Chia Yu Chian : The Hospital Series 1980

…Chia’s works often depicted figures, in various shapes and forms. His figures from the 1970s and into the 1980s include the Hospital Series, when he was compelled to be hospitalized due to various debilitating ailments. He spent a few months on and off in the hospital. But his art continued to run rings around such constraints. If he was rendered fragile or weakened by his unstable health, the paintings and drawings of the period do not exhibit such. Instead, in a series of over 25 paintings and many drawings, the otherwise anonymous Hospital series, named for its depictions of the hospital in which Chia was temporarily resident, reveals much about Chia’s irrepressible energy as an artist. The paintings and drawings are a lucid combination of daily observations as well as acute sensitivities to the eventfulness that connote the experience of being in and visiting a hospital. Between waiting rooms, the nurses’ station and open wards, Chia offers an unexpected perspective into what would appear to be private moments in the lives of the community. His ability to compose large groups of people as well as arrange his paintings with as few as pairs or single patients reclining on a bed bring a sober but equally imaginative reflexivity to the paintings. By this we refer to Chia giving us just enough information in his compositions to figure out the context of the goings-on, but also managing to maintain a sense of the confidential befitting the medical incident deemed as necessarily and only privy, to patient and practitioner. These are uncomplicated pictures of people and their happenstance, in a setting that coincidentally is the hospital. One speculates that had Chia been resident in a large boarding house in the middle of Rome during the height of an Indian summer full of activity, he would have been able to document just as aggressively and accurately, the liveliness evident in his surroundings.

~ Bridget Tracy Tan, Director, Art & Corporate Knowledge, Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts

Medical Report 1980, 61cm x 82cm, oil on board

By Appointment 1980, 51cm x 69cm, oil on board

Affectionate Letter 1980, 61cm x 82cm, 0il on board

Anguish 1980, 61cm x 82cm, oil on board

Suffering Patience 1980, 61cm x 82cm, oil on board

sketch_University Hospital 1977, 28cm x 38cm, ink on paper

sketch_The Nurse And The Doctor, 23cm x 33cm, ink on paper

sketch_The Patient And The Doctor, 28cm x 38cm, ink on paper