artcommune gallery presents ‘Batik Brilliance: Seah Kim Joo’s Ingenuity Undyed’, featuring over ten seminal batik works by Singaporean artist Seah Kim Joo (b. 1939). A second-generation local artist, Seah Kim Joo (b. 1939, Singapore) was active in the Singapore and Malaysian art scenes between the early 1960s and 1980s, and was well known for his practice across oil painting, watercolour, woodcut, and batik.
Curated by Yang Jye-Ru, Batik Brilliance: Seah Kim Joo’s Ingenuity Undyed aims to highlight the distinctive appeal of batik as a lesser-examined medium within the narrative of early Nanyang art. The exhibition features works such as Cock Fighter, Barges in Singapore, Mother and Child, Two of a Kind, Malay Kampung, and Abstract Cityscape, which capture dynamic relationships between people, architecture, animals, and natural environments. These compositions transform landscape into visual spaces that reflect social structures and historical atmospheres, rather than functioning merely as exotic imagery.
Through Seah Kim Joo’s works, this exhibition invites visitors to reconsider the notion of “Nanyang”—not merely as a geographic or stylistic label, but as a visual culture produced, circulated, and reinterpreted under specific historical conditions. At the same time, the exhibition offers a rare opportunity to rediscover the artistic vitality of a highly influential master who has been largely absent from active artistic production in recent decades.
