TENG-HIOK CHIU (1903-1972) 'Rowing Boat, Polperro Harbour'

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). 
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.).