... through the new spirit, man himself creates a new beauty, whereas in the
past he only painted and described the beauty of nature. This new beauty has
become indispensable to the new man, for in it he expresses his own image in
equivalent opposition with nature.
Piet Mondrian in the pamphlet, Le Néo-plasticisme: [principe général de l'equivalence plastique] by Rosenberg’s Galerie L'Effort Moderne, Paris 1921.
There is an English idiom; the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, meaning that the child will resemble the parent.
The Malaysian artist, Yeo Eng Hin’s works stride the lacunae between figurative and, for want of other terms, what we might want to call abstraction. Yeo reveals organic hints of his Italian teacher, the Bolognese artist Leonardo Cremonini. Cremonini, a 20th century European master painter who inspired both artist Francis Bacon and poet W.H. Auden, revelled in his predilection towards semi-abstraction. This is demonstrated in energetic works such as Le Cap (1981) and Vegetazione Invadente (1960-1961) which trends towards notions of a neo-metaphysical art. While simultaneously accepting Yeo’s debt to Cremonini, Yeo’s art works also hint at the stunning, explosive, abstractions of another of his Parisian mentors, the Chinese artist and resident of Paris, Zao Wou ki.
Zao Wou Ki, a graduate of the famous Hangzhou National Academy of Fine Arts, now called the China Academy of Art, in China, relocated to Paris in 1948. He began experimenting in oil on canvas, ink on paper, lithography, engraving, and watercolour, and amongst his circle of friends were modernist artists such as Alberto Giacometti and Joan Miró. Zao frequently, yet subtly, references his Chinese ancestry in his oil painting in a methodology seemingly eluding many proponents of Singapore/Malaysia’s Nanyang. Yeo was a student of Zao’s, and of Cremonini, in the early 1980s.
Yeo had an extraordinarily fortunate artistic upbringing. Before residing in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, for four years, and studying drawing and painting under the notable artists mentioned above, Yeo had spent his formative years studying, in Kuala Lumpur, under the renown Malaysian artist, Chia Yu Chian, for two years. It was a close relationship, not just founded in art but because Chia and Yeo came from the same Chinese dialectical background - Teochew. Chia recognised in Yeo, a young man very committed to his art, a little of himself. Chia was very lenient towards Yeo, guided him and let him stay well beyond his appointed hours at his studio, to finish his work. It was those little things which endeared Chia to Yeo, helping him understand the professionalism of the man. Chia’s advice to Yeo, was for him to go directly to Paris, rather than spend unnecessary time at Nanyang Academy. Though schooled well by Chia, Yeo understood that he was not ready to go directly to Paris, and needed to strengthen his skills before going abroad.
The opportunity to study under Chia gave Yeo a foundation strong enough for him to enter the Nanyang Academy of Fine Art (NAFA), in Singapore, for three years (1976-1977). This was at a time when teaching of the fine arts (meishu xueyuan) at Nanyang, had started to develop into a broader based art school (yishu xueyuan) providing training for visual arts, design and performance subjects.
Eschewing both the newly established Malaysian Institute of Art (MIA, 1967), and the even more recent Kuala Lumpur College of Art (KLCA, 1968), it was at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts that Yeo was able to further absorb nuances from the Nanyang masters, such as Georgette Chen (Chang Li Ying, Zhejiang, China). Chen had been a student at the Art Students League in New York, and later studied art at the Académie Colarossi and Académie Biloul in Paris, France. Chen was still teaching painting and drawing at Nanyang (1954 to 1980), when the young Yeo attended. Chen was amongst the immigrant Chinese population of Singapore who had became Nanyang’s Western/Eastern stylistic fusion forerunners. Echoes of those Nanyang teachers can be seen in Yeo’s early works such as Tea-picker in Cameron Highlands (1976), and echoed in later works such as Sound of the Lotus (1995) and Orchids (1997).
That is not to say that Yeo’s paintings resemble those of his teachers. They emphatically do not. And yet, there are essences, or better yet Baudelairian ‘correspondances', connections and interactions between the works of the pupil and of the teachers. As his mentors before him, Yeo has striven to generate a style of his own; a style looking forward towards abstraction, while remaining, perhaps temporarily, anchored in the figurative.
This may be witnessed in ‘sparkling’ paintings such as Kuala Lumpur at Night and Johor Bahru before Dawn. In his larger painting, Kuala Lumpur at Night, Yeo works with a neo-impressionist attention to light, making the painting shimmer with light in its textural splendour. While capturing the city’s imposing array of modern buildings, Yeo lends an ‘other worldly’ sensation to the whole, hinting at the city as a fantasy. I am reminded of Jean-Luc Goddard’s French style poster for his film Alphaville, created by Jean Mascii, in all its 1965 ‘futurism’. In the landscapes Niah Cave 1 and Niah Cave 2, there are hints of Cremonini’s use of semi-abstraction as a method of depicting that which reveals itself in characteristic shapes and textures. Yet Yeo resists the inclination to be just another Cremonini, but strikes out on his own, seeking inspiration from his subject matter. Yeo’s flower series leans more towards a melding of Chinese Ink Brush painting, and contemporary acrylics, again with hints of an abstraction which had been demonstrated with the master China’s Zhang Daqian’s paintings, like Peach Blossom Spring (1982).
There is little doubt that Yeo’s work reached a pinnacle of excellence with his recent series of very spiritual paintings, concerning Cambodia’s Angkor (2014), which I have written about elsewhere. However, that is not to dismiss Yeo’s other landscapes, his flower paintings or his sparkling cityscapes, which all deserve reviewing.
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