Anthony Poon

Anthony Poon Kin Soon was born on 21 April 1945 in Singapore. He trained first at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 1964, then went to London on a Lee Foundation study grant to attend the Byam Shaw School of Art from 1967 to 1970, followed by a year at the Regional College of Art in Bradford, Yorkshire, from 1970 to 1971. That British training exposed him to hard-edge and Op Art painting, which he brought back to Singapore and reworked into a distinctly local abstract idiom.

From 1976 he developed the body of work for which he is best known, the Wave Series, paintings and shaped, wave-relief canvases that moved from geometric hard edges toward more curvilinear, colour-modulated forms. He became one of the more visible artists working across both painting and large-scale public sculpture in Singapore, winning competitions for commissions that now stand at sites including the HDB Hub, the old Hill Street Police Station, Tampines Junction, the Singapore Turf Club, the St Regis Singapore, and International Plaza. In 2002 he won the Excellence Prize at the China International City Exhibition and Symposium in Beijing. In 1990 the Singapore government awarded him the Cultural Medallion for the Visual Arts, the country's highest recognition in the field.

Poon died of lung cancer on 2 September 2006 in Singapore, at age 61, surrounded by close family. In keeping with his wishes, his family donated twenty-three works, sculptures, relief paintings, and paintings, to the Singapore Art Museum, adding to sixteen pieces the museum already held. A decade later, in 2016, The Private Museum in Singapore mounted an estate exhibition of his sculptural maquettes during Singapore Art Week, and National Gallery Singapore staged a survey of his painting and public work the same year.

Institutional framing of Poon has been consistent: National Gallery Singapore and Sundaram Tagore Gallery both describe him as a pioneer of Singapore abstraction, and a 2016 National Gallery Singapore exhibition presented his Wave Series and public sculpture as central to the country's postwar modern art history. A critical essay published alongside his catalogue argued that he was among the first modern Asian artists to substantially alter the structure of the canvas and stretcher itself, building dimensional, relief-like paintings rather than flat surfaces, a claim that has become a standard reference point in later writing about him. Reviewers have also repeatedly tied his shift from hard-edge geometry to more curvilinear, colour-driven composition to a broader concern with colour as subject matter in its own right.

Poon's auction market is small, almost entirely confined to Singapore and regional Southeast Asian sale rooms, and has been climbing in a series of stepped records rather than a smooth trend. A 1970 work, Blu-Consi-Waves, set a benchmark of SGD 79,300 at 33 Auction's Singapore Autumn Sale in 2017. That stood until 2025, when Untitled (1992) sold for SGD 109,800 at 33 Auction's Spring Sale, and Aqueous Waves (1984) then sold for roughly USD 92,400 at Klas Art Auction in June 2025. The current record is Colour Waves (1986), which sold for SGD 165,100 (roughly USD 129,700 to 129,800 by market-report conversion) at Sotheby's Singapore on 25 January 2026, more than double its low estimate. Coverage of that sale, including in The Straits Times and ARTnews, treated it explicitly as a new all-time high for the artist.

Poon's market is thin by international standards, with sales concentrated among a handful of Singapore and regional auction houses, so any single result, including the current record set at Sotheby's Singapore in January 2026, should be read against a short and still-developing sales history rather than as evidence of a deep, liquid market. There is no published catalogue raisonne, which puts extra weight on provenance and on the artist's estate; no gallery is confirmed to currently represent the estate, though Sundaram Tagore Gallery in Singapore organized a 2014 exhibition of his work. The scale of his public and museum presence, especially the large holdings at the Singapore Art Museum and National Gallery Singapore, is the strongest signal of long-term institutional standing, even where auction turnover remains limited.