Locating Ng Eng Teng
Over the years, I’ve become quite obsessed with the life and work of Ng Eng Teng (1934-2001), “the Grandfather of Singapore Sculpture.” I first experienced his peerless strangeness through a photograph, online.
It’s the ground floor of Plaza Singapura in the ’70s or ’80s. Ng’s two sculptures, Wealth and Contentment, loom prominently. Wealth is the one closer to us: a woman like a gilded pupa lies serenely on her back, her hair raised in a conical shape, her hands resting on her tummy. In the background, Contentment, a woman with a similar figure, seems to be gliding towards us. In the middle of the photo, between these two sculptures, stands a child and his mother. The child stares at Wealth, transfixed, perhaps even frightened. The photo isn’t clear but I’ve read the child as a boy, perhaps because I can easily imagine myself in the same space, drawn and daunted by these floating alien mothers.
When Plaza Singapura underwent a renovation in 1997, Wealth and Contentment were donated by the owners, DBS Land, to the National University of Singapore. The two sculptures now rest in front of the University Cultural Centre, on a grass patch that isn’t easily accessible by foot — you have to cut your own way through the shrubbery to get to them. (In a 2011 Straits Times article, a journalist lamented that this move was akin to “sending your aged parents to a nursing home.”)
Similarly, one of Ng’s iconic Mother and Child (1980) sculptures, which had originally resided in front of Far East Shopping Centre on Orchard Road, was shifted to an area in front of Orchard Parade Hotel, and finally relocated in 2021 to a much quieter spot near the Gardens by the Bay. It now sits on a patch of sand, fringed by coconut trees, like some beached animal.
Besides highlighting the erratic — sometimes downright neglectful — way public art has been treated in Singapore, these relocations reinforce the sense that Ng’s works have been difficult to accommodate in the public sphere. In more ways than one, we do not know where to place Ng Eng Teng. Despite significant commissions, the public nature of his art, and the high esteem with which he was regarded when he was alive, culminating in the award of the Cultural Medallion in 1981, his work occupies an uneasy position in Singapore’s art history. Unlike other pioneer artists whose iconic works have been readily celebrated and accepted as part of the nation’s visual vocabulary — Georgette Chen, Chen Wen Hsi and Chua Mia Tee come to mind — Ng’s idiosyncratic idiom still provokes puzzlement and discomfort. Put another way, Ng does not easily fit into narratives of Singapore art history — be they Nanyang style, nation-building, or activism and resistance.
Sculpting his own way
One way of approaching Ng is to understand his unique formation as an artist.
When Ng was an art student at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA) in the 1950s and 60s, there was no formal instruction in the two forms he was most interested in: ceramics and sculpture. He was fortunate to meet Jean Bullock, a British artist who had arrived in Singapore with her husband (who served in the air force). Bullock taught Ng, in his words, “the finer aspects of sculpture making.” While helping her cast her works, he learnt how to use ciment fondu, a kind of cement, which would become his favourite material for sculpture.
Encouraged by none other than Georgette Chen, then his lecturer at NAFA, to further ceramic studies overseas, Ng continued his studies in the North Staffordshire School of Technology in Stoke-on-Trent starting from 1962. Although the school taught industrial pottery, rather than the type of studio pottery he wanted to advance, Ng was recognised by a talent-scouting body, leading to an offer of a position in the Carrigaline Pottery in Ireland as a resident designer.
Before heading to Ireland, Ng spent a year as a research student at the Farnham School of Art in Surrey. This provided his entry into the world of contemporary studio pottery: his lecturers there, Henry Hammond and Paul Barron, were contemporaries of Bernard Leach, an influential ceramist now regarded as “the father of British studio pottery.” It is likely that Ng’s time here exposed him to a wider range of British and European sculptors, whom he would later cite as reference points: Rodin, Jacob Epstein, Manzù, Giacometti, Brancusi, and Henry Moore.
He had a happy time in Ireland. He had a “good job, good pay … life was getting comfortable.” His decision to come home seems to have been driven by an amalgam of reasons. While Ng’s commercial work was well-received, it did not satisfy his desire for studio work. He wanted to set up his own studio in Singapore, with the full complement of tools and sufficient space to realise his visions. He cited concern for his ageing parents. He also wished to come back and start up a pottery workshop for NAFA, as a way of honouring Georgette Chen’s mentorship. (NAFA would later reject this proposal.) Lastly, having found some success, Ng was eager to return in a blaze of glory, having “done so well in health and life.”
This was not to be, at least not immediately. After returning to Singapore, he was unemployed for two years, worrying about money, and eventually took on a position as a designer of visual aids at the International Planned Parenthood Federation. Finally, in 1969, he bit the bullet and became a full-time artist, having built a gas kiln in his family kitchen with his father’s help and encouragement. Thereafter, he did not look back, unleashed as a relentless creative force on Singapore’s urbanising landscape. Responding to his 1970 solo exhibition, Liu Kang would remark, “Eng Teng has so many talents: so how do we reckon with him?”
Starting with a near-blank slate — to quote Georgette Chen, “there were hardly any sculptors then and no ceramic art” — Ng could formulate the terms of his art more freely than in other art forms, bringing to bear his eclectic range of influences. At the same time, demand for public art had gestated and grown on the back of the electric economic growth of the 1970s and ’80s.
The body as affliction
Like no other Singaporean sculptor, Ng understood and manipulated the human form to striking effect:
The structure of a body is a very powerful symbol of emotion and feeling; I am fascinated by the immense potential in the use of the figure.
Ng’s acute understanding of the body’s potential for contortion and failure can partly be attributed to his own ill health. His post-secondary education in 1953–4 was disrupted by tuberculosis, and he faced kidney and heart problems in the ’70s, leading to his eventual death by kidney failure and pneumonia.
In his works centred on fear and anxiety, for instance, the body is presented scrunched up on itself, a mass of trembling and tension. And illness pervades the The Last Masterpiece, a posthumous work completed by Ng’s relatives which collects, in a haunting assemblage, cotton swabs dabbed with his blood, together with a syringe and a rubber tube. In the art historian T.K. Sabapathy’s words, “the body in Eng Teng’s art appears as contaminated. The body is predominantly an afflicted entity.”
I would like to push this reading of Ng’s work further, in a direction that is strongly hinted at, yet assiduously avoided, in Ng’s interviews. This quotation from curator Constance Sheares’ interview with Ng in 1999 features prominently in the NUS Museum:
“In the Liberation series, of which Breakout is one, you use bindings. What is the significance of this figure which appears to be trying to free itself from a covering of bandages?
I think I have to keep it still a secret. It’s something very personal which I suppose in years to come, will be revealed, just like my illness of tuberculosis. I am surprised you have noted it. Yes, it has very deep significance for me. This Liberation series is in some way about the difficulty of getting out of being what you are. So, there, I have given you a little mystery!”
Sheares and Sabapathy take great pains circumambulating this moment. Sheares states that “Eng Teng offers us no clues to interpretation here,” yet immediately adds that “one is tempted to see Eng Teng’s art as autobiographical.” Sabapathy, commenting on the interview in 2003, commends Sheares for “exercising discretion,” then purports to “probe a little.” Yet Sabapathy ends up talking about Ng’s illness again, remarking that his heart surgery and dialysis “weighed on him and his thoughts continually.” But re-reading Ng’s reply, it seems that he is referring to something other than physical illness.
I cannot help but read the phrase “the difficulty of getting out of being what you are” as a confession of sorts. It explicates much about Ng’s work, his smuggling in of phallic shapes, the delightful and playful energy of his work, his occasional frisson of sass.
In Ng’s work the incipient queer potentiality of the body bristles and tries to break out, contorting and twisting itself into grotesque and wild forms. The queer body is presented as alien and afflicted, a stranger in a strange land.
“How do we reckon with him?”
In a year where retrospectives of major Singaporean artists like Cheong Soo Pieng, Teo Eng Seng, Lim Tze Peng, and Kim Lim have been lined up and keenly anticipated, the neglect of Ng Eng Teng in the 90th year since his birth is an astonishing lacuna. But if we were to revisit his work, we should go beyond anodyne presentations of Ng’s work, such as the tendency to focus on his Mother and Child works and themes of maternal love. It may be much more interesting — and illuminating — to read him as as a pioneer among other Singapore artists who have harnessed the strangeness of the queer body to shock and amaze, in fields as diverse as performance art (Josef Ng, Loo Zihan) and painting (Alvin Ong). As, to quote the poet Arthur Yap, another “gaudy boy afflicted with joy.”
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Some further reading:
- Sabapathy, T. K. Bodies and Figures: An Overview of Ng Eng Teng. Singapore: NUS Museums, 2002.
- Sabapathy, T. K. Configuring the Body: Form and Tenor in Ng Eng Teng’s Art. Singapore: NUS Museums, 2003.
- Sabapathy, T. K. Ng Eng Teng: Art and Thoughts. Singapore: NUS Museums, 1998.
- Sheares, Constance. Bodies Transformed: Ng Eng Teng in the Nineties. Singapore: NUS Museums, 1999.
Selections from the NUS Museum’s Ng Eng Teng Collection can be viewed at collectionsonline.nus.edu.sg.
Header image: Tropical Rhapsody (1972), ciment fondu, 122 x 275 x 11 cm.
