Teng Hiok Chiu was born into a notable family in Amoy, on Gulangyu Island outside of Xiamen, China in 1903. He received a western education at Harvard University and the Museum School of Fine Arts, Boston, before enrolling at the University of London in 1924 and subsequently studying at the Royal Academy Schools. A master of oil painting, he blended western techniques with Chinese sensibilities, enjoying considerable success in England before relocating first to Morocco, and then the USA, after which his reputation gradually faded.
Painter Teng Hiok Chiu was born into a notable family of tea merchants in Amoy on the Gulangyu Island outside of Xiamen, China, in 1903. In 1920 he moved to the USA to attend Harvard University for a semester, focusing on art history, architecture, and archaeology. The following year he enrolled at the Museum School of Fine Arts, Boston, training under the portrait painter Irwin D. Hoffman.
In 1923, Teng set sailed for Europe, enrolling briefly at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, then moving to the University of London in 1924. From 1925–30 he studied painting under the tutelage of Sir George Clausen, Sir Walter Russell and Charles Sims at the Royal Academy Schools, winning every medal, prize and scholarship for which he competed; in 1929 he earned the distinction of being the first foreign artist to be awarded the Turner Gold Medal and the Royal Academy Scholarship for Landscape Painting. Demonstrating an early command over the western oil paint medium, Chiu focused on exploring western modernist concepts and became a master of still-life compositions, developing skillful techniques of naturalistic oil painting. In 1929 he held his first solo show in London at the Claridge Gallery. Her Majesty Queen Mary honoured the show with a visit, and the paintings sold out the next day. This exhibition was followed by a second held at the Fine Art Society in 1930. Art critics praised his subtle sense of colour and his ‘suave, transparent, clean handling of the oil medium' (The Observer 1930, p. 14). The Times noted that Chiu ‘is a master of several methods: the exaggerated analysis of colour favoured by the pointillistes, of which his Fog in Piccadilly Circus is a good example; the impressionistic, as in the excellent study of London Bridge; and the method of hard outline and suffused colour, represented here by the solitary watercolour of Showers in Westminster' (The Times, 30 October 1930, p. 12). From 1927–30 Chiu’s oil paintings of landscapes and figures were included in exhibitions of the Royal Society of British Artists and other institutions; between 1927 and 1938, he exhibited at the Annual Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts six times. Chiu, who had not been exposed to the tradition and history of Chinese painting before he left China in 1920 (Ying-Ling Huang 2019, p. 384), reached the apogee of his artistic career in 1930, working in the British Museum with his mentor Laurence Binyon, the renowned orientalist scholar and Keeper of Oriental Prints and Drawings. Together, they analysed many significant works of Chinese calligraphy and painting. From then onwards, Chiu blended eastern and western aesthetic ideas and philosophies to produce works which addressed both western technique and Chinese sensibilities, such as adopting the concept of multi-point perspective and the technique of directing the viewers' gaze, both typical of Chinese landscape painting. Between 1925 and 1930, Chiu travelled throughout the British Isles, spending his summers painting in Cornwall (particularly around Polperro), East Anglia, the Lake District and Scotland. In 1930 Chiu began almost a decade of world travel, which took him to Bali, Java, Beijing, Shanghai, Indochina, Siam (now Thailand), Cambodia and various European countries. In 1935 he painted a notable portrait of Madame Chiang Kai-shek (Madame Chiang), First Lady of the Republic of China, the wife of Generalissimo and President Chiang Kai-shek. In 1936 Chiu held a solo show at the Fine Art Society which included the new subject-matter of Chinese landscape in Nanjing and important architecture and monuments in Peking (Beijing). Binyon, who wrote the preface to the exhibition catalogue, noted that Chiu ‘has developed an eclectic style, in which it seems to me that through all the mastered technique of Western oil-painting the original Chinese element becomes more apparent than in the pictures shown six years ago […] Mr. Chiu, […] like so many Oriental painters who practice the Western style, found it a heavy and unpleasing means of expression: he has subdued it to a lightness of handling and felicities of colour natural to his gift’ (Binyon 1936, n.p.).
Chiu’s fame gradually faded in Britain after he moved to Morocco in 1937 and then to the USA in 1945. He initially lived in New York City on Park Avenue with his wife, and both quickly became socialites, frequenting the most prestigious parties and gatherings in Manhattan. In 1942, Chiu held his first American one-man exhibition of paintings at the prestigious Knoedler Gallery. In New York he befriended the artist Georgia O'Keeffe, maintaining a correspondence with her throughout the 1940s and 1950s. He also visited her twice at her home in Abiquiu, which resulted in his group of New Mexico landscapes and an exhibition of his paintings in Santa Fe in 1944. Teng Hiok Chiu died in Glastonburry, Connecticut, USA in 1972. In 2003, the Frye Art Museum in Seattle held the first show in almost 30 years of Chiu’s paintings from a private collection of Kazimierz Z. Poznanski, professor at the University of Washington, Seattle. His work is represented in the UK in the collection of Bradford Museums and Galleries.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Teng Hiok Chiu]
Publications related to [Teng Hiok Chiu] in the Ben Uri Library