작품 상세

Portraitures by Yong Mun Sen were few and far in between, what more his one of all people, a Malay Gentleman, and done in oil. Was it a commissioned piece, someone he knew well, a passing acquaintance or something in the person that made him want to capture his visage in oil on canvas? With a truncated cone kopiah on his head, and in white too, and with a scarf loosely strung over his shoulders, the moustachioed subject seems transfixed on something or someone in front. He looks pious, and maybe an Islamic official of some standing. What’s the occasion, Hari Raya, Awal Muharram, a wedding?. Mun Sen, nee Yen Lang, was dubbed the ‘Father of Malaysian Painting’ by pioneer-artist historian Dato' Dr. Tan Chee Khuan. A fourth-generation Malayan, Mun Sen was also a pioneer photographer who started painting in watercolours in 1920. He was given a Retrospective by the Penang State Art Gallery (PSAG) in 1999 and a posthumous exhibition in 1972, the same time as the National Art Gallery Kuala Lumpur. He was also accorded posthumous exhibitions in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur’s Galeri 11 in 1966. Mun Sen was also an art activist, co-founding the Penang Chinese Art Club in 1936 (president, 1937), the Singapore Society of Chinese Artists (vice-president, 1936) and the Penang Art Society in 1953, with his patron Loh Cheng Chuan as president. In 1922, he set up the Tai Koon Studio in Penang, which was renamed the Mun Sen Studio in 1930 with a branch in Northam Road the next year. He had solo exhibitions in London (Malayan Pavilion, British Industrial Fair, 1948), Tasmania (Australia), Singapore and Cleveland (United States).