Boy

Malaysian-born Chia Yu Chian (1936-1990) was the first Southeast Asian recipient of a scholarship from the French government to study in Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Paris (1959-1962). An active participant in the local and regional art scene in the 1950s and 1960s, Chia had exhibited extensively, regionally and internationally in France (1959) and Germany (1960), with his first solo exhibition in Malaysia (1956).Influenced by Singapore’s pioneer artists Chen Wen Hsi (1906-1991) and Cheong Soo Pieng (1917-1983) who experimented with Western art styles, Chia depicts the sitter in ‘Boy’ with sharp angularity and expressive brushwork against an intense, dark colour palette.