Georgette Chen

Biography

In the autumn of 1930 the Salon d’Automne in Paris showed two paintings by Georgette Chen, then twenty-four. One of her works was bought that same year by the Musée du Jeu de Paume, which was a rare thing for an artist from Asia.

She was born on 23 October 1906 in Zhejiang province, under the Qing dynasty, as Chang Li Ying. She was the fourth of twelve children. Her father, Zhang Renjie (Chang Sen Chek, born Zhang Jingjiang), was an antique dealer with businesses in Paris, London and New York, and he gave money to Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary cause. Her childhood was spent travelling between Paris and China; her mother allowed the children to speak only the Shanghainese dialect at home, so that they would not forget where they came from. Georgette finished high school in the United States.

In 1926 she spent a year at the Art Students League of New York. Life in Paris suited her better, and in 1927 she went back there, to the Académie Colarossi and the Académie Biloul. Her parents paid for her studies but never fully accepted her choice of profession, believing that an artist could hardly earn a living. Later Chen was counted among the School of Paris, the loose circle of mostly immigrant artists working in the city.

After the Salon d’Automne her work was shown at the Salon des Tuileries and the Salon des Indépendants. In the same year, 1930, she married Eugene Chen Youren, a diplomat and former foreign minister of the southern Kuomintang government (the Chinese Nationalist Party); they had been introduced in 1927 by Sun Yat-sen’s widow. It was his second marriage. In 1931 the couple moved to Shanghai, and when the Sino-Japanese War began in 1937, to Hong Kong, where her husband took part in anti-Japanese activities. In 1944 the Japanese authorities arrested them, held them under house arrest and moved them to Shanghai. Eugene Chen died there in May 1944. After the war the painter travelled to France with plans for an exhibition of Chinese landscapes, but the museum curator with whom she had made the arrangements had died in the meantime, and the plan was dropped.

In 1947 she married Ho Yung Chi, a political historian and a former aide of her first husband. In 1949 the Asia Institute in New York held a major solo exhibition of hers: Chinese landscapes and portraits painted after the war. That same year the couple moved to Paris, and Chen took part in the Salon d’Automne for the last time.

In 1951, longing for Asia, she and her husband settled in Penang, in Malaya, where she taught at Han Chiang High School. In 1953 the Chinese Chamber of Commerce in Singapore showed eighty of her works, among them still lifes of local fruit and views of Penang and Ipoh. There she met Lim Hak Tai, president of the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA); he invited her to teach, but she declined at the time. That same year she finalised her divorce from Ho in Singapore and stayed in the city for good.

From 1954 Chen taught part-time at NAFA, and her students included Dorothy Bordass and Ng Eng Teng. According to one account she left in 1981, according to others she taught until 1980; I would put it cautiously as “about thirty years”. As early as 1955 she called herself a Singaporean and built a house on Siglap Plain, and she became a citizen in 1966. She learned Malay and took the Malay name Chendana, “sandalwood”: her Malay friends were looking for a name with the syllable “Chen”, and of the many suggestions she chose this one. Her paintings of these years show rambutans, the Singapore River, Sikh guards and Buddhist monks, whom she painted for the colour of their turbans and robes. She applied a Western manner to local subjects, and together with Liu Kang, Chen Chong Swee, Chen Wen Hsi and Cheong Soo Pieng she is counted among the pioneers of the Nanyang style, the Singapore painting that joined Asian subjects to Western training; in that circle she was a rare woman.

In 1982 she was awarded Singapore’s Cultural Medallion, but because she was ill in hospital, her student Ng Eng Teng received it for her. In 1985 the National Museum Art Gallery in Singapore showed 172 of her works, and in 1986 a solo exhibition opened at the National Art Gallery in Kuala Lumpur.

Georgette Chen died on 15 March 1993 at Mount Alvernia Hospital. In 1994 her house on Siglap Plain was sold at auction, and the proceeds went to a scholarship for art students. About fifty forgotten paintings were found in two rooms of the house, and 53 of them were given to the Singapore Art Museum; its collection now holds 104 of her works. Retrospectives were held there in 1997, and National Gallery Singapore staged the exhibition “Georgette Chen: At Home in the World” from November 2020 to September 2021.