master chen's ducks

Fra Angelico's The Annunciation - a fresco in a monastery in Florence, heavenly city of the Renaissance, heralding the new magic of perceiving thick and solid objects represented on flat surfaces.

It's a well-known achievement. Since the Renaissance painters have been able to create the illusion of depth by adhering to the geometrical rules of perspective in their painting. The spectator can stand before such paintings and look in, beyond the painted surface, into another world, as fleshly populated and thickly architectural as ours.

On a recent visit to the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) I stood before a Chinese ink and colour painting of ducks by Chen Wen Hsi, a China-born artist who visited Singapore in 1949 and stayed on to paint, teach, and make it home until his death in 1991. The painting was one of the works at the artist's centennial exhibition at SAM until 8 April 2007.

There are four ducks, two swimming from the top and the other two from the right. Their necks are either craning toward the left or else they point their beaks in that direction. There are a few straggly grasses in the foreground across the width of the painting, suggesting a bank that overlaps into the space where the spectator stands. The ducks are paddling in water that is evoked across the paper without any visual clue to its depth except for the positioning of the ducks and the grasses. It is an emptiness in its absence of perspectival clues, in its flatness - as flat as the paper the artist's fingers pressed on; but also emptiness that fills out into meaning and content from the suggestion of webbed feet in the sparing dabs of colour beneath the rightmost duck's body.



Look, no horizon in sight! There extends a space like a hemisphere over the ducks, a space filled out from two arcs you might trace from joining the four edges of the picture diagonally. You might move in this space, hovering over the birds like a god or calling to them from the bank with feet planted on the ground. Or reach a hand inside, as I did, even with the poor substitute of the print in the catalogue.

Master Chen's ducks bob across the papery, watery surface. Do they look east or west? Probably both, following the master's lead.