In the late 1950s, Teo Eng Seng made the first of three attempts to travel to England.
Today, the 86-year-old artist is a Cultural Medallion awardee and the subject of a major solo exhibition at the National Gallery Singapore (NGS). Back then, however, he was just a schoolboy with very little money and a few years’ worth of twice-weekly art training at the British Council in Singapore. He hitchhiked as far as Malacca before being turned back by villagers who feared for his safety, due to the political unrest raging across Malaya at the time.
Undeterred, Teo tells me, he made a second attempt, this time with a classmate who could sing and play the guitar. He borrowed money from his teacher and friends so he could pay a carpenter to build a cart, which he and his friend planned to load up with their guitar and paints and push through the continent. If the scheme sounds harebrained now, it probably was back then, too — “[It] never crossed my mind that Burma’s got jungle, you know,” Teo laughs. “How are you going to push a cart?”
But before they could set off, Teo’s friend got cold feet, leaving him back at square one. (He had to pay back the money, too.) It was only on his third attempt — this time with the Pasir Panjang Sea Scouts, a Singapore outpost of the British scouting programme — that Teo successfully hitchhiked to England, where he worked various jobs in order to fund his education at the Central School of Arts and Crafts (now Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design) and the Birmingham College of Art and Design.
Why was the young Teo so determined to reach England? Because, he says (in a time when Singapore had, effectively, one art school and one railway line), “[t]he British teachers who taught me were very precise. You don’t stay in Singapore if you want to become an artist. You go somewhere and then you turn back.”
It is this drive — the inexorable calling to live an artist’s life — that has guided him ever since.
Paper experiments
Born in Singapore in 1938, Teo has since been canonised as part of the “Second Generation” of Singaporean artists, alongside contemporaries such as Ng Eng Teng, Goh Beng Kwan, and Anthony Poon. His show We’re Happy. Are You Happy?, which opened last September at the National Gallery Singapore, is a large-scale survey of a decades-long practice, one spanning a diversity of mediums from painting to performance and predicated on careful observation of the wider world.
One Saturday in January, Teo welcomes us into Muse House, a two-storey Katong shophouse that serves as both residence and art gallery. Sporting a colourful t-shirt emblazoned with the words “Karung Guni Uncle” (rag-and-bone man), the artist retains every bit of the irrepressible, maverick energy that made his name in the ’70s and ’80s. We start off seated around the large square table on the first floor, but, before long, he gets up to point out the artworks around us — an abstract painting here, an assemblage made with plastic scraps there.
On Muse House’s second floor, Teo has arranged a few works that illustrate his trajectory as an artist. The selection starts with some early oils and watercolours, before crescendoing to some pieces that he considers his “finest” in paperdyesculp — the signature paper pulp material he developed in the 1980s.
Paperdyesculp — a versatile material which can be built into three-dimensional forms or used to create richly textured collages — emerged partly from Teo’s desire to distinguish himself from Western predecessors. When he returned to Singapore in 1971, after graduating and teaching in England for a few years, he bristled at comparisons between his oil paintings and the works of Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and other Western painters.
“It [was] always about somebody influencing me,” Teo says. “Initially, I wouldn’t mind, because they were big names. But after a while, you say to yourself: ‘Then I’m nothing! I’m nobody!’ So I have to kill that reference.”
Teo would go on to use paperdyesculp for some of his most famous works, such as The Net (Most Definitely Singapore River) (1986) — a retort against what he saw as the clichéd, unimaginatively literal depictions of the river dominating Singaporean art at the time. As he tells it, however, the invention of paperdyesculp also arose from necessity: specifically, a moment in the classroom at Singapore’s United World College, where he taught art to 11-to-18-year-olds for over 20 years.
“… I was merely holding newspapers and a bowl,” Teo recalls. “The kid said to me: ‘We’re not going to do papier-mâché, yeah? We hate papier-mâché.’”
After some questioning, Teo discovered that his students found it too difficult, with papier-mâché, to work in detail. One Japanese student (it was an international school) stood up and said that in Japan, they would “cook” the paper, turning it back into fine particles. Another student soon chimed in to tell the class what was done back home. Eventually, these contributions fed into Teo’s development of paperdyesculp, which, in the writing of Singaporean art history, became one of his practice’s most distinguishing traits.
Rubbish into gold
But this classroom anecdote also illustrates something even more central to Teo’s practice — his openness, whether to inspiration from the wider world or to the creative potentials of different mediums. For him, anything can catalyse art, from current events reported in the news to bits of trash sitting in the street.
Across the decades, Teo has worked in everything from oils and watercolours to collage, assemblage, performance, installation, and more. But when asked about this diversity, he responds, simply, “It’s just my way of life. You are not living if you just focus on one thing.”
Teo lights up when talking about material and form, moving about the room to explain his artistic intentions. Here, applying paint on plastic; there, using soft paperdyesculp to offset a harsh plastic glare. Among the works currently on show at Muse House are assemblages made using scavenged plastic and wood — in his choice of mediums, he is both cost- and environment-conscious. No need to use expensive paints, he says, when discarded materials and two-dollar enamel paint from the hardware store do just as well.
He stops to point out a piece of work made using plastic dialysis fluid bags. “If you just throw it in the bin, you are actually polluting the environment. But if you use it for your art expression, then you are turning rubbish into gold, aren’t you?”
“Possibilities,” he adds later, “It’s all about possibilities.”
Observing the world
On some level, Teo’s openness to unconventional mediums and his openness to the world at large are connected. “I think artists should be aware that the world is very different from the past. Artists don’t work in the mountains or in the caves anymore. You’ve got to come down and see the world. Using just the conventional mediums for your expression — it’s losing out on many other things.”
For, besides material experimentation, Teo’s practice is also characterised by careful observation of the world around him, especially regarding social and political issues. One case in point: We’re Happy. Are You Happy?, the 1997 work for which the NGS exhibition is named.
In this work, a cage draped in fabric houses anthropomorphic bird figures made of paperdyesculp. Despite their confinement, the birds seem perfectly content, with one even playing cheerfully on a swing.
Teo explains that the work emerged from his observation of Singaporeans in the 1990s. At the time, new homeowners would install stately Grecian-style pillars outside or even within their houses, no matter how small — an aspirational architectural trend Teo replicated in the work. With this added context, then, it’s easy to read the piece as social commentary, representing how we distract ourselves with material goods while remaining ignorant of the larger forces that limit our lives.
“Human beings are very funny,” Teo muses. “If you miss this, you miss some fun.” Learn even a little about his practice, and it soon becomes clear that he’s the kind of artist who misses very little — indeed, that almost all his work is based on careful observation, and then creative transformation, of his world.
At times — as with We’re Happy. Are You Happy? — those observations are expressed with a wry humour; at others, with a deep sense of empathy and identification with broader humanity, and particularly the oppressed. In the NGS show, for instance, viewers will find Massacre at My Lai (After Haeberle’s) (1970) and WMD? (2005), addressing the Vietnam War and American invasion of Iraq respectively. At Muse House, a recent set of turbulent abstract paintings respond to the ongoing tragedies of Gaza. Through intense, throbbing colours and dense, slashing brushstrokes, Teo conveys his strong feelings about families broken and lives lost.
“The world is not that peaceful,” he reminds us. “… If you are concerned with [quality of life], then you must not forget the people who are living in hell.”
A life in art
As we are wrapping up our interview, Teo points out another artwork located in the stairwell. It’s a large canvas, filled with cloudy colours, dark, aggressive lines, and a grinning figure crouched in the centre. Teo introduces the piece to me by asking: “You like my orangutan?”
It turns out that the central figure is Rodney, an orangutan who, due to administrative issues en route from Sarawak to Scotland, got stranded in Singapore. Teo informs me that for two years, the orangutan was cared for by United World College schoolchildren: “They loved him. Fantastic.”
It’s a singularly strange tale, but, writing this now, I’m beginning to suspect that Muse House — this unassuming two-storey building tucked in among all the others along Marshall Road — is probably filled with other tales equally as strange. Not only from Teo’s long and storied life, but also from the other artists and visitors who pass through.
Indeed, in space-starved, hypercommercial Singapore, Muse House is itself a kind of oddity: a place where other talented artists can exhibit their work, free of charge. Teo may have retired from teaching to make art full-time, but Muse House remains a means for him to nurture the Singapore art scene. “Nothing more satisfying,” he says, “than having a place for the artist community, as well as the general public, to pop in, look at artworks, have a cup of tea, chat about all sorts of things.”
Knowing what I now know about Teo’s life trajectory, it’s easy to see Muse House as yet another manifestation of the artist’s clarity of purpose — purpose that, after his ten years abroad, brought him back to Singapore for good.
After all, as Teo explains, he could easily have stayed in England. Houses were cheap — he had been about to buy one for a mere 6,000 pounds. But then again, artists were plentiful there. He had no real reason to hang around.
“I came back because I said — Life is too comfortable in the UK. I don’t want that. Back home, [there were] so many things to be done … Orchard Road [was] still a two-way street. Buses smoking like mad. Flooding on Orchard Road. Art scene, none. Here’s an opportunity for me.”
Teo has made use of this opportunity to its fullest. Writing this now, I’m starting to see his life story almost as a metaphorical gesamtkunstwerk — a total work of art. Maybe that’s why I’ve had difficulty untangling, for instance, his openness to different materials from his broader openness to the world. Making art, teaching, scavenging, running Muse House — these are not separate practices, but interconnected parts of the moving whole. Maybe this is what Teo meant when he said his epitaph at the end of his life would simply read, I have lived.
“Well, the life of an artist is fantastic,” Teo tells me, as he reflects on his beginnings. “I don’t regret it at all.”
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We’re Happy. Are You Happy? runs at the National Gallery Singapore till 2 February 2025. Find out more and get tickets at nationalgallery.sg.
Header image courtesy of Justin Goh.
