Beauty, grace, passion and spirituality. The unique feminine characteristics found both in humans and birds is the essence of what Low Chee Peng hopes to capture in this series, Wood Man.
By Eeyan Chuah
If you are someone who follows Low Chee Peng’s work, you would know him for his whimsical sculptures of babies carved from marble and stone. His latest series however is a departure from that. Wood Man is a series of ten women and their spirit birds (instead of animals) carved from wood, currently on exhibition in his gallery space, O Sculpture Studio at Hin Bus Depot.
“How did this exhibition come about?” I asked.
“It wasn’t really intentional,” he explains. “Maybe it is fate. I just happen to have a lot of wood come to me this year.”
It started when he was invited to participate in the Wood Sculpture Symposium, organised by Sculpture Society Singapore in partnership with National Parks Board Singapore (NParks). It was a grand outdoor exhibition in Singapore of wood sculptures carved from felled wood supplied by NParks.
The trend continued when a local developer in Penang reached out to commission a piece for an old tree they had to cut down for one of their development projects. It also happened that his friend and collector, Lee Khai, offered him all the old timber that had to be stripped from a heritage building he was renovating. So a lot of wood was really coming his way and “Well, I just had to go with it,” he laughs.
The inspiration for Wood Man, Low explains, is to transform the wood into man, or rather into wo(od)man. Each log has a distinct character and would birth forth a distinct persona.
“Why women? And why the birds?” I asked again.
“When I see all this wood, I can’t help but think of the trees they once were and when I think of trees, the first creature that comes to mind is the bird, whose origin is the tree.”
Each bird in the sculpture represents a trait: A domesticated parrot, the transformative swan, the flighty sparrow, the courageous magpie, the eternal crane, the razor sharp woodpecker, the intelligent crow, and of course the night owl. And each trait represents the story of each of the women. The rest is left to the audience to fill in the blanks.
“But why women?” I repeated.
“In the beginning it was gonna be men and women. Maybe because I am a man, I find women more mysterious, and the more I delve into the traits of the birds, the more I see them reflected in women,” he answered sheepishly.
As a woman, I couldn’t help but ask cheekily: “Men are more simple?” He shrugs.
I don’t know how mysterious we women are, even though the women in Low’s sculptures surely look so, but birds are definitely elusive and extremely difficult to capture with lens and shutter, let alone in sculpture. However, looking closely at Low’s sculptures, the birds look like wooden taxidermy suspended in motion. At the risk of sounding like a windbag of an art critic, it brings to mind a famous quote by Michelangelo: “The sculpture is already complete before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.”
I think it is similar for Low when he first came across all the wood fate brought to him. The old timber from Lee Khai was rough and decaying but Low says he finds its aging lines intriguing and beautiful.
“I just know there is a story to be told here.” Mysterious women and elusive birds and all.
“So what’s next?” I ask in closing as I always do.
Low is going to continue sculpting stones and carving wood. His studio, O Sculpture, however has a line up of interesting exhibitions that started earlier this year when Low invited a fellow sculptor he long admired, Raja Shahriman, to exhibit his Lok series. The series was entirely made of metal, followed by Wood Man, a series carved entirely out of wood.
Next, Low has invited new artists to gather in his gallery space to create works inspired by the remaining five elements: Water, Fire and Earth. The mystery continues…
Eeyan Chuah is a writer based in Penang.