Mountain Rain

Tan Swie Hian (1943) was born in Indonesia and migrated to Singapore as a child. After graduating from Singapore�s Nanyang University in 1968, he worked at the French Embassy for 24 years before becoming a full-time artist. In 1985, Tan was awarded the Gold Medal of the French Artist Salon and in 1987, the Singapore Cultural Medallion. In 1993, Tan became the first Singapore artist to have a private museum dedicated to the display of his extensive oeuvre of artistic and literary works. In 2003, he received the World Economic Forum Crystal Award and Singapore Meritorious Award. '�Mountain Rain'� is evocative of monumental landscape paintings from the Northern Song dynasty. Its complex brushwork and ink wash present a rain-soaked vision of craggy mountain cliffs. Although firmly reinforcing the traditional Chinese viewpoint that man is but a small part of nature, this is not a typical Chinese landscape painting. The central triangular space, left unpainted, creates an unusual spiral perspective that prompts the viewer to imagine himself looking at a patch of sky framed by towering cliffs.