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It is a long journey ahead symbolically, and the mother in the scene will have to guide her two children through the plank platform to their stilt house on the seafront. A mother’s care and love is a recurrent theme in Dato’ Chuah Thean Teng’s works as he was very close to his mother, who was known to be one of the last in her generation to have traditionally bound feet. The woman in red with a sanggul (hair tied in a bunch at the back of the head) is cradling her toddler while a school-going daughter walks by her side with a bag and flask in hand. The path ahead is clear and all around it is serene and calm expressed through the overall clean lines and patterns. The wooden houses on stilts look peaceful with the windows opened to the serambi (verandah) for more air and light.
Teng is the world-acknowledged founder of Batik Painting and he never looked back after his break-through exhibition in 1955. His paintings, Two Of A Kind (1968) and Tell You A Secret (1987), took on iconic status when selected for Unicef greeting cards. He studied at the Xiamen (Amoy) Art Institute in China. He was honoured with a retrospective exhibition by the National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur in 1965 and by the Penang State Art Gallery in 1994. The Penang State Government conferred him the title “Dato” in 1998 and he received the Live Heritage Award in 2005. The National Art Gallery gave him a memorial exhibition in 2009. His major works are on show at Yahong Art Gallery in Batu Ferrringhi in Penang, which is a veritable museum also showcasing the batik works of his sons and grandsons.