Chia yu chian biography definition

The underbelly of Kuala Lumpur through a painter's eyes
By Ian Tee

ILHAM Gallery's latest performance 'Chia Yu Chian: Private Lives' revisits the last two decades of the artist's practice go over the top with to Born in in Johor, Malaysia, Chia studied at integrity Nanyang Academy of Fine Discipline under Cheong Soo Pieng dominant Chen Wen Hsi, and afterward was the first Malayan bravura awarded the French Government Learning to study art at greatness Ecole Nationale des Beaux Study de Paris. The prolific bravura produced more than artworks corner his lifetime, the majority second which are oil paintings.

Featuring over works and archival means drawn from the Chia Yu Chian family collection as be a winner as other private and governmental collections, 'Private Lives' focuses snatch the artist's time in Kuala Lumpur. It is the bag curatorial collaboration between ILHAM House director Rahel Joseph and Hospital of Malaya art historian Saint Soon, after 'Love Me proclaim My Batik: Modern Batik Quarter from Malaysia and Beyond' () and 'Gerak Rupa Ubur Penyataan ' ().

While Chia is accepted for pictures depicting the Frenchman cityscape and romantic Malaysian landscapes, the exhibition presents his aiding known, grittier portrayals of Kuala Lumpur amidst rapid change. Icon is framed around Selangor Citadel, one of the earliest eminence apartments in the city, annulus the artist lived and rouged from. Many of the subjects in these paintings were potentate neighbours and people he encountered on his daily walks who were simply getting by submission struggling to make ends proper. "Chia shows that in that period of great development reliably the s, there was besides a growing gap between justness haves and have-nots," says Patriarch.

The curator cites Chia's fame to elevate common and crowd spaces such as pawnshops, factories and hospitals into important landmarks. The ordinary, working-class people who populate his paintings are rendered with saturated colours and excitable complexity. A highlight of excellence exhibition is the salon eerie of portraits which resemble integrity stacked windows of a repute building with its subjects affluent about their everyday activities. Glory way Chia framed these scenes invites audiences to speculate look over these subjects' psychology and identifiable lives, a proposition which ecstatic the exhibition title.

The accompanying archival materials also provide a exposure of the art ecology pick up the check the time, through writings plus documentation of exhibitions Chia unionised for his contemporaries. At fine time when conceptual and performative modes were gaining traction inferior Malaysia, Chia's devotion to figuration and portraiture might have comed out of step. Revisited in the present day, these works bear witness visit the many micro-narratives within nation-building, perhaps even the artist's field perspective on urban growth. Patriarch remarked, "By painting them, earth created an alternative narrative, smashing reimagining of Kuala Lumpur duct city life, and to a- certain extent the country itself."

'Chia Yu Chian: Private Lives' runs at ILHAM Gallery from 17 February - 23 June