Yip Cheong Fun - Child Portraiture

Child Portraiture

Yip Cheong Fun used to visit the Malay Kampongs at Geylang Lorong 3 after the early morning boat trips very often in the 1950s. And he would often take pictures of the children living there and gave them supplementary copies on the subsequent visit. One of the photographic works that Yip was very fond of was the one with a young boy looking straight into the camera with his hands placed on a wooden beam. His brother stood behind the child and held tightly onto the wooden beams as well. “4 hands and 2 eyes are all in one row,” Yip said while touching this precious piece of photograph, “what is most outstanding is the child’s eyes.” Although Yip did not reveal his feelings towards this photograph, the inclusion of a wooden beam that created distance and the four hands tightly holding on to it that created tension suggested some of Yip’s thoughts of childhood. Indeed, Mr. Andrew Yip, a psychologist, believed that Yip Cheong Fun’s work on child portraiture was affected by his early childhood which was filled with his memories of fleeing from floods, famine and wars in China and the difficult time living in Singapore with his mother. The photograph “A Father’s Care”, where a father was trying to help his daughter to get down from a large piece of rock, would be deeply moving if one understood that Yip has lost his father at four.

Bridget Tracy Tan, Director of Gallery and Theatre in the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in Singapore, commented on Yip Cheong Fun’s child portraiture: "Yip was known as a child-portrait photographer in his time, made famous by his many images of children, some dark, some compelling, some uncannily exhilarating, and others still reserved, impenetrable…. The depth of Yip’s perception is as much about the children as it is about himself. If we read a burden of anxiety upon a face, we understand full well that Yip’s childhood was not an unblemished one. If we read the light of innocence and imagination upon a face, then we know Yip’s experiences bore the same if not as a child himself, then as that within his own children, all six of them. If we catch the outbreak of happiness through smiles and laughter, we know that this kind of joy is not limited to heady childhood, but lives on well into old age.”