Abstract Representations

Chua Ek Kay

Enduring Understanding

Students will understand that

abstract art brought about new

energies and dimensions in artistic creations.

Essential Questions

Overarching Questions- How has abstraction affected our way of viewing

art? - What can abstraction achieve that realistic art

cannot?

Topical QuestionsHow did Chua break from his classical Chinese ink

paintingtradition?

Essential Questions

Overarching QuestionsHow has abstraction

affected our way of viewing art?

What can abstraction achieve that

realistic art cannot?

Topical Questions

How did Chua break from his classical Chinese ink

painting tradition?

Still life, landscapesstreet scenes

Chua Ek Kay

When1947 - 2008

WhereBorn in China

Practiced art in Singapore

HowChinese ink painting

WhyInfluence from modern

Western art

& to break away from tradition

WhichAbstract painting

Who• Chua Ek Kay was born on the 21 November 1947 in

Guangdong, China.

• Family moved to Singapore in 1953.

• Chua excelled in calligraphy and writing Chinese poetry. Was already well-known in calligraphy and poetry circles before 1975.

• Chua trained in Chinese brush painting and seal-carving under master ink painter Fan Chang Tien of the Shanghai School from 1975-84.

• Became a full-time artist in 1985.

• Chua studied Western painting at the University of Tasmania and the University of Western Sydney in Australia in the 1990s.

• In 1991, Chua Ek Kay won the United Overseas Bank Painting of the Year Grand Prize with his painting of a Chinatown street scene.

• Mr Chua received the Cultural Medallion in 1999.

• He passed away on 8 February 2009.

England• The Russian artists, Naum Gabo (1890 – 1977) and

Antoine Pevsner (1886 – 1962) issued a “constructivist manifesto” that calls for distancing from traditional sculpture methods such as stone carving and exploring space with new forms and materials. They were living at England.

• The 1930s was fraught with economic depression and political tension.

WhichPaintingChinese ink painting CalligraphyAbstract painting

• His abstract paintings of grass, the lotus pond on rice paper, may be based on extensive ponderings on the universal meaning of nature and the lotus, but what appears to be scribbles or blotches, are products of well-thought-out, almost mathematical calculations.

• He began exploring his ideas about art, breaking away from traditionalist Shanghai School-styled subjects. Remembering his childhood days in Liang Seah Street and its community, Chua found new inspirations in his paintings from mountains and lakes, to shophouses and even abstract works inspired by Australian aboriginal cave paintings.

• Chua Ek Kay’s work came into prominence after he won the UOB Painting of the Year in 1991 with his mastery in ink and brush work of Chinatown and lotus.

Vivaldi’s Winter, 1999

ink and pigments on paper,

150 x 83 cm

(need to find clearer image)

Chua Ek Kay was moved by the music of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons when he painted

autumn and winter.

Influenced from music – Vivaldi’s Four Seasons

Influenced from music – Vivaldi’s Four

SeasonsHe created them while listening to a recording of

Vivaldi’s music. These works rate very highly amongst Ek Kay’s

most memorable works to date. As he painted and the music changed, Ek Kay’s

tempo and rhythm changed. Spring was light, dancing and casual. Summer was

more intense.The most dramatic was Autumn: in anticipation of

winter, the feeling of this work was very somber. Finally, the rhythm of Winter was melancholy and

forlorn.

WhatTheme: Abstract and Lotus works

Light in the Jungle, 1999

ink and pigments on paper, 78 x 60 cm

Chua Ek Kay soon moved onto exploring what his brush can do, such as the flying white created by rubbing the heel of the brush on paper resulting in greater depth and dimension.

His most challenging work is in the abstract where the image is sheer movement.

Bicycles Rest at the Backlane, 2000

60 x 76 cm. Ink on paper.Collection of the NUS

Museums.

Theme: Abstract works

WhatTheme: Abstract works

Tian Yuen, 2001ink and pigments on

paper97 x 180 cm

WhatTheme: Lotus works

First Light Lotus Pond, 2007

ink and pigments on paper, 124 x 124 cm

WhatTheme: Lotus works

Ode to a Lotus Pond, 2007ink and pigments on paper, 97 x 180 cm

WhatTheme: Chinatown Series

The scenes of old shop-houses and crowded, bustling side streets of Chinatown in Singapore remind Ek Kay of the calligraphic strokes carved into stone of the Wei Dynasty. The well-known 'Tablet of

Yique Buddhist Shrine.‘ Wei Dynasty

In 1991, Chua Ek Kay won the United Overseas Bank Painting of the Year Grand Prize with his painting of a Chinatown street scene.

In the following years, Chinatown continued to be a source of inspiration for Ek Kay.

Its disorganised, rambling and chaotic setting inspires him to be more and more expressive with his brush.

Ek Kay finds character and history in Chinatown, and he tries to express the confusion and sounds in abstract terms.

Sign Board of a Coffee Shop on

Beach Road, 2007ink and pigments on paper, 59 x 46 cm

Such scenes conceived became the signature style of Ek Kay’s Chinatown paintings. He uses powerful ink for the structures in the foreground and lively dots for the modern buildings in the background.

Street Scene, 2007ink and pigments on

paper59 x 46 cm

There are other “silk like” strokes pulled across the painting to soften the bold and dark strokes.

Vehicle Parked Along Chulia

Street, 2007ink and pigments on

paper59 x 46 cm

His Chinatown paintings often include dark doorways for which he uses only a few strokes of very dark ink. These black patches are purposeful and deliberate, suggesting activity beyond the doorway.

Sign Board of a Coffee Shop on

Beach Road, 2007ink and pigments on paper, 59 x 46 cm

White Wall, 2007ink and pigments on

paper59 x 46 cm

In his Chinatown paintings, the walls are done by the heel of the brush and the outlinesof the roofs and structures of the building are done by the tip of the same brush.

His Works @ Clarke Quay MRT Station

“In their wisdom, the boatmen of old (the past), painted eyes onto their tongkangs or junks, to help guide them in

the dark.”- Chua Ek Kay

Chua’s diverse artworks at Clarke Quay Station presents a multi-faceted portrait of the Singapore River both past and present.

On the walls of the station, a 60-metre long mural titled “Reflections” depicts the Singapore River as the city lifeline.

As bold as the brushstrokes, as fluid as Chinese Ink – at Clarke Quay, Chua Ek Kay celebrates the parallels between life on Singapore River and the myriad possibilities of his life’s work n Chinese brush.

Lot 8Teochew Street (The Reflections) Chinese ink on rice paper (3 panels)

H120 x W210 cm (each panel is 120 x 70 cm)

His Works @ Clarke Quay MRT Station

His Works

Street Scenes Revisited features 32 works in Chinese ink on rice paperreminiscent of the early Street Scenes series of the 80s.

Painted in 2001, the new works come with the winds of change reflecting Chua's tempestuous attempts to re-orientate and then transform his art stretching over a full decade.

The new series has been motivated by a clear intention.

Chua said: “I wanted to re-examine the same haunts to sense the changes. My intention is also to re-examine an important phase of my art development. My purpose is to capture the lapse of time, which represent, for me, a history of sights, of my visual experiences”.

Street Scenes

WhyHis Background Chua’s teacher, the late Fan Chang Tien was an

influential Singapore pioneer artist in the Chinese ink style.

• In Ek Kay’s early training in Chinese painting, he was taught that colours should be minimally and economically applied.

• Chinese scholars consider the use of too much colour to be vulgar.

• Although Ek Kay is very much tempted to use colours in his work, he is still afraid to attempt it. His fascination with colour began after his trips to Nepal and India in 1999.

His Influence- Landscape in India He was inspired by the landscape in India during a

painting trip he made in 1999.

• Spirituality and the silence of vast landscapes are important elements in Ek Kay’s philosophy of painting.

• Like the Zen painters of the Sung Dynasty, he places great importance on the principle of “less is more”.

• He realises that he has to remove all unnecessary details from his landscape paintings.

His Influence- Western Art

As he explored new expressions in art, he found

similarities between the Shanghai School style and

the works of Western artists like Henri Matisse,

Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock in terms of artistic spontaneity.

HowHis Materials Rice paper Chinese painting brush Ink

HowHis Materials

• Of all his training in the use of Chinese brush, “expressive ink” is the most important to Ek Kay.

• Fan Chang Tien taught Ek Kay to be expressive in whatever subject matter he chose, be it a vase, trees, flowers or a rock. There must be rhythm within each stroke and each dot. There must be a gradation of black within black.

• Chua Ek Kay uses the technique of expressive ink for more than the simple depiction of subject matter.

HowHis Technique

A classical Chinese landscape painting incorporates numerous styles of brush work to describe the

various elements of water, mountains, trees and figures.

These different brush strokes include:

“hemp lines” “axe-cuts”, “hook and nail” “flying white” “moss like dots”

HowHis Technique

Ek Kay can expertly demonstrate the major techniques in

manipulating brush and ink: decisive strokes for bamboo; twists and turns of the brush for old, gnarled

plum trees; fluid and gentle strokes for the leaves of orchid

plants; dry “flying white” brush strokes for rocks; and random “expressive ink” strokes for

chrysanthemum. He likes brushwork to be powerful and

expressive: the stroke must give the feeling of being carved into stone

Abstract Representations

Documents

1 Abstract Representations: Constantine Brâncuşi

Abstract - arXiv · standing how to compose these representations to obtain representations for phrases, sentences and even larger pieces of discourse. Some early approaches to do

1 Abstract Representations Chua Ek Kay. 2 Enduring Understanding Students will understand that abstract art brought about new energies and dimensions

Representations of U sl at roots of unity - UvA · Representations of U q(sl 2S1) at roots of unity Tim Weelinck Abstract In this thesis representations of U q(sl 2S1) at roots of

GALOIS REPRESENTATIONS VALUED IN REDUCTIVE GROUPS AND · GALOIS REPRESENTATIONS VALUED IN REDUCTIVE GROUPS AND THEIR CENTRALIZERS NIKOLAY GRANTCHAROV AND WYATT REEVES Abstract. For

& Natalia Maehle Brand Concepts as Representations of ...home.ku.edu.tr/~ozsomera/publications/JM2012.pdf · generalizable and robust structure of abstract brand concepts as representations

Compact Representations of BFGS Matrices · 2020. 1. 31. · COMPACT REPRESENTATIONS OF STRUCTURED BFGS MATRICES JOHANNES J. BRUST y, SVEN LEYFFER , AND COSMIN G. PETRAz Abstract

Spectral representations for solutions of certain abstract

The Emergence of Abstract Representations in Dyad Problem ...danls/Dyad Abstraction.pdfAn examination of their problem-solving representations demonstrated that the dyads constructed

Automorphic Galois representations and the cohomology of ...panchish/ETE LAMA...Automorphic Galois representations and the cohomology of Shimura varieties Michael Harris Abstract

New Analytic vectors in continuous p-adic representations · 2015. 11. 18. · Analytic vectors in continuous p-adic representations Tobias Schmidt January 4, 2009 Abstract Given

Hypergeometric Series Representations of Feynman …Hypergeometric Series Representations of Feynman Integrals by GKZ Hypergeometric Systems Ren e Pascal Klausen October 22, 2019 Abstract

Spaces of surface group representations - UCB …kpmann/TopComponents.pdfSpaces of surface group representations Kathryn Mann Abstract LetΓ g denote the fundamental group of a closed

On Modeling Cognition and CultureOnModelingCognitionand Culture Whyculturalevolutiondoesnotrequirereplicationof representations JOSEPHHENRICH¤andROBERTBOYD¤¤ ABSTRACT

Neural Representations of Emotion Are Organized around Abstract Event …saxelab.mit.edu/sites/default/files/publications/SkerrySaxe2015.pdf · Neural Representations of Emotion Are

LIE ALGEBRA REPRESENTATIONS OF DIMENSION < p2€¦ · LIE ALGEBRA REPRESENTATIONS OF DIMENSION < p2 HELMUT STRADE Abstract. Various methods of representation theory of modular Lie

WASSILY KANDINsKY Abstract Expressionist MUSICAL REPRESENTATIONS

It’s all in your head: How to get abstract representations in there

Program Representations Xiangyu Zhang. CS590Z Software Defect Analysis Program Representations Static program representations Abstract syntax tree;

PROJECTIVE UNITARY REPRESENTATIONS OF …math.shinshu-u.ac.jp/~kgomi/papers/pur.pdfDELIGNE COHOMOLOGY GROUPS KIYONORI GOMI Abstract. We construct projective unitary representations