Preferring to work with the same subject matter over long periods of time, Wong's oeuvre has often been categorised serially, with his paintings of nudes, lotuses, and flesh being particularly prominent.

These calligraphers inherited the aesthetic sense of amateurism (as opposed to the professionalism of court painters) of dynastic Chinese scholar-officials, favouring spontaneity and an affinity for literature and belle lettres.

[9][10] This familial setting would have an enduring influence on Wong; his early New York days would be marked by explorations into calligraphic aesthetics, and he would produce collages that fragmented and reassembled his mother's calligraphy throughout his career.

Impressed by her son's sketches of figures in magazines, Chu arranged for Wong to take drawing lessons from family friend Liu Kang.

In 1957, Chen moved out of the Chinese High School Teachers' Quarters into his home and studio at 5 Kingsmead Road, where he hosted close students and conducted more in-depth art lessons.

[15][16] This aesthetic direction is especially obvious in the oil painting Bicycle (1959), "demonstrating the teenager's interest in the cubist fragmentation of a flat pictorial plane and stark angular forms".

[1] Perhaps more evident in his oil paintings, Wong's subject matter also conformed to the ideals of the Nanyang School—to depict the lived reality of Southeast Asia.

[18] This exhibition, held at the National Library from July 1–5 (with an extended day),[16] made 19-year-old Wong the youngest Malayan artist to hold a solo show.

The Art Students League, which Wong Keen enrolled in from 1961-1966, played a significant part in educating a new generation of artists working with recourse to abstract expressionism.

[5][22] Wong enrolled in the Life Drawing, Painting and Composition course instructed by faculty members Morris Kantor, Vaclav Vytlacil, and Sidney Gross over the period 1961-1965.

[9][5] Wong earlier years in New York were marked by a degree of poverty, requiring him to take up part-time jobs on top of selling his paintings.

Among the most commonly cited sources of influence were Willem de Kooning, Francis Bacon, Richard Diebenkorn, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, and Mark Tobey.

[1][5][24] Part of Wong's study was outside of his curriculum at the League, as he sought out, interacted with, and gained insights from pioneering abstract expressionist artists such as Hans Hofmann and Theodoros Stamos.

"[30] An appraisal by his lecturer Sidney Gross was published and translated in both American and Singaporean newspapers:"I remember vividly the first time I saw his watercolours [sic] and drawings.

[4] Wong eventually decides to join a programme in London's St. Martin's School of Art, engaging in sketching as well as "making full use of the opportunities provided by museums and galleries".

[4] Wong's student years in New York were a new formative period, where he turned away from earlier Nanyang School practices into more contemporary aesthetic ideas.

[1] Wong brought into gestural strokes the idea of colour tonality, derived also from East Asian calligraphy and his training in the Chinese ink medium.

Antony Nicholin and Peter Stroud wrote of this synthesis:"Utilising gesture as a primary expressive vehicle, Keen's paintings vary from a highly personalised lyrical figuration to extreme abstraction.

[5][42] Commenting on a representative work of the period, Arms Stretching (1963), Ma Peiyi observes through the circular structuring of Wong's nude forms his attempt in engaging more stylistically with the shape of his subjects "without compromising on [their] basic anatomical proportions.

Utilising Bada's sparse yet expressive compositional style as a scaffold for pictorial innovation, the series is empty of imagery but striking in its poetic subtleties; form and atmosphere are evoked through delicate spatial arrangements and rhythmic, gestural brushstrokes.

[4] Artists represented or exhibited by Keen Gallery included Patrick O'Brien, Serge Lemoyne, Lee Shi-Chi, Jenny Chen, Ming Fay, Camilo Kerrigan, Edward Evans, Tino Zago, Dennis Hwang, Michiko Edamitsu, George Bethea, and Norman Barish.

"[5] Antecedences to the Torso series were first exhibited at Gallery Triform, Taiwan, where 20 "recent works, mostly abstracted forms inspired by female nudes" were shown.

[66][67] A review of the exhibition remarked that "Wong Keen's recent works were mostly based on the human form; with twisted brushstrokes he retained his usual abstract style.

This series formed perhaps Wong's clearest repudiation and redefinition of the traditional inspirations and cultural moulds that shaped his practice, as Kwok and Ong have written: "Caesura works on the theme of destruction and rebirth.

[4] This initial set of works from this series was largely completed from 1996-1997 as Wong moved back to Singapore and travelled through Thailand, Bali, Java, and China, incorporating the new images of Asia he garnered into his paintings.

[76] Commenting on a representative work on rice paper, Ma Peiyi wrote:"In the case of Lotus XX (1999), Wong Keen appears to have unified the spatial approach of Bada with that of another Western artist he deeply admires, Richard Diebenkorn.

While the composition reads entirely abstract when comprehended through the relations of colour, line and shape, a lotus pond becomes visually apparent once the viewer subsumes the image within the signified context of its title.

[24] As introduced in the exhibition catalogue:"In these ink expressions, the female nude that flows into form through his dynamic and fluid brushstrokes move through light, sensual space; is devoid of identification yet concrete in her evocative gesture.

These paintings continued Wong's innovative ink-like use of acrylic pigments on rice paper, and can be considered an elaboration of the Formation series.

[87][88] The pictorial language of Flesh is also a metaphor for what Wong understands us society's habit of mindless consumption, especially of women; this is expressed through the mutually implicated forms of fast-food burgers and the female nude.