Goh Ah Ang

Born: 1954      

Education:      Self-taught

Goh Ah Ang is an artist trained in the Chinese mode of painting and he was initially involved with traditional brush painting techniques. In recent years he has become well- known for his delicately rendered ant paintings. Using textured rice paper as a base, his colonies of busy worker ants are minutely and painstakingly rendered, one by one, with the aid of a very fine brush. The tiny ants are spread out on the white base and highlight the empty void of the white paper surface. There is a sense of busy movement and activity as the ants move in different directions across the paper surface. The inherent qualities of traditional Chinese painting values, with its emphasis on technical dexterity and black and white contrast, have lent to Goh's paintings a contemplative quality. The viewer is inclined to study each minutely rendered ant in the colony. Time is thus stretched out. The title of the work obviously alludes to human hope and it would seem that the arts are being used as a metaphor to draw attention to the human condition and life's struggles.

Jehan Chan

Born: 1937      

Education: 1956 - Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore

Jehan Chan was one of the many local-born artists who studied at the Nanyang Academy of Art in Singapore during the 1950s. The depicted scene is a row of canvas-covered roadside food stalls. The artist has employed aerial perspective to depict the scene. The artist had studied under Cheong Soo Pieng and had been quite clearly been influenced by his famous teacher. The use of the vertical Chinese hanging scroll compositional format was a popular Nanyang stylistic devise. A top-to-bottom reading of the picture reveals the sweeping, downward curve of the stalls which ends with the centrally-placed, stabilising tree trunk,located in the foreground. The satay sellers, rendered as stylised figure types, are again influenced by Soo Pieng. This painting again reflects the strong Chinese aesthetic influences, manipulated by the Nanyang artists, in the search for a distinct Malayan artistic style, the Fifties and Sixties. The admixture of Chinese inks and the gouache mediums used in this sensitive tonal painting indicates the syncretic approach of the Nanyang artists, attempting to fuse Western and Far Eastern artistic influences.