Silence By Tung Yue Nang

This exhibition runs for ten days from the 21st of June 2014 to 30 June 2014 at the Cape of Good Hope Gallery.

It's been a while since Tung Yue Nang has had an exhibition, the last one being in 2003. I think that was another showing of his realistic Baba & Nonya series. Afterwhich he was in the wilderness, doing photography and travelling. He did a series on Saigon for White Canvas gallery which wasn't very impressive. I felt it was more of experimental works.

In 2011 and 2012, he started repainting the Singapore River / Chinatown scenes similar to the 2002 Chinatown My Chinatown series. This time, the few works that he did had less colour and more dark wash and darker ink strokes. From there I think he went on to do pure Chinese ink, brushing and washing. And this series was painted en plein air, spending many early mornings on the streets of Chinatown and the Singapore River. He also did alot of research about Chinatown and how people lived there and he absorbed the whole hustle and bustle of Chinatown. He also managed to capture the tranquility of the Singapore River and the activities of Singapore, as opposed to the earlier series where his emphasis was on how Chinatown is modernising and the juxtaposition of the old and new is more obvious.

The result is this brilliant series of paintings; mainly 97x97cm or 49x97cm. There was a big 97 x 180cm and 2 small vertical pieces of 97x49cm.

His ability to work in this way with Chinese ink is unique, he has good understanding of visual perception principles and good compositional skills. If you look carefully at some of Tung's paintings you can catch some of his quirkiness.

Very Very Versatile artist, able to do this series and at the other extreme, the realistic series of Baba & Nonya and his One series. Great photographer too.

And if you were lucky to be at the opening, the generous Mr Terence Teo gave away free copies of the Silence Book, a hard-cover 136pg book to all present.

Bliss

Simple Life 

In the flesh the painting is much better, painting's emphasis here was the lighting in the painting

Artist talk (L-R) Terence Teo, Tung Yue Nang, Choy Weng Yang, Lim Tze Peng

Points for Collectors: Tung Yue Nang is a Strong Buy rating. He has sold many of his previous works, like the Baba Nonya series. However, this was placed with many galleries and till this day some of those works are still available. But under the guidance of Mr Teo (a painter himself and someone who knows about the fine art market), Tung has been pointed in the right direction. At the VIP preview last night, quite a lot of works have been sold already. And many of his pieces not at this exhibition but featured in the book, had already been sold since the 2nd half of last year. Mr Teo is good as he is not directing Tung to paint to sell but to paint to challenge himself and to produce brilliant works and that's all. Further with the Cape of Good Hope having access to serious art collectors who are able to recognise these non-commercial pieces, he has managed to help place some of the pieces into these collections. This is the precise reason why an artist should stick to a gallerist who will help develop him. Tung's exhibition managed to be featured in Business Times, Lian He Zao Bao, and also a radio interview with 95.8fm.