A phalanx of perpendicular and horizontal lines in mock abstraction separating the stilt huts on the right and the steady sampan flotsams on the left in stark contrasts, the inverted V of the aluminium roofs registering the highest point (even ‘towering’ over the hazy skyscrapers in the backdrop) and the conical hat of the itinerant street vendor on ground nearest viewer, form the composition of Cheong Soo Pieng’s Fishing Village. It also marks two career watermarks — 1961 was when Soo Pieng became a fulltime artist, and 1961 in this work represented Soo Pieng Singapore phase, before he embarked on a 1961-1963 European sojourn which took him to London, Dublin, Glasgow and the Deutschland quadrant of Munich-Cologne-Hamburg-Berlin, in which his abstractions incorporated more Cubist veneer. The signature on the bottom left anchors the whole composition while concessions to blues, in small decals, breaks the cream-black monotony. As observed by Seng Yu Jin in Cheong Soo Pieng: Visions of Southeast Asia (National Gallery Singapore, 2010): the “Western easel painting convention with Chinese ink painting pictorial formats came to cement his artistic style.” Cheong Soo Pieng is one of the most versatile of Singapore’s pioneer artists, with great aplomb of experimentations in terms of style, techniques and media. His epochal developments in 1952 (Bali), 1959 (Sarawak) and 1961-1963 (Europe) contributed to his seminal influence as a pivotal progenitor of the Nanyang Style, especially with his stylised figure types. Trained at the art citadels of Xiamen (1935) and Shanghai (Xinhua, 1936), he migrated to Singapore in 1946 and taught at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Art from 1947 to 1961. He was given a retrospective at the National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, in 1967, and the Singapore National Museum in 1983 but he died of a heart attack on July 1 — four months shy of the exhibition. He was awarded the Singapore Meritorious Service Award (Pingat Jasa Gemilang) in 1962.