Cheng Haw-Chien

Biography

In 1968 an oil painting by Cheng Haw-Chien, “At Dawn”, was selected for an exhibition of local artists at the Penang Art Museum Gallery. He was about twenty.

He was born on 4 May 1948 in Penang, into a Chinese family in Malaya (his original name was reportedly Qinglong). As a teenager he began studying Chinese brush painting and became acquainted with Western art forms. After secondary school he continued his studies in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and in 1974 he graduated from National Chengchi University in Taiwan. He had many teachers. In Hong Kong he studied with Chao Shao-an, one of the masters of the Lingnan school, and called on the scholar Rao Zongyi; in Taiwan he visited Zhang Daqian, Lang Ching-san, Liang Shih-chiu and other prominent figures of cultural life. He studied poetry, calligraphy and painting under the Buddhist monk Zhu Mo and under Liu Taixi. The Lingnan school combines Chinese ink on rice paper with techniques of Western and Japanese realism, and he counts himself as belonging to it. Of the traditional subjects he chose landscape and bird-and-flower painting, and he works in the traditional formats: fan, album, hanging scroll and horizontal scroll.

In 1969 he held his first solo exhibition in Penang. In 1974 he showed work at the Provincial Museum of Taiwan, and in 1976 at the International Art Centre in London. After university he travelled through South East Asia and Europe; his paintings “Bridge Over the River Kwai” and “Tour to the Kingdom of Buddha” were well received, as was the “Europe Tour” series with views of Cambridge and Paris in winter. In 1978 he worked as an art coordinator at a secondary school.

From 1981 he set out on a journey around the world: Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific islands, the Americas, Europe, Africa, India, Nepal, Thailand, the Philippines. He photographed and sketched, and wrote travel articles and reviews for local newspapers. By his own count, his solo exhibitions exceeded a hundred and fifty; another figure given is about 140. In 1982 he showed work at the National Art Gallery of Trinidad and at a cultural centre in Jakarta.

In 1984 he was appointed principal of the Central Academy of Art in Kuala Lumpur; the start of his tenure is also dated to 1983, and it ran until 1995. He joined the art appraisal committee of the National Art Gallery of Malaysia. In 1985 he led a delegation of Malaysian artists to a group exhibition in Taiwan, and in 1990 he took part in an exhibition of Asian calligraphy in Beijing, at the Palace Museum.

The year 1994 was a major one: a solo exhibition at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing, to which he was invited by eight organisations, among them the Chinese Artists Association and the Xu Beihong Memorial Museum. That same year he became vice-chairman of the International Calligraphy Association and head of its Malaysian branch. In 1995 he became director of the Metropolitan Gallery of Fine Arts in Kuala Lumpur, showed work at the Liaoning Provincial Museum and gave lectures at the Luxun Academy of Fine Arts. In 1996 he brought an exhibition of Malaysian artists to Beijing.

Since 1997 he has been president of the Central Research Academy of Art (the start is also dated to 1998). The degrees he claims raise questions: he describes his master’s degree in the history of fine art as conferred by Summit University in Louisiana, and his doctorate as conferred by St. George University, placed variously in Cambridge or in Oxford. The first of these is regarded as a diploma mill, and it is hard to verify these claims.

Since 2000 he has been a visiting professor at Renmin University of China in Beijing, since 2008 a professor at Changshu Institute of Technology, and since 2010 a lifelong adviser to the Ningbo Art Museum. His later exhibitions, most often titled “Hao shui qianshan”, were held in Ningbo, Zhengzhou, Nanchang, Qingdao, Hefei, Ürümqi, Dongguan, Huizhou, Shenzhen and Chongqing. In 2010 the National Art Gallery in Kuala Lumpur staged his exhibition “The Art World of Cheng Haw Chien” and published a book of the same name. His publications also include a collection of poems from 2003 and the five-volume “The Paintings of Cheng Haw Chien”.