Lee Boon Wang

Place: Guangdong

Born: 1934

Death: 2016

Biography:

Lee Boon Wang was a Chinese-born Singaporean landscape painter, best known for his riverside and seaside paintings. He was born in Guangdong, China and emigrated to Singapore with his family as a child. He graduated from the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in 1953. He 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. 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, a left-leaning realist organization in the mid-1950s. He later joined the Singapore Watercolour Society. He had a brother, Lee Boon Yang, who became a businessman and politician, and a sister, Lee Boon Ngan, who married the painter Chua Mia Tee. He 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.