GEORGE TOWN, Oct 9 — She may have lost 90 per cent of her sight almost 30 years ago but Ch’ng Seok Tin continues to do what she loves best: making art.
The Singaporean studied art in Singapore, UK, France and USA between 1971 and 1985 and also has two Masters degrees from the New Mexico State University and The University of Iowa where she majored in printmaking.
She practised various forms of art from drawing, painting, textile, photography and sculpture over the years until she lost 90 per cent of her vision in 1988.
She was only 42 when she had a fall and a month later, she was found to have a brain abscess. She had to undergo surgery to remove the brain abscess that her doctors believed was due to viral infections. The surgery was a success but she lost her vision after that.
After losing her sight, Ch’ng did not give up on art but switched to mixed medium and sculptural works instead. She has also published 13 books, most with her own illustrations and contributed articles to Chinese newspapers and magazines in China and other parts of Asia.
Recently, Ch’ng was in Penang for George Town Festival’s Arts Beyond Sight exhibition where her sculptures were exhibited in the dark for people to experience art as a visually handicapped person... by touch, sound and taste. Ch’ng also conducted art workshops for the visually handicapped and the sighted during the exhibition here.
Here, Ch’ng talks about her interest in art and the challenges the visually handicapped faces when it comes to the art industry.
In her own words:
I studied fine art, I majored in printmaking. It took some time to get used to losing my sight and figure out how to make use of the other senses and depend on feelings. And to figure out possible techniques, so I shift from 2D to 3D so I make sculptures from leather, paper, then bronze, clay. All kinds of different materials and also mixed media, collage and all these things.
Sometimes I do paintings, acrylic collage. Sometimes I need a helper if I want to distinguish colours. I get inspiration from daily life and news. I can’t read normal books so I listen to audio books quite a lot. I don’t sculpt all the time or create art regularly. Sometimes artists don’t have the inspiration. If no inspiration, maybe I won’t work for a long time.
Now I give free lessons to some small groups who like printmaking at a temple. Two years ago, I started to teach printmaking there on and off… sometimes more people, sometimes less. Sometimes they do woodcut and bookmarks. I can still feel, so I can still do printmaking with some assistance. There are a lot of possibilities, just use our senses.
A few visually handicapped people came to learn to do art in my workshops here using sticky foil and paper. They use sticky foil to stick on a paper to create shapes on it. You can form a shape and then colour it. We teach them to differentiate the colours. We use tags on the crayon, one tag is red, two is orange colour, three is yellow colour, this one is green, this one is blue. People who can’t see won’t see the colour so we explain to them which colour is a symbol of what and they use it to express their feelings.
We were invited by Steven Chan of Dialogue in the Dark, he is blind and he felt that no visually handicapped can do artwork in Malaysia. So he thought an artist from Singapore can inspire those here. We did one art exhibition for the blind in Singapore. Steven came to exhibition, he got to know me there and invited me here.
In Singapore, there are only two VH artists, me and another young artist who does wire sculptures, Victor Tan. He is quite famous in Singapore. He started doing art 20 years ago. Actually it’s not easy… you must be interested in art and then must be willing to learn and also the finance situation. You need somebody to support you.
Art is quite tough especially when we think about finance, it’s very difficult. Even now, I’m quite famous in Singapore but I don’t sell much work. I only sell a few pieces of work, only a few thousands dollars, how can I survive? Have to depend on savings. Last year, I had an exhibition and sold some pieces but this year, I only sold one piece. I still survive of course, I have to live a simple life.
We have to create awareness but in Singapore, we don’t have that kind of culture. People buy artwork for investment, sometimes it’s for feng shui, for decoration, not really to appreciate true art.
I see art more as a hobby and art therapy for the visually impaired. If you just relax and enjoy it, to express your feelings, hands on and don’t care if it’s beautiful or not, can sell or not. Just do it, it’s very relaxing. As long as you don’t think too much about money. If you think you want to become rich or sell a lot of artwork or depend on art as a livelihood, I don’t think you should do that.
Last year I went to Hong Kong to attend Touch Art Festival in November, I met a lady from Tokyo and she told me that in Tokyo there’s a gallery, called Touch Art Gallery where everything can be touched, 3D sculptures and relief art work. They allow people to go in and touch. It’s also open to sighted people to touch. We need to educate and provide opportunities like this for the VH. Like in Singapore before, all art exhibitions we can’t touch. In one of the exhibitions, Victor went to an exhibition and he can’t touch so we appealed and the Singapore Art Museum opened it for the blind to touch. That’s only one time, after that, no more again. If we have to appeal every time, it’s tiring.
