Flesh Matters

Wong Keen

ISBN: 978-981-11-7838-2

Publisher: The Culture Story and artcommune gallery

Artist(s): Wong Keen

Author(s): Ma Peiyi, Lee Chor Lin

Publication Year: 2018

Pages: 156

Dimensions: 297 x 260mm (closed);

297 x 520mm (open)

Binding: Hardback

Stock: Available

SGD80

To purchase, visit us at artcommune gallery.

Synopsis

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Published in conjunction with the milestone exhibition Wong Keen: Flesh Matters at Artspace@Helutrans from 12 - 22 July 2018, this publication features essays and nearly 100 colour plates devoted to the New York-trained artist’s development of his acclaimed Flesh Series in the period of 2012 - 2018. Wong Keen first embarked on his visual discourse of flesh and meat during an artist residency in Beijing with Galerie Urs Meile in the summer of 2012. His dynamic exploration of the subject has since evolved into a brilliant chapter characterised by highly-stylised images of the burger, the butcher shop and the nude, which he wittingly dramatises through

various strategies and mediums. Wong Keen (b. 1942, Singapore) grew up in a Chinese literati environment and was already an acclaimed young painter when he left Singapore to study at the Art Students League of New York in 1961. He was the first Singaporean and among the earliest of Chinese artists to venture into the flourished post-war American art scene—then the most avant-garde art centre in the world. Having lived in the US for over fifty years, Wong Keen’s powerful embodiment of Chinese ink wash aesthetics and Western inventive approach towards form and colour has continued to characterise his dramatisation of flesh in form and philosophy in this latest series.