REFLECTIONS IN DAWN MIST : WOODS AND CACOPHONY IN YELLOW

 

Artist: Chng Nai Wee

Dimensions: 238cm by 190cm

Media: Fluorescent, Pealescent, Acrylic Paint on Canvas

 

This is the highlight of a series of freely expressive and abstract works interplaying fluorescent yellow, titanium white, and pearlescent gold paints to represent the air of tranquility and spirituality in nature and what it means to my being and essence. In this work, Reflections in Dawn Mist, I am depicting a lone tree next to a pool that reflects the rays of the morning sun while the white dawn mist dissipates. This is a moment of quiet introspection for me. The series is called Woods and Cacophony, because woods refers to the forest that I have come to identify so much in the course of my national serviceman days in the army, and cacophony refers to the incessant sounds of the teeming life of the forest. In my youth, as a soldier, it is often that I have waited, lying prone in the jungle behind the bushes, that my mind wanders off into the world of imaginary future and introspective past. I am rather bound with the metaphor of the lone tree and the reflective pool. I see the long tree as myself, struggling to be upright, and reaching for the sky towards the sun rays of my dreams, while at the same time I am weighed by the harshness of draping vines and am engulfed by mist - the metaphor for the vicissitudes of life and the confusion that it brings. The pool where I see my own reflection is my ceaseless obsession with introspection - a place of refuge and a way of seeking to break free with insights. The woods and cacophony is the greater world of life.