He gave up a rising career in the US to help art education in Malaysia. HIMANSHU BHATT talks to veteran educator Chew Teng Beng.

AS a small boy in his native Terengganu of the idyllic 40s and 50s, Chew Teng Beng was taught by his father, an artist and a teacher, to manually grind Chinese ink out of blocks of solid black dye.

He was taught to make paintbrushes himself and to wash them as well as to scrape signboards for painting. He made outings with his father, meticulously sketching the landscapes and people he saw.

“My ambition was to be a doctor,” he remembers now. “But unfortunately, I couldn’t stand the sight of blood.”

Instead, it was a different kind of calling that his blood was warming towards.

Dr Chew Teng Beng, 68, is today a respected authority who served, among others, on the National Advisory Council on Culture.

He headed the country’s first ever fine arts department at university level.

A prodigy in his youth, the Fulbright-Hays scholar has overseen the growth of formal art education in Malaysia from its most early stages.

Today he looks backs on a distinguished life that is grounded on the very fundamentals of hard work and imagination nurtured in his childhood.

“If I don’t paint or do creative work every day I feel edgy,” he says.

Most poignantly, Chew should be known for giving up a rising career among the finest academic circles in the US to return to Malaysia when there was little commercial exposure to art here.

Soon after graduating with a Masters degree from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1970, he was appointed to head the fine arts programme in Siena Heights University while only in his early 30s.

In 1973, he was offered a PR to stay in the US. He turned it down.

He opted instead to take up an invitation by Robert van Nuys of USM to head its fine arts department –– the first for a Malaysian university.

Chew helped design the entire curriculum and structure; he was the only local in a department filled with Westerners.

“I was wondering if I should come back,” he recalls. “I knew I could not sell my paintings here like I did in the US. My wife was quite concerned.”

He eventually declined the PR offer, and later became chairman of USM’s fine arts department till his retirement in 1993.

The decision was a defining moment that underscored the values he had imbibed from his family of artists.

Chew’s grandfather was a calligrapher and physician from Fujien province who settled in Kuala Terengganu during the early part of the last century.

He became bankrupt and turned blind during the Japanese Occupation. Chew’s father, Kok Kee became the family’s sole breadwinner.

It was in such an environment of struggle and work that Chew derived the instincts to develop him into a foremost art educator and critic.

“Of course my father was my mentor,” he says. “Right from the time I was a year old, I would take his pencil and doodle on his books. I used to get a shelling!”

As he grew older, he would go out to sketch with his two younger brothers, Kiat Seng and Kiat Lim, all carrying easels on bicycles.

Like a magical spell, the unspoilt landscape and virtual isolation of Terengganu generated a deep awareness of nature and the living world.

“There were no libraries, no references, no books, no academia,” he says. “We only inspired each other.”

Since he retired, Chew has divided his time between Penang and his second home in New York where his daughters live.

He has also helped a private art academy here while supporting other educational programmes.

The education system today, he stresses, is in danger of becoming “a factory churning out people for jobs, not artists” and needs to focus on teaching the methodology of art.

“Art teachers are preparing students for exams, training them on technical and mechanical skills. It’s a very mundane approach to art.”

A more important determinant of a work is whether it communicates, he says. “A good painting compels you to come back and have a second look.

“I don’t sign my painting until many, many days after doing it. I have to do a lot of reflective thinking.

“I paint because I have a compulsion, an urge to paint. I paint because I want to paint, not because I want to sell.”

“You can’t be a millionaire,” he says. “You have to be married to art. If you really want to be an artist, you shouldn’t worry about anything else.”