This exhibition assembles a visual connotation of different genres in drawing and painting, deemed both in the ‘Western’ manner or the Chinese style. There are figure drawings, figural representations, landscapes, forms of heritage and diverse representations of ethnicities through figures or the environment. In some sense, the media becomes a moot point, for the artists of Nanyang were sure in their skills. Their challenge was to provide for a specific time and place, offering transcendental values in light and space, in colour and motif, in the symbolic and the narrative. The broad spectrum of the Nanyang tradition proudly covers Chinese ink painting, Western oil painting, the draughtsmanship and skills found in figure drawing and sculpture. Its range is vividly expanded into horizons of modernity and historical bearings, the known and unknown worlds, the Asian climate and its unique environment at the time of its discovery in the early 20th century.
Traditions of Nanyang
