QUACK, QUACK! In a career spanning six decades, Chen Wen Hsi painted fewer ducks among his menagerie of feathered friends. He often depicted ducks in pairs, for the wholesome companionship. Chen Wen Hsi, an iconoclast, didn't like the perfect picture, preferring a little distortions like splotched ink outlines, or broken lines, to better catch the gaze. His ducks are depicted with large bodies, but the focus is on the bills (or beaks) - flat, broad, spatulate and slightly sloping. Most of his ducks are painted in the vertical scroll format, unlike this one: ducks by the river, ducks amidst lotuses... He had also painted ducks, coloured, using his fingers, after his master Pan Tianshou, perhaps. Wen Hsi himself had reared chickens, ducks, geese and of course, his metier, gibbons - half a dozen of them. "My love for small animals was almost inborn," he had written (Chen Wen Hsi: Master of Tradition and Innovation, 2006). Of his feathered friends, there were herons, cranes, storks, sparrows, rails, pigeons, peacocks and peahens. Chen Wen Hsi was not only a master artist, but a master theoretician as well. Apart from a 1982 retrospective and a Centennial exhibition (2006) in his adopted country, Singapore, he was also given a retrospective at Beijing's National Art Museum, and his works are collected by among others, the Ashmolean Museum of Oxford and the Cologne Museum. He first escaped the Sino-Japanese War in China, arriving in Singapore in 1948. He first studied at the Shanghai College of Art for a year, but continued at the Xinhua College of Art, also in Shanghai, graduating in 1932. He first taught briefly at Xinhua, and later, the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in Singapore, from 1951-1959. He was in the Singapore's Gang of Four visiting Bali for the first time in 1952, the others being Cheong Soo Pieng, Chen Chong Swee and Liu Kang. His laurels include the Singapore Meritorious Service Star Award (1964) and posthumous, Gold Award (1992); and the Asean Cultural and Communications Award (1987). He had even represented Malaysia at the Commonwealth Arts Today exhibition in London in 1962, and had held solos in Kuala Lumpur in 1958, 1961, 1967 and 1968. He was also a gallerist, with two outlets in Singapore.