Blog: Art collections

Tales of an era are often expressed in various art forms. I believe these are cultural assets of our times, and I started collecting artworks from artists I personally know. Knowing the artist as a person humanises the art piece and gives so much more depth to the meaning of their work.

Kenneth W H Lee (AU)

I attended one of Kenneth’s solo art exhibitions in 2019, in a tight squeezy space at ArtShine Gallery in Ultimo. An old buddy from the alma mater Sydney University, Kenneth has been painting returning to Sydney from his Singapore entrepreneurial forays. I too have returned to this fair city after having lived intermittently in Malaysia. It’s not easy to transition and make a life of your own again having been in exciting exotic cities like in my case Kuala Lumpur, and in Kenneth’s, Singapore.

I had the honour of interviewing Kenneth to learn more about Introspection III, his third solo art exhibition: read it here.

From his bio, one can have a sense of the artist:

A Malaysian-born artist and expressionist Kenneth W H Lee, now residing in Sydney the last 30 years, weaves symbolic and metaphorical representations of human interactions through emotionally raw and visual narratives employing rich colour and space.

Kenneth, an exhibiting artist, is self-taught and from the age of two he was encouraged to express himself on paper by his artistically gifted parents and was first shown the fundamentals of drawing and the use of watercolour. Kenneth continued to experiment instinctively, further developing and mastering his style in various mediums with an initial focus on portraiture and still life in oils and acrylics.

Blessed with an exceptional gift and internal warmth, he derives great pleasure from gifting his closest friends with unique pieces of his art over the years. Kenneth sold a small number of artworks during his varsity years by accident and on request; however, he shifted his energy away from art and instead turned his attention to his academic studies. Kenneth’s first love was architecture, yet he first completed Economics and Accounting majors as well as Commercial Law & Tax as minors at the University of Sydney, the University of choice for his first Economics degree.

Kenneth has had an exciting career in asset and funds management in the real estate sector of Australia, South East Asia and the Asia Pacific region, traveling the world via work commitments with large blue chip international brand names.

Now aged fifty one and based in Sydney for a total of thirty-two years, Kenneth combines his passions in creating fine art pieces as a painter while consulting in corporate advisory. Kenneth is a father of two and a true ‘foodie’ with a passion for cooking stunningly tasty food.

Source: www.kennethwhlee.com

Malcolm Utley (AU)

Australian painter Malcolm Utley from Bellawongarah (NSW) Australia was the Australian artist of the year-long Malaysia-Australia Visual Arts Residency in 2004 at the Rimbun Dahan.

Utley has a varied art practice encompassing architecture, film, installations, painting and sculpture. He graduated with 1st Class Honours in Architecture from the University of Sydney in 1990 and was awarded the Elizabeth Munro Prize for Design and the Ruskin Rowe Prize for History. In 1993 he studied film at FAMU, the national film school in Prague, Czech Republic. From 1998 he studied painting in the 3-year course at the Charlie Sheard Painting School in Sydney.

In 2002, Utley traveled to Paris, France to work as assistant to the Australian painter Tim Maguire. Upon returning to Australia, he enjoyed a brief contract as a visiting artist teaching sculpture at four Aboriginal community schools in the central lands of South Australia, before taking up his residency at Rimbun Dahan.

Source: Rimbundahan.org

Jerome Kugan (MY)

“Red & Gold” is an art exhibition featuring new works by Jerome Kugan, presented in collaboration with curator Sharmin Parameswaran, held at RAW Art Space from Dec 9 to 15, 2017. The new works were mostly in the form of paintings and drawings represent the first fruition of a personal art project by Kugan on themes centred around the subject of the human body. In these works, Kugan manifests contemporary anxieties about the human body while imbuing the subject with his own personal take on what figurative art might mean in the context of nude painting in the history of art. His images borrow from and allude to a wide array of references, ranging from religious iconography, colour symbolism, anatomical drawings, mandalas, social taboos and censorship, androgyny, black humour, and queer culture. And yet they are decontextualised enough in their abstractness that they remain open to various interpretations. It is the artist’s intent that viewers are able to view the works without shame and in the spirit of gentle humour, that his somewhat romantic and pallid rendering of genderless figures may act as an entrypoint back into a more humanistic discourse on what it means to be human in today’s increasingly dehumanised world.

Jerome Kugan is a Sabah-born writer, musician and (now somewhat reluctantly) artist. While he’s had no formal training as a visual artist, he has previously shown his works in both traditional and non-traditional media in Art For Grabs (“Epic Understatements, 2017”; “Talismans, 2016”; “Catological, 2016”; and “With Closed Eyes, 2013”), The Annexe Gallery (2009, 2010) and Reka Art Space (2003, 2005). “Red & Gold, 2017” is his first solo art exhibition.

Source: RAW Art Space KL

First published May 2, 2019.