Bidspirit auction | Chuah Thean Teng 'Mother and

Chuah Thean Teng 'Mother and Children' Batik Dye on Cloth - Batik dye on cloth made into a lightbox. The image has nice backlighting when turned on.   Dimensions: 41” x 29 1/2” x 3”    Condition: Painting is in good condition. Wiring for the lighting needs some reworking.    Artist Bio: Chuah Thean Teng (1914–2008) is called the father of batik painting. After the Second World War he ran a commercial batik factory in Penang making sarongs; the business failed, but it gave him command of the wax-resist process, which he then turned to easel picture-making. Batik builds color through sequential dye baths, molten wax applied to reserve the areas that must stay pale before each immersion, so the design has to be planned entirely in advance — there is no overpainting or correction. His signature is the deliberate craquelure: hardened wax flexed until it cracks so dye seeps into the fissures, leaving a web of fine dark veins behind flat, boldly contoured figures. Mother and child was his most persistent theme, worked repeatedly from the 1950s onward.