Author Description

Teo Eng Seng: We’re Happy. Are You Happy? offers a comprehensive overview of Singapore artist Teo Eng Seng’s bold experimentations over the last seven decades. Teo is known for his invention of what he terms “paperdyesculp”—a malleable mixture of pulp, natural fibres and other commonplace materials, and his technique of finessing it, inspired by Chinese papermaking and calligraphic traditions, and Western abstraction. Through painting, sculpture and paperdyesculp, Teo draws aesthetic vocabularies from an extraordinary range of cultural sources only to deconstruct them, directing the self—spontaneous and raw as he deems—in irreverent jest. Pervasive in his oeuvre is a radical openness to the social world, teasing us to question the human condition with unabashed humour, irony and wit.