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Lot description
Chia Yu Chian comes off inadvertently as the champion of the impoverished and downtrodden, and in his Hospital Series, the weak and infirmed. His art was Social Realism, on the common people, especially around his Selangor Mansion apartment cum gallery in Jalan Masjid India, which he captured with great compassion and perceptiveness. But he is best remembered for his Parisien oeuvre when he studied at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts, in an extended stay from 1959 to 1963 - the first Malayan/Singaporean to be given a French Government scholarship. He had stayed at the bohemian Montmartre, at the Rue de la Charbonniere (District 8) and also at the Latin Quarters of Sorbonne in Paris. The Malaysian National Art Gallery has several of his Parisien rooftop topography, although his most memorable masterpiece is Election Fever (1978). His mentor, the renowned French art educator Professor M.Chaplain Midy, described him as "a painstaking, hardworking and exceptionally promising young painter" and during his early sojourn in Singapore, Professor Michael Sullivan dubbed him "the essential Malayan artist". Notable also are 1) He came under the personal tutelage of Chen Wen-hsi and Chen Chong Swee, but he never studied at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in Singapore; 2) At age 17, in 1953, his painting was bought by Malcolm MacDonald, the Commissioner-General for Britain in Southeast Asia (which was later donated to Universiti Malaya); 3) He was commissioned to do a 3 meter x 2 meter mural for the Malaysian Embassy in Paris (1962); 4) He met Pablo Picasso, and did a sketch of him, and Picasso himself gave it a cachet of approval by singing his name on it. He had intoned: "Art must not only be imbued with beauty and colour; it must be imbued with life and spirit to reflect the mood and tempo of the times." NOTE: Chia Yu Chian has 13 works in the National Art Gallery collection.