Ong Kim Seng, born in 1945 and one of Singapore’s best known watercolourists, is largely a self-taught artist who learnt by observing pioneer watercolourists Lim Cheng Hoe (1912-1979) and Gog Sing Hooi (1933-1994) who painted by the Singapore River on Sundays. Ong, whose first solo exhibition in 1979 featured works from his 1978 trek to the Himalayas, became a full-time artist in 1985. In 1999 Ong was awarded the Cultural Medallion by the Singapore government, and in 2000 the prestigious Dolphin Fellowship by the American Watercolour Society, the only Asian to receive such an honour. The proliferation of construction sites in Singapore in the 1970s and 80s offered new and exciting subject matter for artists. The two blocks of apartments depicted here eventually became Ong’s home after his family was resettled from their ‘kampong’ (village in Malay). Although executed largely in translucent colours, opaque colours are used as colourful highlights (on the workers’ backs), a technique similarly seen in the works of Singapore’s pioneer artists.
