Chng Seok Tin

Biography

In 1988 Chng Seok Tin took a group of her students to see art museums in Europe. In London, as they hurried to catch a bus, she fell and hit her head on the pavement. First came attacks of dizziness; back home in Singapore a brain abscess was found, and after surgery she had lost about 90% of her vision.

She was born on 6 October 1946 in Katong, in a family of seven children. They were poor and lived in a leaky attap house (roofed with palm leaves) in Kampung Chai Chee. Her parents wanted all the children to go to school. Chng attended Chung Cheng High School, which had an art department taught by teachers from the Shanghai Art Academy. In 1966 she entered the Teachers' Training College and at the end of that year began teaching Chinese at the Tanjong Katong Girls' School. At the same time she started taking private art lessons, then studied at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts and received a diploma in Western painting. From 1974 she wrote for Singapore newspapers and had her articles published in them.

Her studies then went on in several countries. In 1979 she received a bachelor's degree from the Hull College of Higher Education in England and in the same year showed her prints at the National Museum Art Gallery in Singapore. In 1980 the Ministry of Culture gave her an award to study advanced printmaking. In 1983 she earned a master's degree in arts from New Mexico State University, and in 1985 a master of fine arts from the University of Iowa. According to some accounts, in 1980–1981 she also worked at a printmaking workshop in Paris. In 1986 Chng became head of the printmaking department at the Lasalle-SIA College of the Arts, and at the same time worked as art editor for the Hong Kong publisher Joint Publishing Company.

After the operation she felt, by her own account, “tormented” for about a year, and then came to take a philosophical view of what had happened. The turning point, as she told it, was meeting other blind people. Another was an invitation to return to Lasalle: Brother Joseph McNally, president emeritus of the college, wrote to say that even without sight she still had a command of printmaking technique. She could “see” the colours of her prints in her mind. “I had all the basics in my mind and I had to slowly start using them,” she said; losing her sight, she added, forced her to rely on her feelings. Chng taught at Lasalle until 1997. Besides prints she made sculpture and multi-media work, drawing on the I-Ching (the Chinese “Book of Changes”) and Buddhism.

She never hesitated to comment on the social milieu in her work. In 2001 the magazine Her World named her Woman of the Year. In 2003, as a fellow of the Vermont Studio Center, she joined other artists in protesting against the United States invasion of Iraq; the trip produced both landscapes of Vermont and prints inspired by the Iraq War.

In 2005 Chng became the first person from Singapore to hold a solo exhibition at the headquarters of the United Nations. The idea came to her after she heard of a Chinese artist showing work there; an old schoolmate, Lee Fong Yang, who worked at the UN, helped her. The same year she received the Cultural Medallion, Singapore's highest award in the arts.

In 2007 she was given the Singapore Chinese Literary Award by the Singapore Literature Society. She wrote mostly in Chinese; the number of her collections is given variously, from eleven to thirteen.

A retrospective was held at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in 2011. In 2014 she was inducted into the Singapore Women's Hall of Fame, and in 2015 Singapore's Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth recognised her as a pioneer of modern printmaking in the country. In her lifetime she had more than twenty-six solo and about a hundred group exhibitions, and she also spoke up for artists with disabilities. She died on 6 September 2019 in Singapore, aged seventy-three.