this breadth of nuances and feelings takes place not only in different aspects of his work but within each aspect as in the case of the series of semi-abstracts and abstracts of the sixties. So with his portraits: no two are the same as he penetrates in each sitting into the depths of the personality before him with the bold colours of the Fauvists of France and the swiftness of a Chinese art exponent.

Today, Chen Wen Hsi who is a robust 74 is at the peak of his artistic career. But despite his solid achievements, honours bestowed by the state, a growing reputation beyond his country, he is nevertheless preparing himself for yet bigger challenges in a personal crusade in artistic endeavours so that he may make a truly important contribution to the artistic heritage of Singapore.

@Choy Weng Yang

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