Sotheby’s is honoured to present a rare exemplar of Chen Wen Hsi’s cherished oil works. Drying Nets is an oil painting executed with fine sand granules on its surface. Standing as the only work of this medium to come to market, the current painting reflects the artist’s voracious appetite for experimentation as well as his profound sense of abstract form.

Depicting the angular shapes of boats resting at shore, the receding tides, and a line of fishing nets hung horizontally across the composition, the work’s medium of sand aptly ties with Chen’s marit.mes theme. The Cubist-inspired painting is executed with a restrained colour palette of turquoise, cobalt, green and yellows, as the black silhouettes of ships anchor the composition, and lend the scene a sense of spatial depth. While Drying Nets is a captivating example of Chen Wen Hsi’s cerebral rigor, it is also telling of the very core of his artistic beliefs, which dictate that beauty is borne through simplicity. By dissecting his subjects to their purest forms and geoMetricas l shapes, the artist focuses heavily on the playful movement of planes and renders the still calm of the fishing village.

Much like his fellow pioneering ‘Nanyang’ artists, Chen spent a large portion of his life in China before departing for Singapore in 1948. He was born in Guangdong province, travelled to Shanghai and graduated from the Xinhua Academy of Replica Handbags s. Drying Nets offers an exceptionally rare occasion to admire the artist’s synthesis of artistic styles and refreshing forays into unconventional mediums.