National Gallery Singapore's new series spotlighting collection begins with ink show

Straits Times

11-06-2025

Works by Khoo Seok Wan were restored by National Gallery Singapore and recently added to the collection. PHOTO: NATIONAL GALLERY SINGAPORE
SINGAPORE – The National Gallery Singapore (NGS) has inaugurated a series of small exhibitions showcasing recent additions to its collection, beginning with one on ink works.
Titled Where Ink Tides Meet, the debut show of the Dalam Collection series contains 50 paintings, mostly from the 20th century. Some 90 per cent are on display to the public for the first time.
They include scrolls not only by pioneer artists such as Chen Wen Hsi and Liu Kang, but also those by Chinese masters including Guan Shanyue and Wu Guanzhong.
It is a fairly traditional – and Chinese – story of ink pioneers and artists from China mingling in Singapore, despite curators acknowledging that Islamic and Indic civilisations' use of ink also shaped South-east Asia's practice.
The show's more captivating – and more diverse – second half pushes traditional notions of what ink can look like.
Abstract experimentations by China's Hong Zhu An, Singapore's Tang Da Wu, Filipina Nena Saguil and Malaysian Latiff Mohidin give the medium's scholarly quiet some creative and conceptual vitality.
The exhibition is curated by NGS curators Jennifer Lam, Shujuan Lim and Chee Jin Ming.
Ms Lam says the focus on Chinese ink is because 'the Sinic civilisation stands out for its sophisticated development of ink', from production methods to artistic philosophies.
The challenge to curators was to fill the gaps of how ink developed in Singapore, including how immigrants revitalised the medium by applying it to local cultural and social contexts.
'Due to wartime losses, absence of descendants, limited archival preservations and shifts in their own priorities in their art practices, few of these ink artists have received sustained attention,' says Ms Lam.
The team's research uncovered little-known names, such as Liu Xiande, who was a classmate of Chen Wen Hsi from the Shanghai Art Academy.
There are also two works by Khoo Seok Wan, whose sketching of orchids and scholar rocks stand out for their monumentality and expert shifts in shades of black. He is better known as a poet and founder of Thien Nan Shin Pao, one of the earliest Chinese newspapers in Singapore advocating for China's reformation.
His pieces from the late 19th century , meditations on scholarly virtue, were restored by NGS, which worked with Khoo's family on the donation.
Amid the thicket of orchids, plum blossoms and bamboo, there are several more complex compositions of different artistic hands at work on the same scroll. These are collaborations. Liu Kang and Chen Chong Swee have one in Spiders And Flowers, the gossamer threads of the web by Chen an exercise in pinpoint control.
Renowned Singaporean orchid painter Lee Hock Moh's panoramas of Pulau Ubin and Fort Canning are deserved showstoppers. His acclaimed gongbi, or detailed brushwork renderings, are from multiple vantage points, as is typical of Chinese landscapes, depict ing nostalgic landmarks such as the National Theatre on the slope of Fort Canning Park that was demolished in 1986.
In the final section, this general controlled elegance of ink transitions into something more contemporary and freewheeling, though the show's small scale means these possibilities are only glimpsed.
Hong's is most radical, a shift away from monotonous beauty to conceptual splotches that obscure asemic, or meaningless, script. Latiff's strokes are muscular in their tracing of China's Guilin hills, in instances so abstract they resemble contorted human figures.
The largest work is a self-portrait by Vietnamese artist Nguyen Minh Thanh on Vietnamese do paper. With Saguil's warping portals next to it, the display makes explicit the continued use of ink for introspection, from meditative melancholia to a more restive turbulence.
Nguyen Minh Thanh's Waiting is an ink self-portrait on Vietnamese do paper.
PHOTO: NATIONAL GALLERY SINGAPORE
The Dalam initiative is meant to be a project space that gives curators more flexibility for bolder connections within NGS' collection, and there have been excellent shows under its umbrella.
For instance, 2024's Dalam South-east Asia's The Neglected Dimension put four Indonesian artists together through the prism of Arabic calligraphy.
This one, in comparison, may feel too conventional – not so much recasting known narratives as filling in niche gaps.
Curator Ms Lim says the works require that viewers take time to enter the mind of the artists.
She says of Saguil: 'Every dot and every line is considered, akin to how a writer thinks about punctuation and grammar. The black ink on paper allows her to relinquish all colours except black and white. The fluidity, luminosity and opacity of the ink becomes her mode of expression.'
Book It/ Dalam Collection: Where Ink Tides Meet
Where: The Ngee Ann Kongsi Concourse Gallery, Level B1, City Hall Wing, National Gallery Singapore, 1 St Andrew's Road
When: Till Nov 16
Admission: Free
Info: Go to str.sg/pvk4t
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