As an art student, Singaporean painter Ian Woo just didn't 'get' representational painting. 'I had problems transferring what I saw onto the canvas,' he says.
With mounting frustration and a niggling sense that he was not among the best in his cohort, he then experimented with colours and 'nothingness'. The resulting canvas won a prize in an art competition held by his alma mater, Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, in 1990. Since then Woo hasn't looked back.
These days the 42-year-old is known as one of the most disciplined and consistent abstract impressionist painters in the island state. His artwork, commissioned by the Land Transport Authority, decorates Singapore's Harbourfront train station on the Northeast Line. And pieces from his oeuvre reside in the collections of the National Library Board of Singapore, The Mint Museum of Craft and Design in North Carolina and the Victorian Tapestry Workshop in Melbourne, to name a few.
The tall, erudite artist now lives in a modest corner terrace. In his living room are piles of apparel - stock from his wife's business - and the tell-tale detritus of two school-aged sons.
Propped against every available wall are big canvases completed in the past year. At a glance, there is something both of the orchid and the arachnid in the works. In a piece called The Magnetic Waterfall, greenish-blue strokes, reminiscent of tropical leaves, creepers or rivulets of water, dominate over neon lines and dark trellises. In another, We Have Crossed the Lake, a sprinkling of feather-like forms drape over murky, craggy shapes licked by yellow accents.
Woo's new show, which runs until June 28 at Fortune Cookie Projects' exhibition space in Tanjong Pagar Distripark, is called 'Flux Technicolour'. The exhibition's title, he says, is a reference to 'fluctuating changes in both colour and forms that affect the gravity of the paintings'. Concurrently, he is also part of a group exhibition with seven other Singapore artists at Osage Singapore dubbed 'Found and Lost'.