작품 상세

It was a phase after college (first half of the 1990s) that Anthonie Chong created a macabre slew of naked figures with striated flaked white paint and stripped of all pretence. Like “bare-forked animals”, male and female, often singly. Here, a ‘Delilah’ is running and running, probably reverse-chased by a ‘Samson’. Running in the dead of the night on a rickety platform with a diagonal slant (a favourite device of his) to subvert the view. Why, and in full buff and the ashen face, it’s not for us to know, but you could almost hear the thumping sounds of running feet adding to the dramatization. There may be some vicarious thrill in the viewer, and one suspects, the creator too… such is human nature. It may not have been the best of starts to hold one’s solo at the X Pub and Gallery (Penang, 1994) after Anthonie Chong graduated with a Diploma in Graphic Design from the Perak Institute of Art in Ipoh (1990). But in 1998, he won the Malaysian award of the Philip Morris Asean Art Awards. In 2000, he switched to cartoon iconography called e-monk fusing eastern surrealism with digital technology, with his last show on this at Artfolio, Kuala Lumpur in 2009. He even had a solo, Naked Perfection, at the Singapore Art Museum in 2002. He had worked as an art teacher, graphic designer and illustrator. His 1990s works are very much sought after by collectors.