Yong Cheng Wah Art for Sale at Auction

b. 1942 - d. 2017

The best known artist son of the legendary pioneer Yong Mun Sen, Cheng Wah developed his father’s skills in watercolours, but also made a name for himself in batik painting which had seen him getting sponsored solos in Manila (ABC Art Gallery), the United States: Honolulu (Dwyer Art Gallery), Miami (Bacardi Art Gallery) and New York (Markus Art Gallery), Berlin (People for Progress Building), Hong Kong (Jackson Art Gallery), Australia: Sydney (Little Art Gallery), Melbourne (Elizabeth Art Gallery and Canberra (Canberra Art Gallery), among others. He had also set up a batik gallery in two venues in Penang over time, apart from a personal gallery in Hong Kong in 1969. His art philosophy can be summed up in a 1986 statement: “Art is a religion to me as it penetrates the truth and reviews the true nature of things as they truly are and to be shared by others.” He could not paint after a stroke and in 2015, held his last exhibition at the Dreamz Gallery in Penang, of his remaining watercolours. Cheng Wah is regarded as self-taught although he had studied at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in Singapore but stopped midway when his father, Mun Sen, died in 1962. He held his first solo in Penang and Bangkok in 1963, as his father was dead against any of his 11 children taking up art. In his early career, he was mentored by Lee Joo For and Father Joseph McNally (St Xavier’s Institution). His works are in the collection of Tunku Abdul Rahman, the first Permaisuri Agong, former US president Lyndon B. Johnson, Paul Getty and former Indonesian president Suharto. Apart from reviving the Mun Sen Gallery in Penang and then Kuala Lumpur for a spell, he also dabbled in off-shore financing.