Painted between 1986 and 1990, six colour-ink works by Singaporean artist and collector Tay Beng Yam lead the contemporary section of Knight Frank’s Eastern Horizons auction this month
Before Singapore became a city of glass and steel, it was an island of forests, plantations, and wetlands. For Tay Beng Yam, born here in 1953, that landscape was where his childhood happened, not a view to admire from a distance. Riverbanks, reeds, ponds, and tropical plants became his earliest visual memories, and they have returned to his paintings ever since, reshaped by time.
Tay graduated from the Fine Arts Department of the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in the 1970s and later studied commercial art. Much of his artistic education, however, came from looking. A long-standing collector and now President of the Collectors’ Association (Singapore), he has spent decades acquiring and studying modern and contemporary Chinese painting and calligraphy, traditional painting, and modern art. Close friendships with Wu Guanzhong and Lu Yanshao, two giants of 20th-century Chinese painting, deepened his grasp of brushwork, composition, and the inner lives that artists bring to the paper. Collecting showed him what earlier masters had achieved, and painting became his way of recording what life had taught him.
The six works in Eastern Horizons, a sale presented by Knight Frank Singapore and the Singapore Palace Museum, show that exchange at work. Colour ink is Tay’s chosen language: ink spreads and pools, empty space gives each composition room, and warm colour brings it to life. Steadfast as Rock (1989), which measures 96 by 180 centimetres, stacks heavy, interlocking stone, with grasses pushing up through the cracks. Emerald Peaks · Bamboo in the Mist (1990) sets mountains of splashed ink against slopes of bamboo, grouped densely in some places and sparsely in others, as though a breeze were passing through. Verdant Mountains · Bamboo and a Serene Heart (1990) adds a crimson glow over the valley and a scattering of wildflowers. Listening to Rain in the Bamboo Grove · Returning amid Verdant Shadows (1987) places tiny figures in the grass beneath misty peaks, and Golden Rocks of Good Fortune · Auspicious Grasses Herald Spring runs threads of gold through ink-dark stone. The most intimate work, Crimson Blooms in a Sea of Ink · Growing towards the Light (1986), measures just 68.5 by 68 centimetres, with red flowers opening amid surging black ink.
Across all six, Tay paints the feeling of a place more than its outline: wind remembered, light on water, the rhythm of things growing. Rock and bamboo, long symbols of endurance and integrity in Chinese painting, here carry a more personal meaning, as markers of time, home, and a life lived close to nature.
The works will be on view from 20 to 21 November, by appointment, at the Peony Ballroom, Sands Expo & Convention Centre, alongside oils by Bei Jiaxiang and porcelain from the Song to Qing dynasties. The auction takes place there on 22 November at 12pm, and estimates for Tay’s works range from S$130,000 to S$250,000.
