artcommune gallery presents Batik Brilliance: Seah Kim Joo’s Ingenuity Undyed, featuring over ten seminal batik works by Singaporean artist Seah Kim Joo (b. 1939). A second-generation local artist, Seah Kim Joo (b. 1939, Singapore) was active in the Singapore and Malaysian art scenes between the early 1960s and 1980s, and was well known for his practice across oil painting, watercolour, woodcut, and batik. Following Chuah Thean Teng (b. 1914, Fujian, China - d. 2008, Penang, Malaysia), a first-generation artist who pioneered the adaptation of batik from craft to a fine art medium in the Malayan art scene in the 1950s, Seah Kim Joo emerged as the most prominent talent to have ushered the discourse of “fine art” batik to international recognition.

Seah Kim Joo incorporated compositional and colour techniques from oil painting into his batik practice, while developing methods such as airbrushing, resist-dyeing, and sand-dyeing. His batik paintings, which often feature Southeast Asian rural landscapes and daily life—markets, kampungs, streetscapes, people, animals, and agricultural labour—transformed a traditional regional craft into a contemporary artistic language rich in both formal innovation and cultural meaning. During his active years, Seah Kim Joo’s batik works were exhibited widely beyond Southeast Asia. Between the mid-1960s and 1970s, he held solo and group exhibitions in Sydney, Los Angeles, Chicago, Hawaii, London, Tokyo, and São Paulo. In 1970, he famously produced a monumental batik mural measuring nine by six feet, which was exhibited at the Singapore Pavilion of the World Expo in Osaka, Japan.

Curated by Yang Jye-Ru, Batik Brilliance: Seah Kim Joo’s Ingenuity Undyed aims to highlight the distinctive appeal of batik as a lesser-examined medium within the narrative of early Nanyang art. The exhibition features works such as Cock Fighter, Barges in Singapore, Mother and Child, Two of a Kind, Malay Kampung, and Abstract Cityscape, which capture dynamic relationships between people, architecture, animals, and natural environments. These compositions transform landscape into visual spaces that reflect social structures and historical atmospheres, rather than functioning merely as exotic imagery.

Although batik once enjoyed widespread popularity among local artists, its labour-intensive and time-consuming production process gradually led to a decline in practitioners. While some artists have continued to engage with the medium, critical research and discourse remain relatively limited. Through Seah Kim Joo’s works, this exhibition invites visitors to reconsider the notion of “Nanyang”—not merely as a geographic or stylistic label, but as a visual culture produced, circulated, and reinterpreted under specific historical conditions. At the same time, the exhibition offers a rare opportunity to rediscover the artistic vitality of a highly influential master who has been largely absent from active artistic production in recent decades.