THE ART OF RAYMOND LAU
By Teng Chok-Dee, Artist, Critic, Curator, 1994
Raymond Lau Poo Seng is an up and coming young local artist to watch. Despite a personal health handicap, he is very determined to succeed as an artist. He toils and concentrates on his art or prolonged bouts and those who talk to him often found him chatting most enthusiastically about art and artists. One could see that art has given him a vital outlet to express himself and to reflect his views about life and the environment where he moves at ease.
A diploma-holder of LaSalle, a premier arts college in Singapore, Lau asserted his presence in the local art scene by winning a string of arts awards that culminated in the prestigious Painting of the Year Award organised by the United Overseas Bank Group in 1993.
His winning attempt, entitled Echoes of the Window (I), which concentrates on the outside wall of an old building, could be perceived as looking into and out of a window. The mixed-media energetic effort is a mixture of abstraction and naturalism. The textures employed in the painting have the quality of media multiplicity. There is the tension of the concrete and the fluid. Texturally, peeling paints and all impart a feeling of fleeting time and material ageing. The effort echoes nostalgia, harking back to a period of old world, pre-war atmosphere.
Lau is one artist who loves to haunt the Republic's old nooks and corners to soak himself in the enchanting old world that such wornout haunts exude. Chinatown, with all its culture, colour and ambience, cluttered, suffocated with folks and buildings and objects, is certainly a hot favourite.
In seeking the old pre-war districts of the island as a subject matter, Raymond is in fact joining a growing list of local artists, amongst whom might be mentioned the late Gog Sing Hooi, the late Lim Cheng Hoe, Chua Mia Tee, Ong Kim Seng and Choo Keng Kwang who are charmed by the old world charm.
Stalking in the old world, Lau is all eye. The camera or sketch-book accompanying him, he darts keenly from corner to corner like an active hungry mynah, seeking the potential angle for a likely subject to compose in acrylic. He is on the lookout for domestic interiors, corners and close-ups, doors and doorways, light and lighting, shadows and reflections, formal or abandoned interiors, places of work, verandahs and vistas, public places, plants and man-made patterns and what have you to transpose onto the canvas. The figure, indoors or outdoors, might or might not be included to rrelate a composition. Essentially, in composing his subjects, he strived for pre-war nostalgia, the images being vestiges of a recollected past or bygone era when elegance and craftmanship occupied pride of place in home and environmental settings. Doors and windows, for instance, were painstakingly designed and crafted and head, hands and heart went into the finishing touches.
Lau's style of painting combines some of the characteristics of landscape and still-life placed in an enclosed essay with its own challenge of perspective and light. He goes for much of the detail, of the intimacy, of the still-life painter but places this in a bigger context, in a sort of "wall-scape". His selection is a kind of confined landscape, so to speak. The "box" or "rectangle" is normally the foundation of the exercise. However, it is vitalised by its subjects or contents, by the interplay of light and dark and vitally, by the painter's personal vision of the topic at hand.
Lau is one artist who possesses an observant eye for the artistry of such others as the architect, the carpenter, the ceramicist and so forth who did the interiors and exteriors of once occupied or lived-in places. He zooms in on the relationship of the paraphernalia, which are vital and essential to his settings to create a certain mood together with the space around them. The focal points could be picked from such items as staircase, doors or windows. The decorative or topographical are obvious in certain visual essays. At any rate, the nature of the topic means that the relationship between space and objects counts tremendously.
Picking a subject for a painting is but a mere start. His reaction tot he topic demands many a tremendous decision as he translates his sense or feeling of the subject matter into a visual mode for the viewer.
The total organisation of pictorial or illusory space and the focal distance are among the choices and they are among the primary concerns. Foreground focus, middleground focus and perhaps distant focus are juggled in terms of spatial organisation and pictorial space. His "Window" series, exemplified by Window Speaks, are effectively designed with the head-on view of a wall with its shallow pictorial space. Window Speaks is based essentially on subtle placement of the vital windows. In his best attempts, the underlying abstract plays a powerful role.
"tiao-dia" (hanging wok) is an appealing composition with its underlying simplification of basic geometric shapes, namely the rectangle and the circle, the door and pan set upon a backdrop of smooth and rough areas of the wall. The effort hints of cultural practice in some quarters.
"pintu pagar", with its collage of printed and written matters, is an echo of rectangles that are textured, worn, torn and smeared shapes forming a unity in diversity. The solid, the door and the transient, the papers, are hinted at.
"Worship" is a cultural, religious statement. The made-made objects, window and jossstick-holder and the plant clinging onto the wall as a growing organic form vying for space, provide contrast and tension in the vertical compositional device normally associated with Chinese scrolls.
"Door-gate" is a moral comment. Its locked door with bars reinforced man's vexation and insecurity. Patterns are made by the bars. The vertical wooden bars and the horizontal metal bar with a lock and the front of the wooden door exudes a depressive, keep-off tension. No wonder some viewers consider the painting negative and unfriendly!
The Spiral Way, the painting with a broken staircase in focus, is a dynamic composition that denotes a break, a broken link, a crisis in a given situation. There is an air of tension and restlessness in the unstable criss-crossing shapes and lines.
Abandoned Mail is a comment on neglect and indifference in society. The letter-box, newspapers and bottles deposited or squeezed in between the window bars and left unattended to or uncared for speak volume in a society that cares for cleanliness.
The Old Building No. 1 with its dome-shaped passage of a domed-shaped wall with its mosses, plants and cracks impart an air of old world charm. It is a study of decay, growth and continuity. It is also a comment on the familiar past left intact to-date.
An intriguing piece is Alone Again, Naturally, a note on ageing, neglect and loneliness. It depicts an old woman in the dark interior with an oil-lamp a symbolic figure fading into the dark, distant past. The compositional device takes a different twist. The composition is a construct of four panels, two hinged as doors separated by a bar with hangers - an eye-catching stance that makes you pause and look and perhaps ponder.
As an artist on the go, Raymond has a long road to travel in terms of techniques, concepts and compositions. There are still a number of areas he need to delve into to upgrade his art. Perspective, colour and tones and compositional devices are not always resolved cohesively. Given time, effort and determination, however, Raymond should be able to better himself as an artist. Rembrandt and Titian were two artists whose work became greater and greater as they grew older. So was Hokusai in all humility.
Robert Hughes, that perceptive Australian art critic cum historian, author of The Shock of the New, notes and also quotes the British painter Frank Auerbach - "Newness rises from repetition. It is the unfamiliar found in the most familiar sight : To have done something both unforseen and true to a specific fact." Of such is food for thought.
Finally allow me to share with Raymond and with you the reader-spectator some points from that marvellous contemplative nun, Sister Wendy Beckett, who posits: "Art is only great if it draws you down into the depths of your being and exposes you to the truth of what you are and what you could become. Any art that does that, no matter what its theme, is spiritual, a deepening of our truth. Art is for everybody; all we need is to give it time. We sometimes want to say, after a quick glance, that we do not like what we are looking at. But it took the artist time to make it, it takes us to see it. As well as time, this needs some humility and an open mind."
In the art of Raymond Lau, one is transported to a world of old world charm, not necessarily that of the good, old days, but certainly a world rich in cultural heritage, a sphere in which material and craftsmanship and design are honoured, a world imbued with fond memories of favourite or familiar places, nooks and corners that altogether provide a link to the past and present, possibly providing clues to the future, spiritually or otherwise. Amen.
By Tan Swie Hian, 1994
"Raymond Lau's pictures glare as in them the bright elements look brighter and the opaque brilliantly transparent. His colours are, in Goethe's words, "the deeds and sufferings of light". It is part and parcel of a metamorphosis created by Raymond through his vision and with a sound training. He is unusual."
刘富生的绘画艺术
By 何和应, 2000
在我国第四代青年画家中, 刘富生是相当受人注目的一位: 一, 他患有手与喉部痉挛的生理缺陷. 每在公众场合和私下会谈的情况中, 不能控制地发作; 往往令不认识他的人感到惊讶. 二, 然则他能克服不听指挥的手, 在绘画创作时, 令它安分守己地投入色调, 笔触和构图上. 许多精彩的"窗与门系列", 近期的"玛麦杂货摊" (Ma Mak Store). 殊令人感到惊奇, 莫非集中精神专心致志于艺术创作可以克除此种痉症? 惟有生理心理专科医生始能作出令人微笑的答复.
有生理缺陷在刘富生来说并不造成艺术创作的阻碍, 反而有逼于死角而后生的局势. 在现实社会里, 试想会有老板肯请他担任一项工作吗? 富生不论他是愿意或不愿意,为局势所逼只好拿他可以拿的画笔画刀发挥他的艺术天分,从事绘画创作,也许是天赋予他的人生一条道路.
富生于己于人1993大华银行常年绘画大赛中荣获冠军奖崭露头角，他以《窗的回音》夺魁。就画论画，当时绘画的功力尚未成熟，但创意十分可取：新加坡市民一般忽略的二战前行将消失的“惹娘屋”经沧桑的古老面目，退色破损的窗门，象征着那个时代的门面窗户装饰的图纹凸凹浮雕，传统节日的吉祥民间图案红纸黄纸，经岁月的洗礼（失修）退色，残缺，朦胧，难以阅读还原其貌。这正是散落在新加坡市街陋巷各角落仅存的稀有品种（屋子），它们散发着历史的幽香，迷惑着画家对古文物艺术气质的觉醒，唤起市民对祖辈前代的缅怀。怀旧文化与艺术，正在全球方兴未艾，刘富生便是善于捕捉怀旧文化与艺术的青年佼佼者。
他对“惹娘屋窗门”的猎取焦点是集中某一突出局面，精心刻划，有时注入幻象，纳进惨淡经营的色彩中不时又见剧烈情怀。九四年大奖后展（规定得奖者一年后推出）， 即可见他抒发怀旧的多张精彩作品。
近作展出是他投入印度人设置在楼梯口，走廊凹壁处，或走廊墙壁死角的杂货店。“日常用品什么都有”非循传统时间营业开店的“Ma Mak Store”。据说是印度传来的售货行业，或售货文化，深根于印度族群，发展至新加坡城市各角落，能在现代化的惊涛骇浪中浮沉。富生很有艺术的敏感触觉，玛麦杂货摊本不是热门的绘画题材，仅令富生叹为“美人儿”。寻找，访问，速写，素描，拍照等十八般武艺全出，要捕捉“玛麦杂货摊”文化的特质，以及它的不堪为人注视的艺术尊容。富生耐心地陶冶，很细心地刻划，竟有玛麦杂货摊那样的百彩杂陈（百货），避烈日风雨的竹帘帆布掩美遮羞似的令观赏者惊鸿一瞥，殊觉美妙。富生有自己的艺术创作方向和信心，不人云亦云，这是他能标出自己一格的气质，能吸引欣赏者的艺术能力。假以时日，在表现刀笔技巧上，在色调气氛的处理上，在构图的特性探讨上，日益求精，成大器不远也。
