Original Prints By Loo Foh Sang By Bill Clement, Australian Artist
Original Prints By Loo Foh Sang
By Bill Clement, Australian Artist
About the time when ballpoint pens began to invade the
world’s markets and change our writing habits, the English artist Stanley
William Hayter published in New York a major work on the renaissance of
contemporary printmaking. The book, New
Ways of Gravure (1949) was destined to reach a wide audience
internationally and as a direct consequence, Hayter, previously known in Paris
and New York as the founder of Atelier 17, a co-operative workshop given over
to etching, began to attract artists from all over the world to the now
re-established workshop in Paris.
Etching or gravure, the art of printing from an engraved
or etched line in a zinc or copper plate had become a half-forgotten tradition
until Hayter set about the tast of reviving and inventing possibilities.
Hayter’s six decades of dedication to gravure and its processes altered
absolutely our perceptions of the medium and its potentialities. Trained as an
industrial chemist, he worked with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in the early
twenties and travelled extensively during this period in the Middle East, he
nevertheless counted among his ancestors a number of traditional painters in
earlier generations. When he moved to Paris in 1926, the first period in his
life as an artist began. This period before the war saw the establishment of
the workshop, saw his active association with many of the major artists of the
period in Paris, many of whom joined him in the workshop. Exile followed in New
York during the war years and there he opened a print-making workshop which
attracted many of those painters who were later to become known as the New York
schools. However it is the third period of his long life, (Bill Hayter died on
May 4, 1988, at the age of 87) that is most likely to leave the longest
imprint. This was the period that saw the development of colour printing and
the arrival of artists from a much wider spectrum of cultural roots. And thus from
the fifties on these men and women outnumbered by far the French in the
workshop.
One of them was Loo Foh Sang whose work is currently on
exhibition at A.O. Art Gallery (1990). Malaysian born, Loo Foh Sang was
educated at the Nanyang Academy in Singapore and at the Ecole Nationale
Superieure des Beaux Arts in Paris. In 1967 he joined Atelier 17 and during the
next four years he worked under Hayter. These were the years that saw the
exploration of colour in virtuoso terms. It was then a period in the life of
the workshop that was significantly different. And the possibilities were not
lost on Loo Foh Sang. In his latest works there are then the developed
possibilities that colour allows in alliance with an imagery that is drawn from
his cultural heritage. And it is in the dialogue between these two elements
that gives rise to images that speak of an artist who has absorbed the
influence of the master and has not become a clone of that master. Any artist
who works under the shadow of great trees must eventually for the sake of
feeling the warmth of the sun return to his sources. And this is what Loo Foh
Sang has done and done extremely well and authentically.
The images which show this best are prints where Loo
plays such as the vocabulary of signs and symbols drawn from Chinese culture,
the phoenix, the ox, the mountains of heaven, the yin-yang diagram, the moon.
This play is an ambiguous world alive with sometimes contradictory sets of
associations and yet one which is characterised by movement and vibrant colour.
One of Hayter’s legacies to his students was that of surrealism, that pre-war
ground of conflicting ideologies which then, as now “vent their fury on man and
leave him as bad dream leaves a waking dreamer.” In becoming part of a wider,
more catholic understanding of human culture it continues to find fertile
ground as we come to terms with our individual stories in widely disparate
realities. Loo, who is one of the major artists associated with the name of
Atelier 17, knows well that the artist who speaks his own truth ultimately
finds himself linked with all other artists who make the same journey.
This article was published in “The Untiring Engraver”
Original Prints by Loo Foh Sang Exhibition Book in Year 2014, organised by Soka
Gakkai Malaysia.
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