SENG, CHEW YEW (1917 - )

“Singapore River” (1965)
Watercolour
37 x 54cm
Signed lower left
*private collection, Sydney
 
Seng is a respected Singaporean Contemporary Painter. He was a local Chinese who grew up in Geylang and was educated at Raffles Institution. He first studied under reverred Russian Mid Century painter Vladimir Tretchikoff and then with Zasipkin. During the Second World War, Chew Yew Seng, Fu Wah Tip (another student of Zasipkin), Tow Siang Ling, T.Y. Choy and others formed the Syonan Art Association. Seng gained prominence at the fourth inter-school art competition, winning the third prize for his “head study”. He was actually quite instrumental in the development of the Singapore art scene. After the war, Chew painted several portraits of British and Japanese soldiers. In the late 1940s, he was one of the leading artists in the YMCA Art Club. His art practice was heavily shaped by both Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia
Tretchikoff and Zasipkin. During this period, several renowned International artists arrived in Singapore who became personally invested in the development of art in the city by becoming art teachers in these clubs, and greatly influenced Seng. He became a prominent portrait artist and gave art lessons on life nudes at the YMCA during the 1940s and 1950s. Lim Cheng Hoe, a leading watercolour artist from the Singapore Watercolour Society, took lessons from Chew Yew Seng. Seng then became an art instructor at the YMCA, and was the only one who taught nude life drawing classes; neither the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts nor the LASALLE-SIA College of the Arts offered such classes during that time. He would later appear in the Art in Action project by the National Museum Art Gallery in 1982 where he did a public demonstration on how to paint a portrait in 15 minutes. In the 1980s, Seng was supported by the Art for Offices franchise headed by Mr Ong Kok Thai. Art for Offices was a company that sourced artworks to decorate commercial offices. Although commercial by nature, Art for Offices perhaps did more in bringing art to the common people than Singapore’s art exhibitory circuits at the time.