Chua Mia Tee

Chua was born in 1931 in Shantou, Guangdong, China. In 1937, at the age of six, Chua and his family fled the Sino-Japanese War in China, coming to Singapore. For his primary education, he attended the Shuqun School and subsequently Tuan Mong School. His studies would be temporarily interrupted by the Japanese occupation of Singapore, with his family moving to Indonesia until 1945, when he returned to Singapore with the end of World War II and completed his primary school studies at Tuan Mong School in 1946. While growing up, Chua would watch his father, a self-taught painter who was a businessman, draw portraits of his grandparents, leading to Chua's discovery of his own interest in sketching and painting. While Chua enrolled in Chung Cheng High School for secondary education in 1947, he left midway to pursue a formal arts education at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA), Singapore, encouraged by his father. There, academy director Lim Hak Tai and artists Cheong Soo Pieng, Koh Tong Leong and See Hiang To would be some of his teachers. Chua graduated from NAFA in 1952 and taught there as a full-time teacher for two years before returning to Chung Cheng High School to complete his secondary education. He would then return to NAFA as an art teacher once again. == Career ==

In 1956, an art association comprising students from local Chinese middle schools, the Singapore Chinese Middle Schools' Graduates of 1953 Arts Association (SCMSGAA), held a travelling fundraising exhibition. At this travelling exhibition, Chua would present his now well-known oil painting, Epic Poem of Malaya (1955), a work that embodies the desire to inculcate a distinct Malayan nationalism in the younger generation. Comprising many of the members of the SCMSGAA, the Equator Art Society was an artist group promoting the use of realist-style painting and socially-engaged practices that commented on social issues in 1950s and 60s Singapore and Malaya. In 1996, with the inauguration of the Singapore Art Museum, Chua's work would also be historicised in Channels & Confluences: A History of Singapore Art, a publication produced alongside the museum's opening. In 2007, the exhibition From Words to Pictures: Art During the Emergency would be held at the Singapore Art Museum, a show examining social realist artworks in Singapore through the historical frame of the Malayan Emergency, including works by Chua. With the opening of the National Gallery Singapore in 2015, Chua's work would be featured in and inspire the title of the inaugural exhibition at the Singapore Gallery, Siapa Nama Kamu? Art in Singapore since the 19th Century, its name taking from a detail in his oil painting, National Language Class (1959). In 2015, Chua was awarded the Cultural Medallion for his contributions to the visual arts in Singapore. == Art and influence==

Chua's oil painting National Language Class (1959) depicts Singaporeans of different ethnicities learning Malay—the national language of Singapore, Malaya, and the Malay World—to free themselves from English, the language of their colonial rulers. Seated at a round table, which symbolizes equality, the Malay teacher poses two questions to his students: Siapa nama kamu? Di-mana awak tinggal? (What is your name? Where do you live?). ==References==