Tan Puay Tee - Woodcuts

In making woodcuts, Tan Puay Tee continues an age old Chinese tradition. Evidence suggests that ‘woodcuts’ or ‘woodblocks’ (that is carved blocks of wood initially used for silk design printing), had began in China during the 4th or 5th centuries. A century later, and China had invented paper. Woodblock printing, in black, was used for Buddhist religious texts, calendars, and calligraphy, but soon bright red (vermillion, or Cinnabar as it was known) was added to produce two-colour prints, mostly of text. Between 960 and 1279 woodblock printing was used to make decorated books in China, and was at its most popular their between 1368 and 1644, such as the ‘Northern Story of the Western Chamber,’ corrected by Zhang Shenzhi, 1639. Zhang Daojun compiler and editor, Chen Hongshou artist, Xiang Nanzhou carver. Woodblock-printed book, ink on paper.

Western styles of art production had been encouraged by the Chinese government since 1902. This increased with the May Fourth Movement (1919), and spread during the early years of the twentieth century. The 1920s and 1930s saw a revival of woodblock printing in China, this time the avant garde used ‘Expressionist’ black and white style, led by artist and educator Li Shutong, who advocated creative woodblock printing and, later, by writer and activist Lu Xun who was interested in woodblock prints as a political tool.

Since the 1880s, Singaporean newspapers (under British Malaya) had already being using woodcut technology to add images to text - cartoons and advertising. In I. Proudfoot’s  ‘Early Malay Printed Books’ (1993), an early Bible, in Singapore, published by the London Missionary Society (1825) had typeset Jawi along with woodcut illustrations. Another, mentioned in ‘Proudfoot’, and published by the British & Foreign Bible Society (1868), also featured woodcut illustrations alongside Jawi typeset text.

According to Art Historian Foo Kwee Horng (in his MA dissertation for the National Institute of Education, Singapore), towards the end of the 1930s interest in woodcut printing was on the wane in Singapore, but was given a new lease of life by the Sunday art supplement in the ‘Nanyang Siang Pau', which heralded in the Creative Woodblock Movement.  Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (established in 1938) had educators practising in Western Art, sculpture, arts Education and applied fine arts, as well as one teacher (Chen Puzhi aka Lan Jia) who specialised in woodcuts. Chen, from China’s Canton, was a pioneer of Chinese political woodcuts, and a communist who had fled to Singapore while being pursued by the Chinese Guomingtang government. The heyday for Singaporean woodcut printing was the 1950s and 1960s, sparked by the social unrest of the time. Like in 1930s China, the starkness and power of woodcut imagery were used (in Singapore) as a political tool.

Tan’s woodcut’s are not the delicate antiquarian illustrations of ancient China, nor are they those political wood gougings depicting workers’ struggles, or the bondage of the working classes (proletariat) to the rich (bourgeoise) of China in the 1920s and 30s, nor yet again the harsh social/political narratives depicting life under colonialism of Singapore’s 1950s. Tan’s work does deal with the harsh realities of life, but not in such an overt fashion, despite woodcuts being entirely suitable to that purpose, and that medium’s tendency for angst ridden, fiery, narratives.

I will mention two very different woodcuts by Tan Puay Tee; one carefully executed woodcut depicts a landscape in multiple shades of grey (Peep 1988). This landscape is populated by three trees, their branches stripped bare of leaves. In the distance are hills, or mountains, while above them all drifts a human figure printed in black. All we see of the figure is his hands, which droop, and the figure’s head cocked to one side, perhaps sleeping. His body appears to be a light brown cloud (possibly originally white, but the wood pulp paper has aged). to one side is another, smaller, cloud.

There is a hint of Marc Chagall’s oil colour ‘Over the Town’ (1918), or perhaps Chagall’s lithograph from 1966 depicting a flying mermaid. Like Chagall, there is a dream element to Tan’s grey woodcut, created in 1990, but why, you might wonder, are the trees bare. In Malaysia, this green, fecund land, leafless trees are seldom seen unless they are dead. We might wonder, is this the soul’s journey, not across the River Styx but over some barren landscape where life refuses to exist? Or, some echo of distance Greek myths where, as the poet John Gilbert Cooper relates in his epic poem ‘The Power of Harmony’ (1745) …

‘Now change the scene, Nor less admire those things, which view’d apart
Uncouth appear, or horrid; ridges black
Of shagged rocks, which hang tremendous o’er
Some barren heath; the congregated clouds
Which spread their sable skirts, aud wait the wind
To burst th’ embosom’d storm; a leafless wood….’

The other artwork (Rest 1982), contrary to the above woodcut, is in pale blue and black, leaving the white of the paper as a third colour for the background. In this print, we are presented with two figures framed by a tentative border, black at the bottom, blue above. Both figures are male, inked black with white details in the woodcut fashion. Both are seated, wearing sarongs and singlets, one black the other white. Both smoke. In the mid ground is the prow of a fishing boat, behind, and in the background, sit another two fishing vessels.

The print is a thoughtful piece. The two figures present as if in thought. Is this a rest after a hard day’s fishing, a moment grabbed to smoke in, a brief respite from a hard working life? There seems no joy in the faces of the two smokers, but they sit, in contemplation perhaps of what they have done, or what they need to do, theirs lives similar enough to not warrant conversation. The boldness of the print is typical of woodcut, stark, but in a gentle, harmonious sense. The lines of the chequered sarongs are clearly evident, as is the drooping cloth of the fishermen’s singlets, paired with the fishermen’s shoulders, fallen, laden with the weight of their rural existence.