Sun Yee
BORN: 1919
HOMETOWN: ZHEJIANG, CHINA
LIVES AND WORKS: SINGAPORE
Sun Yee was born in Zhejiang, China. She studied at the Xinhua Art Academy in Shanghai and the University of Japan in Tokyo before going to France where she studied with notable French modernist, Fernand Leger. Her works have been met with successful exhibitions in France and Japan. A competent artist of Chinese brush and oil mediums, she has held exhibitions at the Salon des Beaux Arts in Paris in 1953.
Having settled in Singapore since 1954, Sun Yee established the Singapore Academy of Arts and was an active participant in the emerging Malayan art world. Her first exhibition in Singapore took place in 1954, after which, she travelled extensively in Malaya, Thailand and Borneo, studying and painting local landscapes and subjects. In her art and writings, she advocated the development of localised visual idioms based in and around local subject matters. In 1963, she held an exhibition in Singapore titled ‘Flowers of Nanyang’ where her works depicted local and regional botanical species through the medium of Chinese ink.