ANTHONY POON
Anthony Poon’s most well known in Singapore’s art scene during the 70s and 80s by his innovative style, experimenting with works of bright colour and geometric shapes, as well as 3-dimensional installation works. His unique style of work during that era was influenced by artistic movements spreading throughout London, the most prominent inspirations being Geometric Abstraction, Hard Edge Painting and Op (Optical) Art. Starting from the series titled “Kite”, it reflected inspiration from optical art that he witnessed in London when furthering his studies there in the 1970s, featuring patterns from traditional malay kites and their motifs, painted onto canvases of unorthodox geometric shapes. His most well known series of “Wave” defined his career the most, experimenting with curvilinear shapes both on 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional mediums, spanning from acrylic to metal, consistently exploring the complexities of line, form, colour and shape in his works, never deviating from it.
Red Frequency Waves
(Left: Anthony Poon, 'Red Frequency Waves', 1985, Acrylic on Canvas, 189 x 189 x 5.7 cm (framed). Photo from National Heritage Board, https://www.roots.gov.sg/Collection-Landing/listing/1026497)
Red frequency waves is part of the Wave series of work, where it was submitted to the 1983 UOB competition and won. Inspired by the curvilinear form of frequency waves, the canvases consisted of undulating, billowing planes of color. Through such motions implied by the forms on canvas, it shows a rebelling against the static nature of painting, filling works with movement and light.
Red Frequency Waves is a part of a larger body of work, which is Anthony Poon’s Color Frequency Wave Series that started in the late ’70s and explored the curvilinear form of a frequency wave. Throughout his wave series, Poon strictly adhered to the systematic use of colors — titling his works using the codes of paint color charts (e.g. CR for cadmium red). This makes the technical aspects of his practice a key point in the interpretation and appreciation of his works.
Black and White
(Right: Anthony Poon, 'Black and White', 1970,
Acrylic on canvas, 186 x 186 x 2.5 cm (framed).
Photo from Google Arts and Culture,
https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/black-and-white-anthony-poon/MQGWY9yEWFZuVw)
This piece consists of a repetitive series of overlapping squares, rendered in thin white (and/or thick, black) lines, placed at precise distances from one another. The overlapping forms, inconsistently decreasing or increasing sizes, create an illusion of depth and three-dimensionality.
Black and White consists of repetitive, overlapping squares of different sizes rendered in thin lines. Upon viewing the display, Black and White creates spots of shadows in between intersections of the squares and their lines, an allusion to the Hermann grid, an optical illusion discovered where large spaces in between grids of contrasting coloured grids created “spots” of shadows at where lines created intersections within the work. Although it is rendered in monochrome, the work is dynamic, eye-catching and strangely hypnotic.