郑明炎

TAY Beng Yam is a Singapore contemporary artist, born in Singapore in 1953. In the 1970s, he graduated from the Fine Arts Department of the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts and later pursued further studies in commercial art. For decades, he has sustained an enduring engagement with painting, collecting, and the broader world of art.

TAY’s painting begins, above all, with lived experience. Growing up in a Singapore where forests, plantations, wetlands, and open landscapes still formed part of everyday life, nature was never something distant or picturesque, but a place in which childhood unfolded. Riverbanks, reeds, ponds, wooded areas, and tropical vegetation became some of his earliest and most enduring visual memories, returning to his paintings many years later in transformed forms.

At the same time, his long-standing practice of collecting and studying modern and contemporary Chinese painting and calligraphy, traditional Chinese art, and modern art has deepened his understanding of brushwork, composition, and the inner worlds of different artists. His close exchanges with artists such as Wu Guanzhong and Lu Yanshao further enriched his understanding of art and broadened his aesthetic experience.

Collecting allowed him to encounter the achievements of those who came before him; painting, in turn, became a way of giving form to his own understanding of life.

Color ink has become one of the central languages of TAY’s practice. The diffusion and fluidity of ink, together with the expressive use of empty space, merge with the warmth and vitality carried by color. Within this pictorial space, the forests, lakes, and wetlands of his youth converge once more with the visual sensibility shaped through decades of collecting, looking, and reflection.

What he paints is not simply the outward appearance of nature, but the wind held in memory, light moving across the surface of water, the rhythm of plants as they grow, and the sensations that remain from living in close proximity to the natural world. The landscapes that once accompanied his childhood gradually become visual memories of time, homeland, and life itself.

Beginning with nature, passing through years of collecting and looking, and eventually returning to nature, TAY’s painting has taken shape at the meeting point of lived experience and artistic experience. It is through this continual convergence that he has gradually developed a visual language distinctly his own.