Dr. Cheah Thien Soong’s Harmonious Symphonies (ink and wash on Xuan zhi, 132 by 246 centimetres), magnificently draws contrast between passages of intense, dense, black ink (Mo) and lighter, airier passages of light blue and white, dappled by a fawn brown. The background consists of a seemingly dark, doom laden or foreboding set of mountains, skilfully layered to reveal a jagged multiple mountain range, perhaps Malaysia’s own divisive Titiwangsa, or some Asian Tolkienesque Mordor. It is perhaps dusk, as red/pink streaks the sky amidst hesitant clouds. The dense mountainous background appears to offer little hope, soot black, imposing, whereas the fore and mid grounds slice through the depressive mountains bringing not just hope, but joy and a collective, wondrous, harmony.
It is at dawn and dusk when the ubiquitous light and dark coloured waterhens gather. During the day they are mostly solitary figures, foraging, like domestic hens (from which similarity they draw their names), pecking amidst bushes and the sand around the margins of mining pool lakes, or skirting the dampened rural padi. But at either extreme of the day the Amaurornis Phoenicurus waterhens gather, in communal groups, and socialise, cackling, noisily.
Dr. Cheah, as the painting’s title might suggest, presents his viewers with an eight foot long, Chinese ink brush paper painting of pastural, communal hope, harmony and perhaps a little expectancy too. His common, and plentiful, waterhens are gathered across the bottom of a painting which deftly manipulates its audience’s perspective, much in the manner of a Cubist painting. Jean Metzinger had written (of the Cubists) that they had “uprooted the prejudice that commanded the painter to remain motionless in front of the object, at a fixed distance”. . Curiously, Metzinger in a different article (On Cubism,1912) also praises the spatiality of Chinese painting.… “Do not the Chinese painters evoke space, despite their strong partiality for divergence?” Dr. Cheah Thien Soong both evokes space, in the traditional Chinese way, but also presents varying view points to wield his deft narrative, in ways hinted at by early twentieth century Cubism.
In Harmonious Symphonies the bleak black background is practically flat, yet Dr. Cheah has arranged a positive space of trees to form the foreground. Those trees shoot through the painting to divide those seemingly impenetrable mounting into two halves, the tops of the trees perspectively guide the viewer’s eyes through the painting, and a light blue sky space forms the middle third.
We see the trees as if we are those birds, those waterfowl, gazing from the bottom of the tree trunks, looking upward into the trees’ distance, into their far away branches and towards the serenely blue sky, just as the waterhens might. For a moment, there is a curious interconnectedness between artist and viewer as, momentarily, we become the waterhens and they become us, symbols of us and for us, a benign anthropomorphism perhaps in which the waterhens speak for us, see for us and feel for us. The birds look upwards, in expectation or is it in praise, their sharp beaks pointing to other birds, far off, flying freely in wedged flocks. In the trees, and on ledges, the fluffy, rotund, waterhen young are safe, above ground, protected from predators. The cackle of waterhens has stopped, for a moment’s prayer. The new symphony is a symphony of reverential silence, even perhaps in awe at the free birds distantly flying home, and it is an harmonious one, shared by the waterhen populace.
To the right hand side of the painting, another reverence takes place. A small grouping of waterhens, beaks raised, look up at outlined lotus flowers. To one side of those flowers, on a ledge, sit three waterhen young, one lotus flower bends towards them, perhaps giving grace in its Buddhist symbolism. In the distance, as our eyes follow the positive space giving us the trunk of the tree, another flock of birds fly, almost like a dart, into the distance. On another ledge, opposite to the lotus graced chicks, a couple follow the free flying birds with their beaks, by them are reed like bamboo twigs symbolising perseverance.
There is communal spirit, reverence, growth, safety, harmony, hope and expectation in a painting which constantly disrupts the audience’s view point, and in so doing presents many surprises and delights as the eye follows Dr. Cheah’s lead from the birds, through the trees to the blue sky, and falls back to gorge on the detailed narrative provided by those waterhens. In many senses it is a sequential narrative, akin to the ‘framing’ in comic books. The ‘story’ is told in ‘comic panels’, spaces, trunks of trees, our eyes are encouraged to ‘read’ the painting as you would a comic book. There is even text. But Dr. Cheah uses hand drawn text both as written communication (poem) and as pictorial elements, much in the way the American comic artist Will Eisner might have, to bind text within a complex, engaging, visual narrative.
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