Artist's impression series – Homestead (Penang)

Palai Penang
2024 March, Homestead, Penang @ Wawasan Open University, co-organized by Galerie Balice Hertling from Paris and Blank Canvas from Penang.



Artist's impression series – Homestead (Penang)
Watercolour and gouache on acid free paper, 42 x 59.4 cm, 2024

Documentation photo by Lin Ho

The Homestead was inspired by the 16th-century Palladian Villa Valmarana, designed by Andrea Palladio. It was designed by Stark & McNeil, a British architectural firm, as the residence of Chinese merchant Lim Mah Chye (from 1919–22) and later acquired by local tycoon Yeap Chor Ee. Both were compradors, ‘middle men’ in the colonial enterprise who helped with the imperial trade networks in the 19th- and early 20th centuries; it was also a highly mobile social class that could move across different strata of colonial society, allowing them to be both local and ‘western’. Compradoric architecture can be found in treaty ports and colonial entrepôts like Shanghai, Macao, Batavia, and Hong Kong. Despite the European classical grandeur of the Homestead, there’s a hint of the owner’s cultural roots, such as the Chinese geomantic symbol ba gua found on the tympanum on the beach-facing façade. This sepia-tone watercolour painting reimagines an East Asian Palladian architectural design by embellishing the roof of the building with Chinese deities, like the statues of divinities adorning the roofs of classical European architecture.