Liu Kang, 1975, Life by the River, oil on canvas, 126 x 203 cm, collection of NHB.

Liu Kang is celebrated as a “pillar of the Southern sky”, a pioneering artist of the Nanyang style, a Chinese Gauguin. We celebrate this year, the centurion of his birth, with a forum this April and an exhibition at the Singapore Art Museum this July.

Born at the turn of the century in 1911, Liu Kang studied art in Shanghai of the ‘20s and Paris of the ‘30s, where he was deeply influenced by the Post-Impressionists and Fauvists, including Gauguin, Cezanne and Van Gogh.

It was these direct influences and the identity of being strongly, a learned ethnic Chinese, that informed his later syntheses of the cultural categories of the “East” and the “West”, the singular point for which he is most famous today—Liu Kang’s mind and paintbrush were able to identify a strong sense of individuality and the elegance of simplicity of form in both Eastern and Western art, and by fusing both, created the celebrated Nanyang style.

A forum titled Liu Kang: Tropical Vanguard was held on Saturday, 2 April 2011.

Prof Lin Xiang Xiong, president of the Global Chinese Arts & Culture society, spoke of the depth in both compositional logics and aesthetics—and how Liu Kang united the two, a synthesis between Practice and  Theory, as well as that of Regionality and Personality—where, academically, Regionality is seen as a hallmark of Asian artists, whilst Western painters consider Personality key.

A researcher at the Graduate School of Chinese National Academy of Arts, Mr Wang Yong placed Liu Kang as one of the most important artists in the history of 20th century Eastern modern art. He also pointed out Liu Kang’s originality—every culture should propagate and develop its own style and essence, not mimic or re-appropriate blindly.

The Chinese guest speakers were in agreement for young artists of today to not be caught up in an international style—all the more so in this age of globalization—to disagree, in fact, with a sense of uniformity in globalization, and they touched on how this is what Liu Kang’s art teaches us.

The panelists

Mr Yow Siew Kah, a local educator, spoke of the trend towards a Western orientation in arts education in Singapore and how Liu Kang’s art—as a Singaporean fusion of the two—could be included as a movement away from such leanings and to help students understand the instability of pictorial genres.

Former lead writer and Op-Ed Editor of Malaysia’s Nanyang Siang Pau, Mr Teoh Kian Hoon, went on to speak about Nanyang art as truly original, not being a mere copy of modern art of the West, but as a deep expression of the identity of Huaren artists.

He also noted how the focus on native exotic women in the “peripheral” regions seems to be a unique hallmark of Nanyang Art, and how Huaren artists took in not just the Fauvist style, but Gauguin’s gaze, thus depicting ethnic women as the stylized “Other”.

Mr Kwok Kian Chow, director of the National Art Gallery, Singapore, rounded off the illuminating session with a Q&A session where deep musings on Nanyang art and our place in the world were sounded out, as well as more light-hearted anecdotes from those who knew Liu Kang personally. Many had high compliments for the master painter, and also warm words as to the man behind the easel.

Praise for Liu Kang flourished—it was concluded that Liu Kang’s legacy lives on though he is dearly departed, and Singapore owes a great cultural debt to his cultural sensitivity and synthesizing creativity.