Eric Quah



 

                Born in 1946, Perak, Malaysia.

New Millennium: A Tribute    
Oil and Collage     
190 x 190cm   
1999

  
 
 

      Art represents multiple aspects of my life journey. I feel like a gypsy. Since young, I always live in different environment and to a large extend in many different countries. Malaysia - Australia - New York - China - Malaysia. In between, I also traveled extensively to Europe and Asia. Life has become a collage which collects and recreate through influences, learning, and practicing. Now I am back in Penang, the place that shapes my child hood and adolescence. I hope my creation can spur to a new dimension.

Discovering Direction
      Quah's early works, like those of his contemporaries in Penang in the 1960s, had a style and a content which was romantic, because like most young Malaysian artists, they love the land. He did his fair share of these village scene, portrait of villagers, street scenes and houses, albeit in a romantic and somewhat impressionistic manner.

International Perspectives
       From Malaysia, Quah went to live in Australia, New York and China. He also traveled extensively to Europe and Asia to gain international perspectives and recognition. His visualization of many global events produced some of his finest collage and liberated his spirit.

A Hard Fought Integrity
        As Quah now approaches his sixty, he regards his life as a journey, a constant search for some modicum of truth about one's place in the world, one's roots. Painting for Quah is a visceral emotion,bb a tributary of memory, where at end, there is a kind of balance if not a resolution, a certain peace but never contentment.

    
   

Happy Reunion         Oil and Collage         
180 x 120cm X 3             2001
 

  
     

Spring     2001     Mixed Media      71x51cm

     
Summer    2001   Mixed Medie    71x 51cm
What the Critics say....................................

       I have to admit that, as a painter, Quah has much strength. At best, his work manifests convincing material skills combined with an imaginative and sensitive touch… But of greater significance is the fact that Quah is no slave of fashion or ideology in art. His vision seems enmeshed in the conservation of expressive painterly skills whose tendrils are rooted in the richness of tradition.






 By Michael Montague,
the Sun, Australia
April 25, 1985.

 

  

       The often thickly applied oils in which Quah works and the layer effects of collaged material such as the actual fragments of fabric, pages from books, photographs and more, create both the deep, luminous colors and a richly living painterly quality. Here one feels hi is an artist completely confident of, and reveling in his medium.
By Susan McCullich,
Co-author 3rd Edition 
Encyclopedia of Australian Art.
Dec 1996

  

     Bridging cultures is never easy but Malaysian-born artist Eric Quah has been doing it for a long time. From Penang to Melbourne, from New York to Nanjing, he has taken his fascination with the everyday world and fashioned from it a rich and startling body of art.









By Ian Findlay,
Asian Art News
Nov/Dec 1992.

  

      Eric Quah’s life history is enmeshed in the tapestry of personal strife in his itinerant journey across geography and cultures, an back into investigation of self. His work are an affirmation of life, a signpost and a barometer of change of the artist’s life as well as he environment, the sequence of actions and human behavioral patterns, a muted whisper or gossip, glimpses of faces, flashes of places… His is a parallel, a painted life and a painter’s life celebrating his dreams, his vision, his expectations, experiences and experiments.

By Ooi Kok Chuen, Author
ERIC QUAH monograph 
published December 2001.

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