Correspondances: Pipe Dreams: Intimations of Chia Yu Chian

Chia by Cheong Soo Pieng

Chia Yu Chian was born in 1936, and died in 1990, aged 54. In its infinite wisdom, art history has included Chia into the prestigious Nanyang hall of fame, not just for his extraordinary and poignant output as an artist, but for his due diligence to his craft and his dedication to capturing Singapore and Malaya/Malaysia as they were, with all their humanity and brilliance, during his brief, but dynamic, lifetime.

In this pipe dream I enter stage right. The Malaysian evening has grown unusually temperate. The coalescence of heat and humidity has precipitated curiously aesthetic banks of white clouds. They are partially shaded with roseate gold and cerulean, emerging prominent from a still bright, cobalt, sky. Those clouds are formed as if stacks of smoke from a well-worn pipe had suddenly, momentarily, appeared outside the house where Malaysian artist Chia Yu Chian had lived (in Bandar Sri Petaling, Kuala Lumpur). Those clouds become frozen. Briefly static. Anticipating the hand of the artist to commit that act of mimesis which Plato (in the Republic) had been so concerned over, for Chia liked huge skies, as we can see in his ‘View of Jinjang, Selangor (1969-1972).

I had travelled to converse with Leong Siew Hong (Chia Yu Chian’s wife), Chia Chee Ping (his younger son) and Chia Meow Lin (his daughter), who are among those who had known the artist Chia Yu Chian best. I had the honour of being able to dine with them, not in the Western concept of style but in the alternate Cantonese way of having deliciously fresh food, freshly cooked in an environment paying homage to that and nothing else. In the rambunctious Chinese ambience of that local restaurant, meaningful conversation, unless about the meal itself, became subservient to the sumptuousness of the feast. Wisps of real conversation, about Chia Yu Chian, became a delicacy to be savoured later.

That repast was a precursor to the main ‘meal’. It was the concrete appetiser to a contextual meal of conviviality, reminiscence and remembering, bound over for the quieter environment of the family home. Over slim glasses of red wine, in a downstairs room provoking memories of the artist, conversations arose in Mandarin and English. It was to become but a taster, concerned with the family’s recollections of Chia and of conversations regretfully never began with the artist. The more I learned, the more I wanted to know.

I had climbed down a small staircase to that dinning area, noticing shelves of art books. Herbert Read’s ‘Art Now’, Thames & Hudson’s ‘Picasso’ and ‘Maitres de L’Art Moderne’ struck me in their significance, before I descended to listen. Taking one step at a time, I simultaneously looked at each photograph as I passed, down and through that passageway. Without knowing I was, unwittingly, following in the footsteps of Singaporean Dr. Bridget Tracy Tan, who had visited Chia’s home when she had been the Director (Art & Corporate Knowledge) of the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA). She had been there to write about Chia for the catalogue ‘Chia Yu Chian in Nanyang’, for the 2009 exhibition of his works. In the catalogue she had given very vivid descriptions of the interior of Chia’s house, the same house I had come to these years later.

Nine years after the Nanyang Academy’s resurrection, in 1946, from its closure due to Second World War (1941 to 1945), Lim Hak Tai, in 1955, and as Founding Principle for the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, included within the academy’s philosophical concepts a fusion of cultures of different races, a bridging of Eastern and Western art, and an expression of local, tropical flavour. A ‘style’ gradually became noticeable, springing from these essential notions. The founding ideas of a new style (Nanyang Style) was intimated to be a fusion of Chinese art, art considered to be School of Paris, and depictions of life, flora and fauna from the Nanyang, or lands bordering the South China Sea. These axioms are essential to the understanding of the essence of Chia Yu Chian’s early works, and the overall spirit of his subsequent paintings.

From looking at those early works, created in an embryonic Singapore before Chia’s Parisian sojourn, there is no doubt that the artist could, should and would create a niche for his oeuvre within the annals of Nanyang, perhaps even of South East Asian painting.

The dream was beginning to come true. That dream was aided and abetted by Chia being tutored in Singapore, by two notable ‘Nanyang’ painters, Chen Wen Hsi (Singapore Chinese High School) and Cheong Soo Pieng (Nanyang Academy of Fine Art). Though, as an interview (1973) with the late art historian and artist Redza Piyadasa explained, Chia was never officially at the Nanyang Academy of Fine art, but was able to exhibit with those artists, and evidently drew a great deal of influence from his proximity to them.

Chia’s daughter, Chia Meow Lin, explained that during those Malayan years, before Merdeka (independence), there was a longing, an urging amongst the younger people to leave for the West. Chia (her father) had taken a few months at the British Council, Singapore, learning English, and later at Alliance Française learning French. No doubt with the idea of gleaning fresh ideas for his art, from a stay abroad. Chia was a very outgoing person who made friends easily.

It was fortuitous that Chia received a French Government Scholarship to study art, in Paris. Jean Aurillac, the French Consular General to Singapore at that time, had authenticated a certificate written by the Director of the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA) to allow Chia to study at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts de Paris, from 1959 to 1962, under the guidance of Professor Roger Chapelain-Midy.

A ‘Straits Times’ article (28th June, 1959, page 5) explains that in the February of 1959, Chia Yu Chian had entered France. He lost no time in making his mark there, for from the 4th of July until the 27th of that year, Chia held a one-man exhibition of his Malayan and Parisian artworks, at the Galerie de Villiers, in Paris.

Before Chia had travelled to France, he held an exhibition in Kuala Lumpur. It was there that he was to meet his future wife, Leong Siew Hong, who already had an interest in art. The story goes that she arrived late for the exhibition opening and, being a gentleman, Chia escorted the lady back home in the dark. A relationship was sparked. They communicated through letters while Chia was away and, on his return, he took a taxi all the way to Banting, where Leong Siew Hong was teaching. The rest, as they say, is history and one reason why that artist had hastened back to Malaya, after his studies.
In 1961, a year before Chia left to return to Malaya (1962), Singaporean Nanyang Master artist, close friend and mentor to Chia, Cheong Soo Pieng, had made a very simple sketch of his friend. That energetically vibrant sketch features a very suave, debonaire, Chia, notorious pipe in mouth and coat collar turned up. He could have been mistaken for the iconic French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo (in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 film, ‘Breathless’).

Soo Pieng had been sponsored to a European trip by Malaysian philanthropist Loke Wan Tho, and had met up with Chia, in London, with that sketch ensuing as a memento of their mentor/mentee meeting.

Chia and his pipe had, seemingly, become inseparable. Photographs, taken in and around the time Chia was in Paris (1959 to 1962), reveal the young artist as a playful, dapper young man, posing with a small, sometimes larger, pipe. Some black and white images are with, some without, cigarettes in the smaller pipe, delicately balancing a growing head of ash, such as ‘1959, First Studio in Paris 20 Rue du Sommerard, Latin Quartere, Sorbonne’, or ‘Paris, 1959’ or there again Chia posing with his artwork ‘Street scene, Madrid, Spain’, in London, (1960) or working on his mural for the Malaysian Embassy in Paris (1961).

Nineteen sixty one was also the year in which Chia’s painting,’View of Paris’, was bought by Dato Lee Kong Chian, and presented to the new Malayan National Art Gallery (opened in 1958).
On Chia’s return to Malaya, in the February of 1962, the ‘Straits Times’, 2nd of September, 1962, Page 2, remarks on him opening his, and Penang’s, first art gallery, at the Lim Chwee Leong building, in Prangin Road, Penang. The article was headlined ‘Malayan Artist Starts His Own Gallery’. That gallery was hailed as being the first of its kind in Penang. It was not, however, Chia’s first hanging in Penang. Doctor Lim Chong Eu had opened Chia’s exhibition (at Penang Library) on the 17th of May, 1958, a year before Chia had left for Paris. That was shortly after Malcolm McDonald (the Commissioner-General for Southeast Asia and the university’s first chancellor) had bought Chia’s painting ‘Young Woman’ and presented it to the University of Malaya, according to the ‘Straits Times, 10th of March, 1958 (page 5).

During the next decade (1970s), Chia’s work edged more towards a style which could be deemed Malaysian Gauguin. This is evidenced, particularly, in the colouration and subject matter of Chi’s portraits and figure work such as ‘Seated Woman’ (1973), ’Cowherd’ (1975), and ‘Maternity’ (1977). If anything, Chia, being born in South East Asia, and understanding its people and their nuances, was more successful than Gauguin in revealing the subtle distinctions of tropical living. Chia played down fragrant notions of exotica, while seeking to uncover equatorial normalcy, ultimately counterpoised by his heightened colour perception.

In ‘The Malay Family’ (1971), Chia uses a rich green to advance the yellow of the child’s dress, and the redness of the woman’s top covering. A similar transposition of colour draws the viewer’s eyes to the dress in ‘The Young Girl’ (1976), where the viewer becomes transfixed by the dress’s pattern and the unusual foreshortening perspective of the portrait. Chia’s ‘To Stitch Up’ (1973) sees a more subtle approach to colouration. It features a sitting figure whose clothing almost blends into the multi- coloured, textured, background. The effect of this blending is to bring the young woman’s face and her hands forward, the one transfixed in concentration, the other dextrously busy at her work. This painting was auctioned by Christie’s, Hong Kong, this year (2017).

The 1980s saw a profusion of Chia’s works. They were as simple as a ‘Van Gogh’ pot of ‘Sunflowers’ (1982) and as complex as his landscape ‘Abode of Recluses’ (also in 1982), but, for this writer, it is in his 1980s figure work that Chia excelled, in particularly ‘Dancing Gracefully’ (1983), a painting of an Indian woman, full of movement, and his ‘Hospital Series’ - sketched out while he was hospitalised in Kuala Lumpur and completed, later, in his studio. It was to be his final decade. He left a huge legacy of paintings, a catalogue of his life and the life of the newly independent Malaya, later to become Malaysia. A few paintings, created before his death (1990), indicate a real maturity to his style. His nudes, especially, had reached a very sophisticated air.

Chia’s paintings have continued to generate a great interest since that ‘Chia Yu Chian in Nanyang’ exhibition in 2009. That exhibition was held at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Lim Hak Tai Gallery, between the 13th November and the 27th December of that year. It was only fitting that Chia’s work should, in a sense, return home. Even though Singapore was never home to Chia, but home to the very essence, to the soul and spirit of his work which is very much part of the idea of a Nanyang fusion of ideas from the West and the East.

A year after that exhibition, in the October of 2010, Chi’s work ‘Tin Mine’ (1958) was auctioned at Hong Kong Sotherby’s (the Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Paintings), and his ‘Paris Scene’ (1960) was featured in the local Henry Butcher Art Auction Malaysia. Also in 2010, under the Malaysian Modern and Contemporary Art Collection, Chia’s ‘KL Street Scene (Lebuh Pudu) (1985) was auctioned, and it is notable that Chia’s work has continued to be sold at Henry Butcher auctions each and every year since that initial Singapore exhibition.

As time has progressed, various notable auction houses have taken an interest in Chia Yu Chian’s works. This includes Bonham's, a well respected art auctioneer. In 2010, Bonham’s New Bond Street, London, auctioned Chia’s ‘Kek Lok Is Temple’ (1950) and in 2014, Bonhams San Francisco (Asian Decorative Arts) auctioned ‘City Night’ (1962). In the same year, Christie’s, Hong Kong, sold ‘A View of Penang’ (1958) at the Asian 20th Century Art (Day Sale).

In 2015, Chia’s painting 'By The River’ (1954) was sold, again at Christie's Hong Kong 'Convergences: A Special Sale of Singapore Art’, while his work ‘Penang’, sold in the Asian 20th Century Art (Day Sale) 31 May 2015, Hong Kong, HKCEC Grand Hall by Christie’s.

One year later, in 2016, Chia’s work was still being auctioned in both Christie's Hong Kong (Asian 20th Century Art, Day Sale), and Sotheby's Hong Kong (Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art), as well as 33 Auction Singapore (Singaporean Art, Modern and Contemporary Asian Art) and in local Malaysian auction houses. It is a trend that grows.

Plato need have no concern. The static clouds have moved, been hidden or are simply no longer revealed. While the world moves inextricably on, the pipe dream continues. He captured the beauty and humanity of his environment, leaving this legacy to the country he loved, the one he chose to return to, from the excitements of the Parisian metropolis, where he had studied.

Koh Cheng Foo (principal of Ai Tong School), writing as Marco Hsu (in his book A brief history of Malayan art, page 91, and originally published in 1963) has this to say - ‘Chia Yu Chian is naturally talented and also outstanding in his art, I believe that he will do well in the Malayan art scene in future’. And he did do well. With dedication to his art, Chia painted a path to the very pinnacle of artistry in South East Asia, achieving recognition beside his former tutors, Cheong Soo Pieng and Chen Wen Hsi, indubitably giants in their field.

Eminent Asian art history scholar, T.K. Sabapathy, on seeing Chia’s work at the Chinese Chamber of Commerce (1984), mentioned this of Chia’s work; that his (Chia’s) ‘Colour and brush stroke exert a force and vitality, transforming the canvas into a field throbbing with energy.’ I can give no higher praise.

I am eternally grateful to the late Chia Yu Chian’s family, Leong Siew Hong and those family members who were able to be present during my interview, and to my wife Khor Pei Yeou who, along with Chia Meow Lin, translated for that interview and enabled a free flow of additional information for this writing. I exit stage left while Chia’s beloved pipe still resides in the house that he left, never to return to. The tobacco bowl languishes, never to be re-filled, a hasty flame never to be re-lit, a Shakespearian brief candle dowsed.