Yeh Chi Wei

Yeh Chi Wei (Chinese:叶之威 1915-1981) Born in Fuzhou, China, Yeh Chi Wei is included among a group referred to as Singapore’s “first generation artists”. Graduating from Shanghai’s Xinhua Academy of Fine Arts in 1936, Yeh worked as an art teacher throughout Malaya and Singapore until 1964, while an active member of various art groups.

Ye Zhiwei is known for its unique oil paintings, and his inspiration comes from different cultures, from Chinese Han Dynasty carving to Javan batik printing and so forth. Because of this, he can be Asian and Western art aesthetic, cultural connotation, and travel inspired by the close combination of the production of innovative works.

Yeh is a highly educated artist and influential leader in the early art world of Singapore. He often led his "ten-person group" to travel around, creating paintings. His pursuit of progress and innovation, as well as in the creation of strong Southeast Asian characteristics of the insistence, inspired by other artists and then the development of this idea.

He was especially noted in having started a series of painting trips since 1960 to various Southeast Asian and Asian countries under the Ten Men Group, as well as the Ten Men Art Exhibitions after such trips. The five paintings, ‘Portrait of a Dyak Lady’, ‘The Dyak Plays the Musical Instrument’, ‘Drummer’, ‘Musician’ and ‘Untitled’ (Accession No. P-0752), are examples of Yeh’s experimentation with incorporating diverse Western and Eastern influences and interests into the treatment of his figurative subjects. His elongated figures are rendered in black, framed by textured fields of muted colour. Yeh’s quiet and thoughtful approach brought to each painting, distils the subject matter down to its essence both in terms of its narrative, composition and painterly technique. His depiction of indigenous cultures offers a world rich with evocative inner meaning.

Yeh's style remained representational until 1961, after his trip to eastern coast of Malaysia with nine other local artists, the first of the Ten Men Group Trips to regional areas. His interests in Chinese woodblock prints, archaic carvings and calligraphic scripts are reflected here, as the work resembles ancient stone rubbings, evoking a sense of antiquity and monumentality.
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