A Closer Look at Georgette Chen's Tropical Fruits

Georgette Chen’s love of painting was a mainstay in her peripatetic life. Georgette Chen: At Home in the World at the Gallery is the first museum retrospective of the artist in more than 20 years, and traces the evolution of her artistic practice across five decades and three continents.

Still life paintings—such as Tropical Fruits —form the bulk of Chen’s artistic production. The meticulous set-ups of fruit, tableware and furniture not only captured the vivid colours and rich textures of Malaya, but also enabled to hone her artistic technique.

In the accompanying catalogue, curator Teo Hui Min traces the innovations that Chen employed over the years as her practice involved. Here is an excerpt from her essay, “Georgette Chen: Beyond the Nanyang”, which examines how Chen arranged the fruits in her composition:

Chen was an avid cataloguer of tropical fruit through her time in Southeast Asia. She delighted in exploring their varied colours, forms, and textures, which were a captivating and distinctive contrast to the flora and fauna she experienced in France and China. However, it was her existing disposition toward still life painting, along with the distinctive compositional strategies she had developed prior to her arrival in Malaya, that culminated in her increasingly complex and innovative representations of everyday local subjects. Tropical Fruits (1969) is the largest known still life that Chen completed, and features a complex arrangement of fruits on a table or in baskets. Sheares rightly identifies the influence of Cézanne in Chen’s “distortions of nature for pictorial balance,” demonstrated in this work by the tilting of the central basket towards the viewer such that the pineapple and other fruits inside can be viewed from above, as in The Waxed Duck. Her use of multiple viewpoints in a single composition is also evident here in the side-view of the basket of rambutans on the left, as if seen from a grounded perspective directly in front of the table. It is the inclusion of a bunch of red tropical bananas, uncannily suspended in the upper right of the painting, that underscores Chen’s further compositional experimentation. The inclusion of two axes of viewing in a single scene, where the verticality of the bananas meets the horizontality of the table, creates visual dynamism and balance in the composition. In this way, it is evident that by the late 1960s Chen’s art had advanced the compositional framing of her chosen subjects.

This innovation is emphasised through a further comparison with earlier examples of still life painting by Chen from the 1930s that show more stringent adherence to the conventions of European still life painting, such as in Still Life with Cut Apple and Orange (c. 1930s) and Still Life with Grapes (c. 1930s.). These early works demonstrate fixed- perspectival views of subjects that also correspond in their arrangement to the orientation of the canvas.

Extracted from: Teo, Hui Min. “Georgette Chen: Beyond the Nanyang,” in Georgette Chen: At Home in the World, ed. Storer, Russell (Singapore: National Gallery Singapore, 2021), 88-89.

The last episode of the video series “At the Conservator’s Bench” takes an even closer look at Tropical Fruits with the help of specialist equipment: a microscope and professional lights. Filzah Mohd Amir, a paintings conservator at the Heritage Conservation Centre, tell us more about through how careful study can shed new light on once-familiar works. For example, examining Tropical Fruits at 50x magnification revealed traces of charcoal. This meant that Chen carefully planned the arrangement of the fruits before committing paint to the canvas, a testament to Chen’s meticulous and methodical way of working.