작품 상세

The way batik-art pioneer Dato' Chuah Thean Teng played with the organic geometry of the satay-seller depicted, half-hidden, showed the artist to be a design genius. The purported satay-seller has half his face covered by a suspended circular object, and with an eye making contact. Other flesh revealed are the stubby toes of his left foot and a hand holding a fan to hasten the charcoal fire on the skewered meat grilled. Hung up on the top right is a pair of ketupat, a kind of diamond-shaped rice-cake wrapped in a woven palm-leaf pouch. This batik work incorporating humour and everyday reality reveal much more thought than the other two known Teng works of the itinerant satay-seller, also done in the 1970s. The satay-seller credo is also imprinted in Malay films like in the 1957 film, Pontianak, in which Wahid Satay played a satay-seller, thus the moniker 'Satay' in his glam name. The satay-seller also appeared in Musang Berjanggut (The Bearded Fox), the 1959 film directed by Tan Sri P. Ramlee, and with Ahmad Chetty in the hawker's role. Apart from being a pioneering innovator in batik painting, Dato' Chuah Thean Teng is known for his astute composition with flashes of humour, a teeming imagination, his colour spectrum and his play of geometry and organic. Yes, he started a world art genre, and was chosen among the world elite in the Commonwealth Commonwealth Artists of Fame exhibition, to mark Queen Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee in 1977. He was accorded a 1965 Retrospective and a 2008 Tribute, both times by the National Art Gallery, and a 1994 Retrospective by the Penang State Art Gallery. Penang  accorded him with the Dato' title (1998) and the Living Heritage status (2005). Teng, as he is more popularly known, established Yahong Art Gallery, first at Leith Street (1953) and then Batu Ferringhi (1994). He was dubbed the 'Father of Batik Painting' by Professor Michael Sullivan in his book, Chinese Art in the 20th Century (1959).