Ng Eng Teng (1934-2001)

Ng Eng Teng (1934-2001) Background Information Born in 1934 in Singapore. Studied painting at Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts and graduated in 1961. During his training, he had become increasingly interested in three-dimensional art forms and on the advice of his teacher, Georgette Chen, he traveled to England to further his studies. In early 1962, he commenced the study of pottery at the North Staffordshire College of Technology and the Stroke-on-Trent School of Art. He did a further year’s research at the Farnham School of Art before returning to Singapore in 1966. Ng Eng Teng has been a full-time artist since his first commission following his first one-man show in 1970. He had exhibitions in countries such as Thailand, Australia and Europe. In 1974, he was awarded the Pingat Apad medal for his contribution to the development of visual art in Singapore. In the same year he received a travel grant from the London British Council. Other awards include the Tan Tze Chor Art Award for sculpture in 1981 and the Cultural Medallion Award for Art in 1981. He was also conferred an Honorary Doctor of Letters by NUS in 1998. Most of Ng’s works have been donated to the National University of Singapore, where a gallery was set up in his name in 1997. His Early Works He has worked with all sorts of materials, including stone and metal, but he preferred clay because it offered the challenge of direct and immediate manipulation of material. He also liked ciment fondu because it can be easily repaired if chipped or cracked and, since the late 1980s, he has worked with bronze because of its malleability and durability. His main source of inspiration has always been the human figure, and even his abstract works are experiments based on elements of the human form. Throughout his career, he seems to have kept two distinct styles going side by side - rounded, biomorphic forms portraying human conditions such as motherhood, or human states, such as fear; and angular or geometric forms, reminiscent of metal sheets, pipes or beams, abstractions of the human figure but often imbued with a distinct sense of humor. Early works begun in the late 1960s are based on the theme “mother and child” and show the close bonds of love and joy formed between mother and child. This is to be a recurring theme in his work. He then went on to make a series of “rockers” and “mobiles”. The rockers were made from ciment fondu and were executed in a light-hearted manner. Viewers were encouraged to rock them and in some pieces, objects contained inside the hollow forms created sound. In stark contrast, the mobile series had more serious overtones. Called the “Freedom Child” series, the suspended ceramic figures symbolize children fleeing from Vietnam and the horrors of war. His Works in the Nineties (Adapted from Constance Sheares. “Bodies Transformed: Ng Eng Teng in the Nineties”. Singapore: NUS Museums/ National University of Singapore, 1999) Ng Eng Teng is a fiercely independent and prolific artist, creating more than 300 sculptures over a span of forty years, from monumental public works in ciment fondu to life-sized or smaller sculptures in bronze, ceramics and ciment fondu. The human figure remains Ng Eng Teng's principal source of inspiration. They can be classed into a number of categories, most of which are familiar to viewers who have followed his career because he tenaciously explores familiar themes, particularly the female figure, which his fertile imagination transforms into the most unexpected and surprising images. Although it is impossible to compartmentalise his work (and, for that matter, that of any other artist) because one work naturally follows upon another, each containing the germ of the next, Ng Eng Teng's mature sculpture (those inspired by human forms) could be classified into the following categories for ease of analysis: Seated Figures, Heads, Torsos, and the Torso-to-Face series. HEADS Heads have always featured prominently in Ng Eng Teng's work. According to him, "A head and a face can express the whole emotional thinking of a person. The components in a face are important - the eyes, the mouth, but not so much the ears, I seem to eliminate the ears, but the nose does play a part. The main expressive elements in the face are the eyes and the mouth. The nose could help in the composition but, somehow, I am not worried about the ears!" Since the mid 1980s, the artist has used this familiar theme, the elements of which he has stretched, pulled apart and recombined in the most inventive and, sometimes, outrageous way, as in “Red Face” (1986). In the 1990s, Ng Eng Teng created a number of heads mainly to explore and experiment with textures, glazes, firing techniques and surface decoration. These include “Head Profile” (1991), “Blue Head” (1991), “Red Head” (1992); they are abstract, monolithic and with rhythmic lines, textured surfaces and modelled to be viewed in profile. “Double Profile” (1994) and “Pony Tail” (1994) are even more abstract, with the emphasis on surface patterning made by inlaying and scratching, a technique he used extensively throughout the 1990s. [The inlay is achieved by scraping away the clay while it is still moist, and the crevices filled by painting on a slip (clay in a creamy consistency and coloured with oxides). After the slip has firmed, the excess is scraped away.] TORSO “Red Modesty” (1991) continues a process of radical simplification begun in the late 1980s with such works as “Modesty”(1986) where "although there is a certain amount of abbreviation already, you can still see half of the head and three hands." In “Red Modesty”, the natural forms are retained but are pared down to their essentials. Although it can be read in purely formal terms, it affects the spectator in terms of the associations it arouses, particularly with fragments of classical sculpture in its omission of head and limbs. By cutting out the breasts and the pudenda, he in fact directs our attention to these missing parts, thus creating a presence out of absence. These hollows give the work a strange, mysterious life. Ng Eng Teng explained, “Conceptually, this second series is different from the earlier one. This second series is inspired by the way nude figures reproduced in magazines or newspapers are taped over to mask the vital areas. Since I didn't want to mask out the vital areas, I might as well carve them out. So I literally carved and hollowed them out.” “Cobra I” (1997) which is based on a 1989 maquette, “Male Torso” (1989) is an allegorical and rather disturbing sculpture. It is arresting in its exaggeration of features of the human body so that it bears a resemblance to the hooded head of a cobra, from which it derives its name. It is full of contradictions, a poetic, post-surrealist object that is both traditional and untraditional in content. SEATED FIGURES “Dreaming” (1992), “Hopeful” (1992) and “Wondering” (1992) are all cast in bronze in Thailand by the artist himself. They are a continuation of the series of seated bronze figures of which “Looking Ahead” (1987) is the first. The stylisations, omissions and simplifications of the earlier sculpture are now handled with greater confidence and compositional skill. The graceful juxtapositions of the head resting on the hand and, in turn, the elbow on the thigh gives these sculptures a pleasing fluidity. “Bewitched” (1992) is perhaps the most interesting of Ng Eng Teng's cast-in-Thailand bronzes and can be considered a forerunner of the Torso-to-Face group of works which emerged two years later. It is part human and part a figment of the artist's imagination. Here, humanity merges into a broader nature and consciousness slips into dream. Head, upper arms and legs are missing in this drastically abbreviated work. It is frontally and symmetrically composed, with arms folded enigmatically below the breasts which seem on the verge of doubling up as eyes. This eye-breast interchangeability is fully evolved in “Small Eyes”(1994) which is among the earliest in the Torso-to-Face series and closely related to “Sitting Pretty A” (1994). Both “Sitting Pretty A” and “Sitting Pretty C” (1994) are remarkable for the hollowing out of the torso, described by Ng Eng Teng as "the big emptiness in the centre", leaving just the barest outline of the figure. This outline is in fact a sinuous, unending line, creating elegant and effortless simplifications of form. The empty space within is the most active element in these pieces which can easily be read as human figures, not of particular persons but the distillation of all humanity. TORSO TO FACE Ng Eng Teng attributed the inspiration for his Torso-to-Face sculptures to his life drawing, stating, "I have benefited from it in that it has given me a new theme -- the Torso-to-Face series which came about from doing life drawings. Of course, I wasn't consciously expecting this to happen when I first got back to life drawing. But at each session I see an image of the face looking at me from the body, and this impression gets more intense each time. But how do I solve it, how do I utilise this idea?" The answer to his question lies partly in drawings such as “Torso-to-Face” (1997) in which the abdominal muscles have been rendered to look like a hooked nose and the sexual organs like a mouth with protruding tongue. The imagery suggested in such drawings "did not take concrete form until about 1994, when the Torso-to- Face series began to appear, one piece after another." This series shows a somewhat perverse tendency for turning a universal theme upside down.

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