Born to the beautiful garden city of Singapore, Swee Leng (赖瑞龙) has been passionate about painting since his childhood days. He explored Art, particularly fine arts, with respectable teachers. The artist’s important foundational years in fine arts was spent learning under the late Mr Fan Chang Qian, a great master in the Lingdong district of China, well known for his Wu-style paintings of orchids and bamboo.
Swee Leng went on to pursue Western fine arts at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts. Even after his graduation, he continued to learn and practiced under many eastern and western masters of great skills and techniques. Of significance, was his mentorship under the late Professor Chao Shao-An in Hong Kong, a renowned master whose origin is in the Lingnan area of China.
These rich and concrete fundamentals certainly helped in developing Swee Leng’s unique art style. Swee Leng developed his unique art style over the years. He is most widely known for his Chinese ink paintings of Nanyang themes, such as coconuts trees, bamboos, tropical birds (myna, swallows, sparrows etc), fowls (roosters, goose etc) and flowers (plum blossoms, orchids, lotus etc). Swee Leng paints with intriguing free-hand brush strokes on tranquil and meaningful compositions. The tasteful depth and simple grace embodies the traditional authenticity in Swee Leng’s artworks, which is highly commended by many around the world.
Swee Leng has held more than 10 solo and countless group exhibitions in Singapore and abroad. Having been invited to represent Singapore by the Singapore Tourism Promotion Board and the Ministry of Culture (now the Ministry of Information and the Arts (MITA)), and appointed panel judge for some of these events, Swee Leng is a familiar veteran in the local art scene. He also sits as committee member for various local and overseas art groups and takes an active role in promoting traditional Chinese art in contemporary times.
Swee Leng’s Chinese ink paintings are represented at galleries locally and abroad. Today, many of his art works are collected by private and corporate art collectors/ art lovers around the world. Swee Leng also spends significant amount of time engaging students in the exploration of traditional Chinese art techniques, styles and compositions.