Among the artists from the Modern Art Society and Alpha Gallery, Tan Teo Kwang probably has been the only one, whose modernist exploration has been fully and constantly based on the cultivation of aesthetic resources from brush-and-ink tradition. Learning from Chen Wen Hsi and Chen Cheong Swee during the time in Chinese High School in the 1960s, Tan grasped some basic technique and knowledge of traditional ink painting and calligraphy. Afterwards, the study at St Martin’s School of Art in London opened up his creative vision, which expanded to the domain of modernism and the abstraction. Unrestricted by the rules and conventions of traditional ink painting, Tan’s creation freely exploits the formalist potentials derived from ink-and-brush heritage. “Patacasso” shows the artist’s continual exploration of the aesthetic virtues of Chinese scripts. Largely influenced by the formalist modernism, the classical Chinese characters play little ideographic and pictographic function in Tan’s work, and instead they have been transformed into unique elements contributing to the formalist construction of his pictorial schema.
