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Collection of Cheng-Khee and Sing-Bee Chee
The Way of Cheng-Khee Chee
The Tweed Museum of Art’s two-gallery retrospective of Cheng-Khee Chee will feature his watercolor paintings stretching from work in 1974 to his most recent 2014 painting, “100 Koi.”
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Collection of Cheng-Khee and Sing-Bee Chee
The Way of Cheng-Khee Chee
"Duluth Depot," 1974.
“It’s a Chee.”
For most Duluthians, that simple phrase immediately calls to mind soft scenes of the city’s waterfront, stunning swirls of colorful koi or, for many, the thought-provoking picture book Old Turtle.
For half a century, artist Cheng-Khee Chee and his wife, Sing-Bee Chee, have called Duluth home, and we tend to think of him as “our” artist. But the University of Minnesota Duluth professor emeritus has lived in Minneapolis and Singapore, too. His talent and knowledge also is widely traveled, and he’s done workshops around the world.
The artist himself, a naturalized U.S. citizen, considers Duluth home.
Sing-Bee Chee
The Way of Cheng-Khee Chee
Cheng-Khee Chee
“I’ve lived here for 50 years, longer than anywhere else,” he says, then adds his signature chuckle: “Of course it’s longer! Otherwise I’d have to be over 100!”
While prints of his work are available at art galleries in the region, it has been 33 years since the last solo exhibit of his paintings in the Tweed and more than a decade since his last solo exhibit in Duluth, at the North Shore Bank of Commerce in 2004.
That changed this week when the Tweed Museum of Art on the UMD campus presented “The Way of Cheng-Khee Chee: Paintings 1974-2014.” The exhibit features 40 paintings spanning 40 years.
The artist describes his work, like his life, as a blend of Eastern and Western influences. He explains that his revolutionary Saturated Wet Paper Process “allows artists utmost flexibility in taking out or adding on colors freely,” rare in watercolors. For any painting, the artist/teacher insists, “If you want to paint anything, you have to study it, have feeling toward it. Without feelings, then why do you bother to paint it?”
From May 12 to September 20, visitors to the Tweed will be able to see this artist’s passion for his varied subjects and for his “home” town.
A visit to the downstairs studio and office space in the Chee east Duluth home echoes the cross-cultural influences and the meticulous attention to subject distinctive in Cheng-Khee’s work. Following along the circuitous hallway, you pass by stacks of his artwork, large and small, and many tableaux deep. Multiple flat-file cabinets, the kinds known for storing maps, here store various forms of art paper with varied texture, fragility, thickness, absorbency and other qualities. Along the top of the hip-height cabinets are neatly organized magazines and photocopies, from many countries, with stories about Cheng-Khee. In the center, a small sitting area with comfortable chairs is surrounded by brimming bookshelves with art and history books punctuated by sculptures from beautiful to whimsical. In his painting studio off one side – a former lower-level deck now fully enclosed – shelves hold looseleaf binders labeled such topics as “Chickens,” “Koi,” “Bridges” and even “Garrison Keillor.” Inside are photographs, detailed graphics or even anatomy charts of each subject. (No anatomy chart of Keillor, of course!)
Sing-Bee Chee
The Way of Cheng-Khee Chee
In this downstairs art kingdom is where we sit one late-winter afternoon – the Chinese New Year, as it turns out – as Cheng-Khee prepares for the upcoming Tweed exhibition. Sing-Bee has set out tea and delightful teacakes and treats from China. For me the visit is a time to renew a fond acquaintance. Mr. Chee – as he remains in my mind – was a supervisor in the UMD library where I got a work-study job while at college. Ignorant, though appreciative, of grand art, I value him for his wit and humor. And I was absolutely blown away by what continues to be one of my favorite pieces of his artwork – a study of squirrels. I could not imagine before seeing this work that a watercolor artist could create a squirrel tail so visually realistic you could nearly feel the fur.
His work, explains Cheng-Khee, is a culmination of his life experiences and a digestion of both Eastern and Western cultures.
“In China, I eat Chinese food; here, I eat American food. The same things apply to art. It’s the synthesis of East and West.”
Born in Fengting on the southeast coast of China, he immigrated as a young teen to the island of Penang, Malaysia, and later attended the Nanyang University in Singapore. While art was always his passion, he studied literature (better job options) and came to enjoy library work when he got a job as assistant librarian at the university. In 1962, he came to the United States, studying library sciences at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Graduating from there, he next came to Duluth to work at the campus library. He continued painting, working at both his interests.
In reviewing his series of homes, Cheng-Khee notes that most of his cities have something in common – water. “All of these cities are seafaring cities.”
Some differences are distinctive, though. Singapore, a city-state now of nearly 5.5 million people, contrasts starkly with the northern Minnesota town he’s called home for half a century. “Singapore is so crowded and so hot,” he notes. He arrived in Duluth (population about 100,000 back then) for work on January 1, 1965, and, despite that challenging introduction, still loves his chosen city. “People are envious that we live here.”
He and Sing-Bee had met in Singapore and married in Duluth shortly after he took work here. Sing-Bee, who holds a teaching degree, chuckles because their wedding made a full-page spread in the local newspaper. She suspects their Eastern heritage made them “exotic” and hence the special coverage. The couple has four children and 10 grandchildren.
Cheng-Khee taught his first UMD watercolor painting class in 1979 and eventually would leave behind his library work for full-time painting and teaching. He continues to offer workshops in locations around the world. As Cheng-Khee explains, the two cultural influences in his work combine the fragile, ephemeral style of Eastern watercolors with the more realistic, explicit Western interpretations.
Whatever your chosen style or technique, the basic artistic philosophy for Cheng-Khee remains. You need to intimately understand your subject. It comes down to a sort of “Paint what you see, paint the image you see in your mind.”
Cheng-Khee starts with visits to a place or, such as for his koi paintings, reflections on both live fish and readings on the animals (hence the abundant looseleaf notebooks). “There is the idea of the concept of painting and the process of painting. … As a painter, you have to know the subject, you have to know it thoroughly.”
For his many portraits of Duluth or Minnesota’s North Shore, for example, the paintings encapsulate the sense of place – even if some angles on the bridge or hill may be artistically altered. “When you come to painting, you can move around to have a good composition,” explains Cheng-Khee.
Before he puts brush to paper, though, the artist has already spent the time by the waterfront. As an artist, he says that often sees shapes and color contrasts when interpreting a scene, such as the Aerial Lift Bridge. When painting, he may start with the abstract and refine to a more concrete elucidation on paper.
Because Cheng-Khee's artistic philosophy stems from solid knowledge of a subject and a strong feeling toward it, he hesitated when first approached in 1989 to illustrate the now-famed Old Turtle book. The poetic and poignant text by Douglas Wood and the assurance of the publisher that they were interested in Cheng-Khee painting interpretation rather than just straight illustration persuaded him. The award-winning Old Turtle proved a natural fit for his art.
As Cheng-Khee Chee enters his 81st year, he continues to fill those looseleaf binders with more potential topics and to plan his next works of art.
In 1960, Cheng-Khee put down his thoughts on graduation to inspire others. These thoughts are quoted in The Work of Cheng-Khee Chee, a 2003 publication that succinctly explains his many techniques of painting and his philosophy of art. And though this humble, humorous soul may not have intended these words as a definition of his own life, they resonate perfectly how his art has … and will continue … to affect those favored enough to see it. Surely, through his art, this artist’s kshana – the Sanskrit “moment” – will extend into an eternity:
“Human life is but a grain of dust in the boundless universe and one kshana in the eternities of time. Ordinary people only know how to utilize limited time to do deeds; therefore their lives are like a wave swiftly disappearing in the ocean. Only extraordinary people know how to use great deeds to fill the time; therefore they can transform limit into limitless and a kshana into eternity.”
Tweed Museum of Art, UMD, 1201 Ordean Ct., 218-726-8222, www.d.umn.edu/tma