작품 상세

It’s obvious women are given weightage by Chia Yu Chian putting the three figures in the lower foreground triangle of the painting - the mother shouldering a pole with two pots on either side and a child in a cloth straddle over her back (mother-and-child theme), the housewife women walking diagonally towards viewer, and the worker woman in strawhat carrying a pole with two bundles of produce walking diagonally from the bottom left. Three divisions of domestic power in the patch on higher ground overlooking a ramshackled row of attap or zinc topped houses cutting diagonally across the composition with a large tract of land on the right and a hill framing the sky on the left half. Yu Chian was a painter of the ordinary people in makeshift villages or new urban clusters or public buildings. He was rarely interested in open spaces as landscapes per see, but one defined by people even as passers-by. Chia Yu Chian was among the earliest Malayan to be educated, on a French Government scholarship, at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts in Paris (1959-1962), where he did a mural commissioned called Life In Malaysia for the Malayan Embassy in Paris. In Paris, he had two solos (Galerie de Villiers and the Salon de Paris) and received Honourable Mentions in the Salon des Independent and Societe des Artistes Francaise Societe des Artistes Francaise, and his works were accepted an unprecedented 15 times in exhibitions. On his return, all his 110 paintings in his solo at the British Council, Penang, were sold out. He was honoured with Memorial exhibitions by The Art Gallery Penang (1997) and the National Art Gallery Malaysia (September to November, 2002), and a Chia Yu Chian In Nanyang exhibition by the Nanyang Academy of Fine Art (NAFA) in Singapore in 2009, although he was not strictly a NAFA alumni. Ilham Gallery in first half of 2019 presented his exhibition, it was a very successful show, eye-opening experiences for visitors.