This spectacular oil painting by Cheong Soo Pieng completes the trio of works by our master Singaporean artists. Going to the Market II ticks all the boxes for Soo Pieng's mature and most characteristic style: the slender, elongated wayang kulit-derived forms that appear around 1970; the golden hues pierced by planes of local colour; and the everyday life of ordinary people going about their business. These people are at one with nature; they signify the Holy Grail of Soo Pieng's musings on ideal human existence, where beauty meets basic needs. A genre painting it may be but the execution is refined in the extreme.

Set in Bali, where Soo Pieng spent so much time after his pioneering 1952 trip with Nanyang Pioneer artists Liu Kang, Chen Chong Swee and Chen Wen Hsi, it shows six young women clustered together carrying their wares in baskets on their heads and in their arms. Like a group of late Gothic Florentine angels, with gazes averted, they move as a single body. Heading towards the market beyond the picture border in the landscape that provides such bounty, their form as a rectangular block retains something of Soo Pieng's late 1960s formalist, contained geomorphic abstractions, as seen in his 1967 work Imagination, sold in these rooms for a premium-inclusive SGD122,000 (US$91,753) on 1 April 2023.

The background is a characteristically Nanyang fusion of Chinese ink painting and European modernism with Southeast Asian subject matter: take Southern Song landscapes by the likes of Mi Youren (1072-1151) for the gentle, suffused brushwork and add Impressionist explorations of the effect of light on vision, and you have the spare yet atmospheric evocation of Balinese agriculture and village life. The landscape increases the formalist enquiry of the figuration, extending the containment of place and person within the central rectangular enclosure. It also typifies the way in which Soo Pieng often bolts figures together with landscape and can be seen as a device in other works of this style and date, such as Mother's Love, 1976, sold in these rooms on 27 May 2023 for premium-inclusive SGD 616,100 (US$455,324).

Viv Lawes
Programme Director, Art History, Sotheby's Institute of Art
Course Leader, University of the Arts London
Senior Lecturer, City & Guilds of London Art School