Background
Wong Keen was born in 1942 in Singapore and grew up in a Chinese literati environment. Wong Keen’s prodigious talent in painting was evident since childhood, thus he was an acclaimed teenage painter in the early Singapore art scene.
215 W 57th St, New York, NY 10019, USA
Wong Keen held his first solo exhibition at the then National Library of Singapore and moved to America after being accepted by the prestigious Art Students League of New York.
Granary Building, 1 Granary Square, Kings Cross, London N1C 4AA, United Kingdom
Wong Keen attended Saint Martin’s School of Art in London, United Kingdom in 1966.
Photo by Gin Tay.
Wong Keen with his Still A Burger work at his exhibition titled Theatre Of Enigmas. Photo by Gin Tay.
Wong Keen was born in 1942 in Singapore and grew up in a Chinese literati environment. Wong Keen’s prodigious talent in painting was evident since childhood, thus he was an acclaimed teenage painter in the early Singapore art scene.
Brought up in a Chinese scholar-artist environment, a deep reverence for Chinese ink and brushwork was instilled in Wong Keen since young. At the age of 13, his creative mind was already penetrated by the idiosyncratic, gestural style of Bada Shanren, which continues to follow and shape his visual poetics across varying mediums today.
Wong Keen held his first solo exhibition at the then National Library of Singapore and moved to America after being accepted by the prestigious Art Students League of New York. When Wong Keen departed in 1961, he was the first Singaporean to pursue art education in New York and the first Asian and Singaporean to have won the Edward G. McDowell Travelling Scholarship in 1965 in the history of Art Students League. Thus, in 1966 Keen attended Saint Martin’s School of Art in London, United Kingdom.
After the 2nd World War, New York flourished as the world centre for arts. By the 1950s, what became collectively appraised as Abstract Expressionism had taken the world by storm. It was against this progressive backdrop in the early 1960s that the young Wong Keen developed his artistic sensibility. During his time at the Art Students League of New York, Wong Keen studied under influential Abstract Expressionist artists such as Morris Kantor, Sidney Gross, Vaclav Vytlacil and Hans Hoffman, gaining first-hand insights into the Colour-field theory (an essential strand in Abstract Expressionism), which emphasizes strategic placements of colours and their effective dramatization to achieve form and balance.
Wong Keen, now based in the United States, held his first solo exhibition in Singapore at the young age of 19. In 1961, Wong migrated to the United States.
He worked as an Art Instructor at Fair Lawn Adult School Swarthmore in New Jersey in 1966. A year later he became an Art Director at Police Athlete Leagues in New York.
Having spent over 50 years in the United States, Wong Keen’s outstanding oeuvre, which encompasses oil, ink, acrylic, and collage since the 1960s to the present, is a powerful embodiment of the elegant expressivity of Chinese ink wash aesthetics and the Western inventive approach toward form and colour. From series to series, whether venturing anew or revisiting familiar techniques and imagery, his relentless pursuit of compositional innovation, together with the enigmatic quality of his language, has given rise to a unique body of work that defies traditions and categorisation.
In 2007, the Singapore Art Museum celebrated Wong Keen’s masterful repertoire with the solo exhibition, Wong Keen: A Singapore Abstract Expressionist.
A Study
2015After a Heavy Rain
2011Two Paintings
2013A Good View
2011Lotus in Green
2007Garden of Evergreen I
2013Yellow Leaves
2011Garden of Evergreen II
2013Nude with Monkey
1998Landscape on the Waterfront
2011Picture Writing 13
2012Yellow Top
2014Lady in the Move II
2015Bursting
2015Flesh at Rest
2017Quotations: "To be enlightened and to create something extraordinary, the artist must first learn to free himself from the tyranny of logic and traditions."