Ageneration of students in Singapore read about Xu Beihong and the magnificent, spirited horses he painted in their standard Chinese-language textbooks. Now they have the chance to see up close what the big deal is about Xu - 70 years after his last major show on the island.
Close to 100 works by the modern Chinese master artist (1895-1953) are on show at the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) until July 13. Titled Xu Beihong in Nanyang, the exhibition is jointly mounted by the SAM and Beijing's Xu Beihong Museum, and focuses on the artist's output and friendships during his sojourns to Singapore, Malaya and India before the second world war.
Insured for US$50 million, the exhibited works come from public and private collections from the mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Canada, Singapore and Malaysia.
Billed as a blockbuster, the show's poster-work is Put Down Your Whip (1939), a 144cm-high, 90cm-wide oil painting that fetched US$9.2 million at a Sotheby's auction in Hong Kong last year. It depicts, life-sized, Chinese actress Wang Ying in character as a starving performer in the anti-Japanese street play of the same name. The exhibition opens with Slave and Lion, which fetched US$6.9 million at Christie's Hong Kong in November 2006. This 1924 oil, painted when Xu was 29, is based on the Roman story of the lion which refused to attack a slave who had removed a thorn from its paw. Apart from the classical subject matter, the composition is also reminiscent of the intriguing light and shadow-play of Renaissance masters.
Exiting the exhibition, visitors are confronted by the epic 1940 ink painting, The Foolish Man Who Removed the Mountains, which pans out like a comic strip, evocative of both Greek heroic nudes and mythical figures from Chinese folk art.
Co-curator Low Sze Wee says Xu constantly sought to reinvent China's art, pushing its boundaries with new techniques and international aesthetics: 'During the 1950s, 60s and 70s, China saw a lot of political turmoil. Artists there didn't have the space to practise modern art, like abstraction and realism. It was really its artists overseas who had the opportunity to further Chinese art into newer areas.'