That Nanyang Touch

I was at the Nanyang Touch exhibition, housed in the Chinese Assembly Hall, Kuala Lumpur. Amidst swaying crimson Chinese drapes, Dr Cheah Thien Soong, president of Cao Tang Men Eastern Arts Society and master Nanyang Chinese ink painter, was waxing lyrically eloquent in Mandarin. His dignified white pony tail nodded as he talked. It was a testimony to his comfortable earnestness, in that hall, in this year of the horse (Ma), now galloping past it's 2014 zenith. It was Nanyang Touch, the Cao Tang Men Eastern Arts Society exhibition, and the hall was bedecked with Chinese dignitaries, Chinese ink painting artists and their brush-stroked, absorbent paper works hung as testimonies to diligence.

The red lanterns were raised, but without Yimou Zhang filming were restricted to stills. The insistent flash of digital photography, illuminating earnest speakers and idle gawkers alike, caught us all like rabbits in the glare, but we all became enlightened, in many other ways, during those hours of the exhibition.

The Chinese Assembly Hall, tucked away at Kuala Lumpur’s No.1, Jalan Maharajalela, was acutely reminiscent of a bygone era. There were shades and echoes of 1930s Art Deco amidst its Neo—Classical structure, but now anachronistic, ageing, worn by so many operas, rumbustious speechifying and the annual Gong Xi Fa Choi bon homie. In another age, and in another ‘motherland’, red cheeked, moon faced young maidens might have peered from the balconies, at spring or moon festivals, proud of their heritage, culture, their simple good fortune at being born into a race of such exceptionally talented people.

It was to honour both Dr Cheah Thien Soong and his hard working, persistently artistic students, that the illustrious and the talented were gathered, seated, intent on Mandarin speakers on the crimson stage. Dr Cheah Thien Soong, in this the year of the horse, was represented in Chinese ink, painted, sitting proud on his black stallion mount, like Sun Wu, smiling broadly for his audience. Dr Cheah Thien Soong is chief, a general of the arts, he is a Nanyang innovator, inspiring yet another generation of creative beings.

Dr Cheah is a former Nanyang (South Seas) Academy of Fine Arts (Singapore) student. Nanyang, if you will remember, led the way from the 1930s, to somewhere in the 1980s/90s, as a most original and perhaps even profound school of art. Taking its name from the region it was in, Nanyang had been one of many such, predominately Chinese, art schools springing up as Chinese immigrant artists fled their homeland, and settled in Singapore during the 1930s. Nanyang, founded by artist and teacher Lim Hak Tai, was the only one to survive the Japanese invasion, and gradually became a haven for visiting Chinese artists, giving lectures. After secession from Malaysia (1965), both Singapore and Nanyang grew exponentially.

Other than being the premier art school in the region, the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts was responsible for developing a unique fusion of Western (Paris) and Eastern (China) styles of art, emerging from out of what was loosely called the Shanghai School. Singapore in those years between 1920s and the 1950s was a melting-pot of cultures, with Western artists and Chinese artists visiting and exhibiting. Oil on canvas, and ink on paper, were equally valid and valued in the Nanyang Academy. It is rumoured that it was a trip to Bali (1952), by Cheong Soo Pieng, Chen Chong Swee, Chen Wen Hsi and Liu Kang, that hastened the metamorphosis of styles, bringing a greater awareness of the region to those Chinese artists, who were so impressed with the brightness of colours, and the general ambiance of that Hindu island.

Nanyang broke with Chinese tradition for the ink painting artists, and stirred up a renewed vigour for the oil painters who, perhaps, were subconsciously working through echoes of Western Post-Impressionism, and in particular those semi-erotic images delivered to a Victorian world by Paul Gauguin, imaging his South Seas. Elements of local (Indonesian, Singaporean and Malaysian) flora and fauna began to insinuate themselves onto absorbent ink papers, deviating from the strict signs, symbols and metaphors associated with traditional Chinese ink painting. Georgette Chen, educated in Paris, New York and Shanghai, brought her own fusion of Eastern and Western styles to Nanyang when she moved to Singapore (from Penang) in 1954.

The Malaysian Institute of Art (MIA), Malaysia’s first school of art, from which my own dear wife graduated, was founded in Kuala Lumpur (1966) by  Chung Chen Sun, who himself was a graduate of the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts. Dr Cheah Thien Soong, one of my wife’s teachers, graduated also from the Nanyang, in 1962, and in 1990 began teaching at the Malaysian Institute of Art to continue the innovations began in Singapore so many years previously.

In that Kuala Lumpur Assembly Hall, the fusion of local imagery and authentic Chinese brushwork was nowhere more evident than in those magnificent images of red-headed hornbills, bustling marketing women, bedazzling bright blue and green peacocks and the majestic jackfruit, plump, hanging, barely able to contain the gravity begging the pair to spread their seeds in the waiting, fecund, earth.

In the Nanyang Touch exhibition, Malaysia was seen with fresh, excited eyes, rendered with practised dexterity and presented to an anxiously waiting public with aplomb. Ink brush painting was revealed as more adroit, more adventurous than ever could have been imagined in Shanghai. That tentative grafting, began in the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in Singapore, had quite literally borne fruit in those two hanging Artocarpus heterophylli (Nangka) which served as symbols of a bright new future for that Nanyang Touch, which Dr Cheah Thien Soong strives each year to preserve and prosper.

To say that the exhibition was a success was to underestimate the whole enterprise. It was a superb undertaking by a skilled team, lead by an enthused leader committed to his art and to the crafts of his culture and heritage. In its links to the forerunners of Malaysia’s art eduction system, Nanyang Touch reminds us all of the debt that Malaysia owes to both the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts and to the Malaysian Institute of Art, their teachers and their graduates.