Chiu Ten Hiok (1903 -1972) was a Chinese southeast asian artist who was one of the first generation of Western-trained artists after the opening of Chinese ports to foreigners after the First World War.  The son of tea merchants, Ten was sent abroad to get his education, first in the United States and later in Europe.  He studied at Harvard University, The Ecole des Beaux Arts, and the Royal Academy of Arts.

After the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in the 1930s, Ten moved to Bali, where he was greatly influenced by the work of the French Impressionists, notably Paul Gauguin.  However, rather than depicting his new home as exotic or primitive, Ten focused on the harmony of humanity and nature and focused on them being one.  Later, Ten moved to New York, where he befriended the late Georgia O’Keefe, and even traveled to New Mexico to paint with her once she departed.  In 1942 he mounted his first solo southeast asian art exhibition at the Knoedler Gallery in New York City, and he and his southeast asian artwork were subsequently featured in Esquire magazine.

Chiu’s paintings display remarkable flatness and their interplay of carefully designed spaces, usually divided with horizontal demarcations, seek to create a harmony of beautiful spaces One can find in Chiu’s paintings such qualities as an effort to create pure pictorial synthesis, a clear reverence for landscape, the retreat into unpeopled spaces, and above all a powerful commune with nature, seen as peaceful and serene.  Chiu Ten Hiok passed in Connecticut in 1972.

Written on Chiu Teng Hiok and his Southeast Asian Art:

“I am trying to get the best out of both Eastern and Western art. I am using the techniques of European art, but I try to preserve the broadness of Eastern art with its preoccupation with essentials. But in the end all real art is the same. You may start from The East or from the West, with one or the other set of conventions, but if you really develop you belong neither to the East nor the West. Art is a universal language which speaks to every human heart” Teng H.Chiu

“His sensitive eye is not satisfied with seeing, and his hand is quick to suggest the subtle nuances in nature that give spiritual significance to art”, “Morning Post”, London, 1930

“Refinement of eye, sensitiveness of hand-these are Mr. Chiu’s special gifts in a high degree. What he has learned of European methods, he has learned thoroughly; he has not, like many Oriental painters before him, half learned his lessons and produce a straggling hybrid. He uses oils with the fluency that his countrymen practice in ink and water color. You might perhaps infer his personality from his work, hardly his nationality” Lawrence Binyon, 1930 (introduction to the exhibition catalogue, Fine Arts Society, November, 1936)

“One cannot look at a roomful of Teng Chiu’s paintings without realizing how pervasive is his gift of presenting us with the smiling aspects of Nature. He hands us the world-sunny side up. His view of Northern Scotland for example, is hardly less tropical than that of Tangier or Java. Only occasionally, in his sense of design, does one feel the presence in his work of a man of the Orient. Otherwise his work belongs in the tradition of Western art. He is an Oriental also in the lightness and deftness of touch with which he has subdued, to quote Mr. Binyon, the Western style of painting. whose media most other artists of Oriental origin find so heavy and cumbersome. Chiu gives to the oil medium something of the graciousness of watercolor without losing the substantiality of oil. The views of the world which he gives us, although all bear the signature of one individual, are sufficiently various to add to the attraction which his work must have for those who are content to leave social significance to the sociologists” Harry Salpeter, “Esquire”, 1942 (February)

“It is obvious that these places served only as points of departure for the artist into the realm of personal expression in which forms are simplified to the last degree and values differentiated with a sensitiveness and subtlety that seem to leave the work hovering between reality and the abstract” “New York Sun,” 1942
“Teng Chiu has fluency of touch, rare purity of color and keenly sensitive eye for the synthesis of landscape” Mellvile Upton, “New York Sun”, 1942

“Teng Chiu ... is endowed with a clarity of vision that washed any nonessential detail. It produces a pristine, cleansed world which the artist records with the aestetic discipline of his race” Frank Caspers, “Art Digest”, 1942

“The best of the work is crisply and briskly and decoratively delightful. Teng Chiu likes clear, fresh, high-keyed color, and he likes to lay it on, thick and juicy, in a pattern of patches that tends -- sometimes more, sometimes less -- toward the abstract side”.
Edward Alden Jewell, “New York Times”, 1942

“...shows the color patches so frequently used by Matisse and Marquet -- a phase of painting that falls between realism and functional abstraction plus a distinct imaginative approach to the subject matter”. Alfred Morang,”El Palacio”, Santa Fe, 1994 (August)

”His paintings remind us how beautiful nature can be when it is viewed by a quiet eye and a poetic imagination and by an artist whose technique is strong and yet does not intrude upon the sensitivity of the execution”. Florence Berkman, “Hartford Times,” 1971