Tan Oe Pang (b. 1947), a well-known Singapore ink artist, has been nurtured in Chinese culture since childhood. At the young age of 13, he came to be a student of the local ink master Fan Chang Tien, from whom he acquired the artistic knowledge and technique of traditional Chinese art. Since the early 1980s, Tan has achieved international recognition for his innovation in ink painting. During the 1970s and 80s, he studied oil painting and was inspired by the examples of Surrealist masters like Joan Miro, Henri Rosseau, Max Ernst and Man Ray. Along with other local artists like Rosihan Dahim and Tan Swie Hian, he was one of the few Singapore artists who produced a significant body of surrealism-inspired works in the 1970s.Acrobatic art saw a booming development during the Han Dynasty in China because of Emperor Wudi's fascination towards the art form. Inscribed in the Chinese ink painting, Tan created “Han Acrobatics” in 1983. It depicts a man performing an acrobatic act where strong accents of the brush strokes show the outline of the body, and where wet ink smudges portray the movements and hues of ochre that bring out the acrobat's masculinity. Captivated by the beauty of the primordial world, primitive essence is identified with the utilisation of monochromatic colours. The work signifies Tan’s early breakthrough in the innovation of the Chinese ink painting. With reference to cubist and surrealist languages of modernism, he created a hybrid imagery that comprises part human figure, calligraphic character and brush-ink marks. As shown in this work, mythology and primitivism provide some major creative resources for Tan’s later development. In 1988, the work “Han Acrobatics” was awarded the Excellence Award in the International Chinese ink painting exhibition at the Research Institute of Traditional Chinese Paintings, Beijing. This is one of the early and major contemporary ink exhibitions, officially organized by a government institution in mainland China in the post-1979 era. This institution invited some overseas ink painters whose innovative achievements had been recognized regionally or internationally. The exhibition and award mark an important milestone in Tan’s artistic career.
