Lee Boon Wang (1 January 1934 – 30 October 2016) was a Chinese-born Singaporean landscape painter, best known for his riverside and seaside paintings. Many of his paintings are exhibited at the

National Gallery Singapore ms, Galeri Kebangsaan Singapura ta, சிங்கப்பூர் தேசிய கலைக்கூடம் , logo = National_Gallery_Singapore_logo.svg , image = Interior_of_the_National_Gallery_Singapore.jpg , caption = Interior of ...

Early life

Lee Boon Wang was born on 1 January 1934 in

Guangdong Guangdong (, ), alternatively romanized as Canton or Kwangtung, is a coastal province in South China on the north shore of the South China Sea. The capital of the province is Guangzhou. With a population of 126.01 million (as of 2020) ...

, China. He emigrated to Singapore with his family as a child. He had a brother,

Lee Boon Yang Lee Boon Yang ( zh, s=李文献, p=Lǐ Wénxiàn; born 1 October 1947) is a Singaporean a former politician who served as Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts between 2003 and 2009, Minister for Manpower between 1992 and 2003 ...

, who became a businessman and politician, and a sister, Lee Boon Ngan, who married the painter

Chua Mia Tee Chua Mia Tee (; born 25 November 1931) is a Chinese-born Singaporean artist known for his social realist oil paintings capturing the social and political conditions of Singapore and Malaya in the 1950s and 60s. Chua was involved in the Equat ...

. Boon Wang graduated from the

Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA); (Standard Chinese: 南洋艺术学院; ms, Akademi Seni Halus Nanyang; ta, நன்யாங் அகாடமி ஆஃப் ஃபைன் ஆர்ட்ஸ்) is a publicly-funded post-secondary ar ...

in 1953.

Career

Boon Wang began his career by teaching at his alma mater, the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts. He subsequently worked in advertising, first for S. H. Benson and later for

Leo Burnett Worldwide Leo Burnett Worldwide, Inc., also known as Leo Burnett Company, Inc., is an American advertising company, founded on August 5, 1935, in Chicago by Leo Burnett. In September 2002, the company was acquired by Publicis Groupe, the world's third l ...

. By the 1970s, he became a full-time landscape painter. He painted many scenes by the river and the sea. Many of his paintings were acquired by the National Gallery Singapore. It was also exhibited at the Ngee Ann Cultural Centre and the Empress Place Museum Gallery. Boon Wang was a co-founder of the

Equator Art Society The Equator Art Society was an artists' group founded in 1956 in Singapore, known for promoting Social realism, social realist art. The Equator Art Society sought to represent the realities and struggles of the masses, depicting Singapore's work ...

, a left-leaning realist organization in the mid-1950s. He later joined the Singapore Watercolour Society.

Personal life and death

Boon Wang had a son and two daughters from his first marriage. He was then married to Helen Teo for four decades. Boon Wang underwent surgery for pancreatic cancer in 2014 and relapsed with colon cancer in 2016. He died on 30 October 2016 at the St Andrew's Community Hospital in Singapore.

References

1934 births 2016 deaths Painters from Guangdong Chinese emigrants to Singapore Chinese landscape painters Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts alumni Singaporean artists Singaporean painters Singaporean people of Teochew descent Deaths from cancer in Singapore {{Singapore-bio-stub