Progress and Advancement

Yu Yu Yang

First placed in Singapore: 1989

Raffles Place, near the former UOB Building

-

Patron: Lien Ying Chow

This pairing of abstraction and realism in this work is remarkable...and according to T.K. Sabapathy a direct response to the demands of the patron, who unusually received higher billing in the label on this work than the artist himself.
Yu Yu Yang (aka Yang Ying Feng) produced many realistic sculptures in the 1940s and 50s, but the realistic figures and reliefs at the bottom of this work look like his first return to such realism in many years.

Said OUB Founder and patron (credited on the label) Lien, "The sculpture will encourage the younger generation to strive harder for a better future for their country as it traces back Singapore's history." (source: "$600,000 sculpture wows city crowd", Straits Times, 5 Aug, 1989)

The Straits Times coverage of the event was very confident in its reading of the sculpture: "The swirl of the S-shaped sculpture depicts a dragon, representing the vitality and strength of Singapore as one of the four dragons of Asia."

Last updated: Jul-23-2022