Books & Catalogues

US$60 per copy (excluding postage)

Heartlands: Home and Nation in the Art of Ong Kim Seng is, in many ways, the most ambitious enterprise of Singapore’s best-known exponent of the art of watercolour. This book documents the artworks of Ong Kim Seng that celebrate the significance of Singapore’s public housing landscape, built by the Housing and Development Board since 1960. The paintings were exhibited in a show of the same name at the Singapore Art Museum in October 2008, together with a video presentation.

His most important old paintings of heartland scenes are preserved here, alongside evocative photos of these places, most of which have long since been rebuilt. These pictures provide the foundation for the main focus of this book – the major new works by Ong Kim Seng in an innovative style he calls “realist surrealism”. Vital images of scenes that now live only in the memory are incorporated into seemingly everyday settings in the present. With this fantastic juxtaposition, he invites the viewer to appreciate the meaning of the only home that he has known and embraced, in the homeland that he cherishes.