The First Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Chew Teng Seng was born in Kuala Terengganu, Malaysia in 1938, andat the age of twelve began a six-year apprenticeship with his father who was a commercial artist and teacher. He gained his early formal art training at teacher training colleges in Malaysia in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The period 1967-72 was spent in Michigan in the United States where he taught painting, lite drawing and printmaking, and completed a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. In 1972 he returned to Malaysia to establish theFine Arts program tor the Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang, and between 1983 and 1986 completed a doctorate on paper-making at New York University, New York. ChewTeng Seng has held numerous solo exhibitions in the United States and Malaysia as well as in Australia (where he received the Australian Government Cultural Award in 1978). He has also participated extensively in international group exhibitions, including '10th Biennial', Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1969; 'Man & His World', Montreal, Canada, 1970; 'Contemporary Malaysian Art 1965-78', Commonwealth Institute, London, England, 1978; 'Exhibition of International Prints', Chiang Mai University, Chiang Mai, Thailand, 1987; 'Seni Lukis: Contemporary Malaysian Art Exhibition', touring Germany, 1990-91; and 'Tradition, the Source of Inspiration', Fukuoka Art Museum, Japan, 1990-91. Since 1963 Chew TengSenghas received numerous awards and grants, the most recent being a research grant in 1991 to study traditional paper-making in the ASEAN region. In 1989 he represented Malaysia as a printmaker at the First ASEAN Symposium on Aesthetics, Workshop and Exhibition, National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur. His work is widely represented in national and inter­ national public, corporate and private collections. Chew Teng Seng currently teaches printmaking and paper-making at Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang. He lives and has a studio in Penang. Chew Teng Seng is technically ac­ complished in a range of media, and has practised extensively as a painter of oils and watercolours. However, he is best known as a printmaker with a passion tor creative and experimental paper-making. Earlier works which featured joss paper and objects with traditional associations imaged the plight of Chinesecultureand traditions in the modern age. T he resemblance of some works to MALAYS I A CHEW TENG BENG fossilised nature can be construed as metaphorical comments on the precarious fate of traditional ways within the vicissitudes of modernity. Theworks in his more recent 'Coralscape' series allude to the human condition and nature itself and are less concerned with voicing social problems and issues of ethnic identity. T hey are subtle, lamenting whispers of resigned nostalgia. Acknowledging the present global concern tor a quality of lite that depends on the quality of the environment, one notes not only the recycling of vegetable wastes into paper, but also the symbolic connotations of the environmental problem conveyed through the images of corals. The battered amoebic configurations speak of the earth's ageand thehuman wisdom which must prevail over destructive exploitation of natural and human resources. Zainol Abidin Bin Ahmad Shariff 23 Coralscape series- 2 1991 Handmade paper 112x81cm Collection: The artist Bottom Coralscape series 1990 Handmade paper 61x75cm Collection: The artist