Lot 057
CHEW CHOON
b. Penang, 1949
UNTITLED, 1994
Signed in Chinese and dated ‘94’
(upper left)
Watercolour on paper
65cm x 65cm
PROVENANCE
Private collection, Penang.
ESTIMATE RM 6,000 - 8,000
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Chew Choon was born in Penang, grew up in Kedah, but has been based in Singapore since he studied at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Art, where he graduated in 1975. But unlike most NAFA artists at that time who were conscripted into what passes as the Cheong Soo Pieng Style, Chew Choon has gone headlong into wildlife paintings, especially after an African trip in 1987. He has just returned from watching animal migratory patterns in Tanzania and Kenya, and in mid-October-November has solos of his wildlife works in Shanghai and Ningbo.
From his first solo called Out of Africa at the Singapore National Museum in 1989, he followed that up with solos in Johor Baru (Malaysia), Tokyo (Japan) and Paris (France) painting animals like pachyderms, oynxes, wildebeests, zebras, sables and cheetahs, after painting excursions to the wilderness of Africa (Kenya, Zimbabwe, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia, Botswana and Tanzania) and the Sri Lankan wildlife parks.
He also began winning awards like the SWA Wildlife Artist of the Year runner-upnin 1991 and the Gold Award in the Drawing category of the Kenya Whaletail International Wildlife exhibition. His earlier awards were the Singapore Ministry of Culture Special Award (1976) and the NAFA Distinction in Visual Arts Creation (1979).
He has published a coffee table book called My Africa, on photographs and paintings of his wildlife escapes over 30 years. |
