Born in 1954 in Singapore, Ng Yak Hwee is a graduate of Singapore’s former Nanyang University (Botany major). An accomplished painter and sculptor, Ng received the 1987 Silver Medal from the Salon des Artistes Français, and won First Prize (Figurative category) in the 1992 UOB Painting of the Year Competition.This painting from 1999 demonstrates that Goh had not, despite his broad forays into figurative painting during the 1990s, abandoned his trademark expressive abstract paintings that had Nature as their subject matter. ‘Nature in Blue’, with its scroll-like format, appears to be a vivid celebration of movement with riotous brush strokes and splashes of colour. The ambiguity lies in where the ‘blue’ earth ends and the ‘blue’ night sky begins, if at all. It is a somewhat brooding work, blue symbolically being a colour that represents both heavenly skies and earthly water, or alternatively just a “blue” feeling.
