AOTM: One Up and About by Cheng Yeow Chye

Cheng Yeow Chye’s tranquil scene in watercolour depicts wooden fishing boats berthed alongside a riverbank crowded with papan houses, a native fishing village idyll encountered often in Nanyang paintings, but a closer look shows some distinctive features.

A boat rests in the foreground, rendered in tonal shades of brown and blue-green. The upper half of the painting gives way to shades of lighter beige and brown, thus offering us a contrasting perspective on light. The various geometric shapes that delineate boats and houses—squares for windows, triangles for roofs, ovals for portholes—add solidity and heaviness, and the clean wire lines strung diagonally across the painting, from which oddly-shaped buckets dangle, emphasise this geometric complementarity. The colour scheme and geometric shapes manifest Cheng’s careful composition, at once invoking a sombre ambience that conveys nostalgic sadness as well as a painterly realism different from his other watercolour renderings of fishing boats with fluid washes.

The angle in which we approach the painting is slightly off-centre, as if viewed through the window of a house cast in shade. Our eye follows the riverrun as it softens into lighter yellowish hues to the right, glimpsing a boat being ploughed upriver by a lone figure in a tableau otherwise devoid of human activity. It triggers for me the question of the influence of Chinese aesthetics on a Western realist composition. 

Educated at the Conservatory of Fine Arts, Penang, Cheng is considered a third-generation Penang artist. He has won local and international awards (in 2019, the GAWA Annual International Watercolour Online Best 50 Artists Award), and exhibited widely in Malaysia and internationally, from Taiwan to Vancouver. His artworks were featured in the movie Ice Kacang Puppy Love (2010).