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Lot description
A naked man on a rattan settee with his right leg bent and raised onto the seat, his eyes transfixed rightwards. Something there, or someone? His bored dour expression suggests a mundane everyday ritual, maybe watching TV with its usual insipid fare. The reclusive Anthonie Chong has developed a Hitchcockian effect of psychological dramas in his figures of distracting ghoulish splatters even just after graduating from the Perak Institute of Art. Here, the lone figure is too cleanly defined for comfort, though the coarse dry pigment grates a tension. This, perhaps, is to emphasise the drab domestic life, the ennui, especially for starting-out low-income bachelors. Whatever the spartan setting, nothing beats one's own place, never mind dullness about: the wane yellow walls and the cheap blue seat covers. Prison or palace, maybe a bit of both. Anthonie Chong graduated in Graphic Design from the Perak Institute of Art in 1990, and had his first solo at X Pub and Gallery in Penang, in 1994. He had a modicum of success when in 1998, he won the Malaysian-level of the Philip Morris Asean Art Award. But such Baconesque figures took an emotional toll on him, and he decided to abandon them in 2000, for animated characters morphing into e-monk based on the Ne-Zha legend. The Singapore Art Museum gave him a solo, Naked Perfection, in 2002. His last solo, e-monky, was at Artfolio Gallery in Kuala Lumpur.