Artist Yip Yew Chong Paints His Story in History

[Music playing]

Jimmy
Hi everyone, I’m Jimmy Yap. I’m the editor in chief of BiblioAsia, a publication of the National Library of Singapore. A clog maker in Chinatown, book printing in Kampong Glam, a barber on Everton Road, and the last Tiger in Bukit Timah. You may have seen these murals around Singapore. They were all painted by the artist Yip Yew Chong. Since 2015, he has painted more than 80 murals in Singapore and abroad. In January 2023, he completed one of his largest works titled “I Paint my Singapore”. This painting consists of 27 panels, and it’s 60 m long and just over a metre high. If you imagine five buses lined up one after another, that’s how long this painting is.

Today I have the great privilege of speaking to you, Yew Chong, to find out more about him and about this remarkable work. So welcome to BiblioAsia+, Yew Chong. How are you?

Yew Chong
Thank you, Jimmy. I’m good.

Jimmy
Congratulations on completing this massive work, which has been called your magnum opus. Not everyone has necessarily seen this whole painting. So tell me about this painting. What is it about?

Yew Chong
This painting is about my life, my experiences, when I was growing up in Singapore and in particular Chinatown, where I grew up in the 1970s, and then as a youth in 1980s. So this whole painting captures the experience of what I’ve seen, what I observe, heard and everything about the people around me too. And I’ve captured them in, 60 m long of canvas on linen. I use acrylic to paint this. It’s made up of 27 panels plus one tighter panel. Each panel is 2.2 m long by 1.1 m high. So I joined them all together to form a 60-metre long painting.

Jimmy
And this is 27 panels means? Are there 27 scenes?

Yew Chong
Yes, there are 27 scenes altogether. I didn’t really want to paint it as individual scenes, but because logistically I have to break it up. Otherwise it’s very hard to put it all together. I had to break it up into 27 panels, but I wanted to actually make a whole panoramic view of Singapore, especially from an aerial point of view. And that’s why I painted scenes from across Singapore: north, south, east, west, the southern islands, the interior, a view from Bukit Timah and the heartlands, our cultural districts. And it’s not just the scenes per se; I wanted to capture the daily life of people and how people lived, how people go to the market. You can even peek into the interior of houses.

Jimmy
I love that bit. I love the bit where you can actually look at it and see what the what people are doing inside their homes.

Yew Chong
Yes. And not just the homes. Even the National Library – the old library. You see the bookshelves, the old fountain.

Jimmy
I love that. You still paint murals, but what gave you the inspiration to do this particular painting, “I Paint my Singapore”? What inspired you to put this thing together?

Yew Chong
The idea started when I finished painting the 44-metre long mural behind the Thian Hock Keng temple.

Jimmy
Okay, what is that mural about? And when was that?

Yew Chong
Behind the Thian Hock King temple, I painted a 44-metre-long mural titled “The Teow Keng Mural”. It depicted the history and culture of the Hokkiens and the migration of Hokkiens from China to Singapore. How they live, how they settled in Singapore and also contributed to the building of Singapore. For example, the Hokkien Hui Guan, right, which commissioned the mural. I painted them, even other races as well as the Hokkiens. When they settled in the 1800s and then they even built, schools, built our water systems. For example, Tan Kim Seng. And they even built Nan Tah University. And then all the way to the end of the mural, you see,the Singapore River, the bumboats floating on the Singapore River with the Hokkien boats painted with the red head and the green bodies.

Jimmy
Right.

Yew Chong
Yeah. And the tall banks behind it. Then most of these banks were actually started by the Hokkiens.

Jimmy
When did you paint this mural?

Yew Chong
I painted the Thian Hock Keng mural in 2017.

Jimmy
So that gave you the idea of doing something even bigger?

Yew Chong
Yeah. Because this mural was painted outdoors. These images will disappear over time. So I wanted to embark on something that is a little more permanent so that more people can appreciate it in the future. And that gave me the idea to want to do something indoor. But it’s very hard. Hard to do something indoor that is that long, right? You need a big space. And that’s why I thought, okay, I want to do something that is portable, movable. You can dismantle it, you can re-exhibit it. And that’s how I came up with this idea of painting on canvasses that are portable, separable, and yet when you put it together is whole one grand display.

Actually, I started with 50 m, because I thought that’s the amount of canvases, the amount of space, and the length I need to give meaning to the painting to capture the diversity of Singapore. My life experiences. It was just a guesstimate, and as I painted this, I got a lot of feedback – you have to include this place, that place.

So how I conceptualise this is I just wrote down on a list of other places that I wanted to capture. For example, Woodlands, Chinatown, Little India, Changi, because these are all the places that I have a connection with. I’ve been to all these places as a youth. I like to just go all over Singapore on long bus rides. I don’t have a detailed sketch or composition of all these places I’ve jot down.

In fact they are not even in the sequence. But I knew that for a viewer to be able to view the painting as if the viewer is traveling around, these places must be, of course, side by side, connected. For example, Orchard Road and Little India are quite close. Bras Basah and Orchard Road – they’re quite close. They should be side by side. I can’t put Changi next to say the Padang right.

Jimmy
Right. That doesn’t make sense at all.

Yew Chong
So I kind of arranged them broadly in that form, but along the way as I painted, and I got lots of ideas from the public. You need to include Paya Lebar airport, Potong Pasir Ponds, which I didn’t have in my list. So I thought, okay, I need to insert it here or there. And that’s how it happened. And that was also the reason why I didn’t paint these 27 panels in a sequence. Say, from the left most the right most, I jumbled them all up.

Jimmy
That must make it harder.

Yew Chong
No, it’s not. It gives me flexibility. For example, I started in somewhere in the middle of the Chinatown scene because I felt I need to start with something I am most passionate. I must start from where? My home. And that particular scene. The night scene of my family home where I live in Chinatown for the first 14 years of my life on a second-storey shop house. So I started with that scene and then I expand it outwards. The second painting was Woodlands. See. From Chinatown I jumped to Woodlands.

Jimmy
Why Woodlands? Why did you pick Woodlands as your second thing to paint?

Yew Chong
No particular reason. You know, sometimes I look at my list. Should I paint Toa Payoh first? Or Woodlands first? Let me try to do something that is very different from Chinatown. I even have painted the Causeway, you know, Malaysia and zinc roof houses, kampong houses. So it’s a little different. I want to paint people’s way of life. So I intentionally opened up some of this building walls to show people how we lived, how we worked in those years.

Jimmy
That’s one of the things I really liked about the paintings, that you have an X-ray vision, as it were. I think you do that for HDB flats. And what else do you do it for?

Yew Chong
Everywhere, even army bunkers, you can see people doing stand by bed in the camp in Pulau Tekong.

Jimmy
And I think you mentioned something about a library as well.

Yew Chong
Yeah, the National Library. I opened up one of the walls, the red brick building, and you can see people taking books from the shelves.

Jimmy
Okay, that’s very cool.

Yew Chong
And the old fountain in the courtyard.

Jimmy
Yes!

Yew Chong
And I even painted an x-ray vision of office. People working late into the night. I was a reminder of myself as an accountant, working late into the night with the green screen computer.

Jimmy

You’ve named this work “I paint my Singapore”. What is your favorite scene in this painting?

Yew Chong
My favorite scene in this painting is the very first panel that I painted, which is the scene of Chinatown in the nighttime.

Jimmy
It’s specifically Kreta Ayer. You grew up in Kreta Ayer?

Yew Chong
Yeah. In those years, we don’t even call the place Chinatown.

Jimmy
What do you call it?

Yew Chong
We just call it ngow chay shui.

Jimmy
Okay, okay.

Yew Chong
Yeah. I have fond memories of Chinatown when I was a child. It is very different, obviously, from what you see today. Like you said, a very touristy place. That Chinatown that I grew up in. Well, everything was on the streets, for example, you see the wet market in the morning and afternoon, it became like a place for eating with hawkers coming. And at nighttime it could be a pasar malam where the same spot could be selling shoes or clothes. So everything happened on the streets. I live on the second floor of a shop house. And do you know what was below? It was a funeral parlor.

Jimmy
Yes. Oh it was a funeral parlor?

Yew Chong
So that’s why Sago Lane was called sai yan kai, the street of the dead. So the whole street were filled with a business just for the dead, like funeral parlors, shops that make those paper effigies. For burning.

Jimmy
Oh you lived above a coffin maker?

Yew Chong
The shop also dyed those clothes when the family mourned, they had to wear dark blue or black. Yeah. They made those clothes.

Jimmy
Wow. I imagine the rent was slightly lower there than elsewhere.

Yew Chong
Yes, it was very cheap. We rented the whole long house from the landlord for probably $9. And then we subdivide that whole long house into cubicles and some smaller rooms, or even areas under the bed, for like $0.50 or so. A dollar a month.

Jimmy
Right, right, right. Oh wow.

Yew Chong
So many families actually lived in this type of house, right? It’s not just one family. That time I think there were as many as like five families.

Jimmy
Living in one.

Yew Chong
In the same house.

Jimmy
On one floor.

Yew Chong
Yeah. Multiracial, too? Indians and the Chinese could be living together in the same long [house].

Jimmy
Is that place still there, or has it been torn down?

Yew Chong
The particular house that I used to live in had been demolished in 1984.We moved out of in 1983. And the reason we moved out is because the whole Chinatown had to be resettled when the big Singapore River cleanup campaign came. Because when all the hawkers and wet markets dispose of the sewage water into the drain, where did they flow to?

Into the Singapore River. So the government thought that we had to clean up from the source, and that’s why all the shop houses, businesses and residents had to be relocated. But the good thing is that we were allocated a flat just above the Chinatown complex. So the Chinatown complex was actually purpose built. It was built to rehouse all these activities, businesses, markets, from the streets into the big complex, as well as residents, like my family had to be resettled inside the complex.

Jimmy
I did not know all this about the history of Chinatown. Yeah, that’s interesting.

Yew Chong
We were located in a flat on the 25th floor.

Jimmy
Very nice. Nice.

Yew Chong
Yeah. It was a really beautiful skyline. It was a panoramic view of the sea, which is very reflective in my painting. You see, in my painting, I painted those skylines where you have sea views, right? A few tall towers, office towers. That’s really my impression. When I grew up, I was literally watching how all these tall banks slowly sprouted up day by day. And when we moved in 1983, we had a grand sea view. And now over time, if you go there today – my mom still lives there, by the way – there’s no more sea view.

Jimmy
You’re known as a heritage muralist. You paint scenes of old Singapore. why did you choose to focus on old Singapore, on heritage, on all on local culture?

Yew Chong
The short answer is actually by accident.

Jimmy
Okay. How did it happen?

Yew Chong
When I painted my first mural, it was on a conserved house, right? An old house. So the theme of nostalgic scenes were best to fit an old house in an alleyway. And after that mural was warmly received, I received many requests to paint on other people’s walls.

Jimmy
Right? Right. So this all set you off on the whole...

Yew Chong
Yes. But having said that, and I love this image. I’m 54. We’ve so much changes today. You like to have fond memories of what you have seen, that has disappeared or dwindled, and that’s why I painted many of these scenes so as to bring back that kind of memories and reminisce.

Jimmy
The murals that you paint on the walls of shop houses and all that – that must require a lot of research. Tell me a little bit about your research process, because you’re not only painting from memory. You must have been doing a lot of research.

Yew Chong
Yes. For this painting “a lot” is an understatement.

Jimmy
Yeah.

Yew Chong
Actually, I spend more time thinking and researching than the actual act of painting.

Jimmy
What is the research process?

Yew Chong
The process is first and foremost, imagination. And recollecting my own memories of my own childhood and youthhood – that forms the overarching image and composition of the painting. And, I didn’t want to paint anything that I don’t have a connection with. That’s why I always start with I’m going to paint my Singapore, my life, my impressions, what I’ve seen, what I’ve heard, where I’ve smelt what I’ve experienced.

Yew Chong
So, that’s the overarching [framework], but yet I cannot just paint without reference. So I went to online, to look at hundreds or even thousands of photographs of old Singapore for the details. And how the buildings used to look like. You have to research through many sources, including the National Archives website. For example, for the Waterloo Street scene, I painted this temple, the Sri Krishnan temple. Today if you go to Waterloo Street you see this a very colourful, elaborate, temple with lots of sculptures, elaborative, colourful sculptures, but I knew that at that time it, it couldn’t have looked like this. And that’s when I look into the National Archives website and look for a photo of the same temple. The whole painting was depicted to be in 1970s, ’80s. So I was looking for the period how this temple looked like in the 1970s or ’80s. That’s why I looked into the website, and I was very surprised. Wow. Today that temple is so elaborate and so colourful, but in the 1978, it was just a simple temple with a gopuram on the roof and the statue of Sri Krishnan at the archway.

Jimmy
So it’s a very, very simple temple. Yes. And the only way you would have gotten that, because obviously you can’t remember what it looked like back in 1970s, was like, sort of go through old photographs. Okay, apart from photographs, what else do you do?

Yew Chong
I read the stories behind the photographs and also those that don’t have photographs, which are just written. For example, I chanced upon the story of the Chinese Sikh in the central Sikh temple. In the central Sikh temple at Queen Street at that time along the Waterloo Street or so, that there was a Chinese Sikh.

Jimmy
Oh really?

Yew Chong
Yes. So this man, I can’t remember his name. He wanted to be a Sikh, wanted to embrace the religion, but he couldn’t grow a beard. Yeah, but the Sikh community welcomed him so he just wore a turban, and he served in the temple and the communities. So I painted him serving food in the temple.

Jimmy
And you read about him?

Yew Chong
Yes, I found out about this when I read through the stories.

Jimmy
It’s amazing.

Yew Chong
And then not just reading through stories. I also proactively, research for real life information from people who are familiar with those places that I wanted to display. For example, the Woodlands scene. I thought this Kampong Lorong Fatimah was a very interesting place. I actually came across this village before when I was in my junior college. I thought it’s very important to capture this water village. And as I dig a little deeper, I looked through some websites and also some sites, or pages, in Facebook.

I thought, okay, I’m going to interview one of the residents. So I reach out to the resident, whom I don’t know, of course. And I asked, “How do you go home?” And I realized that if you drive, you had to go through immigration and checkpoints, and do a u-turn after that to reach the kampong. But, if you walk, cycle or take a motorbike, you can actually cut through a dirt track through the forest from Woodlands Road, carry your bike, bicycle across the train track to reach home. Very interesting. And you might think, okay, then it’s very troublesome is there? Every day you have to bring your passport. They can show their passport or the NRIC number with the address Kampong Lorong Fatima. And they will allow you to go.

Jimmy
So it doesn’t go all the way to Malaysia. You just go through the immigration. So make a u-turn and then...

Yew Chong
U-turn.

Jimmy
That’s very interesting.

Yew Chong
So all these stories are depicted in the painting, and some also drew suggestions from people. So I was asking my friend who is very familiar with Bukit Timah, tell me some legends stories about Bukit Timah. And he said, you have to paint the Bukit Timah Monkey Man.

Jimmy
I saw that! I saw the Bukit Timah monkey man. It is so cool that your painting has the Buikit Timah Monkey Man.

Yew Chong

Right, in the Himalayas you have the Yeti; in Singapore you have the Bukit Timah Monkey Man. Well, these interesting stories where we lost if we don’t try to tell them, and what better way to tell them, than by putting in a painting like this where everybody sees it and then start a conversation.

Jimmy
So, you know, as part of your research process, you know, you look at photographs, you talk to people, what else do you do?

Yew Chong
I listen to oral histories. In particular, I always like to hear stories from the National Archives website. I remember hearing stories about the Changi village, you know, for example, and the spooky bridge.

Jimmy
The what bridge?

Yew Chong
The spooky bridge.

Jimmy
Oh the spooky bridge. I’m not familiar.

Yew Chong
Those stories are most interesting to hear.

Jimmy
How do you personally balance, you know, historical research and the need to be creative, you know, take some creative license?

Yew Chong
it is indeed very difficult to balance. But I have to remind myself, I am an artist. I am not a historian. I am not of a person who documents history. I’m an artist. So I always place aesthetic storytelling and the meaning behind the painting as the first and foremost important. And that’s why, I have more license to recreate my impression in a way that I can emphasise on things that I want to emphasise.

For example, I can even turn a building the other way around from reality and to showcase the facade rather than the back of the building. Yeah, and I can also shrink the size of something that I don’t want to highlight and emphasise the size or the activities that I want to highlight.

Jimmy
But even so, what’s interesting is that, you know, you take some creative license. You’re not taking a photograph; you’re painting. But at the same time, it has to be historically accurate, because otherwise it will not resonate with people. You cannot put, for example, a double decker bus on Orchard Road in the 1960s, for example. And if you did that, people would not feel that it was real. It would take them out of the moment.

Yew Chong
That there’s always an extent of memories. And they are quite relative at times. In fact what you have said, I actually did that.

Jimmy
Did you really?

Yew Chong
I put Bugis Street the movie on the billboard of the Lido Theater. And because I’m depicting 1970s and 1980s Orchard Road, the Bugis Street movie only came out in the early 1990s, but I thought it’s close enough, and I decided to do that because I really thought that, you know, that movie was like a [gamechanger] in the movie scene in Singapore.

Jimmy
Rather than being, as you say, a documentarian and capturing things exactly as they are.

Yew Chong
In fact, I would say even for a documentarian or a historian, they also do that.

Jimmy
There’s some element of imagination.

Yew Chong
Yes, imagination and also discrimination of what you want to focus on.

Jimmy
What do you find hard to paint? Or everything is easy to you?

Yew Chong
No. A straight line is not easy to. [laughs] Yeah, architecture is not easy to paint, but that’s why I try to paint old houses because they are never straight. For example, the Raffles Place scene in the “I Paint my Singapore” and the HDB scenes. Yeah, I dreaded to paint all those straight lines.

Jimmy
Cannot use a ruler?

Yew Chong
You can use a ruler, but I don’t, because you can see that, you know, you use a ruler. So I always draw freehand.

Jimmy
I cannot clearly draw a straight line, so I know where you’re coming from. I cannot draw. Actually, you know, a lot of paint artist paint in their studios, and then they’re very protective about the thing and only when it’s completed do they show it to the public. You of course are very experienced painting murals. Everyone can see you work. For this particular painting, “I Paint my Singapore”, you did a lot of your work in a studio. But I think the last bit of it, you did it in public. What is the difference? You know, painting it in alone in a studio versus painting it in public?

Yew Chong
In my studio, I can turn on the aircon if it gets too hot, and I can turn on my music. It’s very comfortable.

Jimmy
So why do you do it? Why do you paint your last part in public?

Yew Chong
For that last panel. I thought that it will be nice if, people can cheer me on as if I’m running a marathon. You know, you want people to be at a finishing line. And because I spent one and a half years painting this, and people knew about this and followed through the whole process, it will be wonderful to see people coming to see this last mile. Now I enjoy both the process of painting indoors and outdoors.

Despite the hot sun and the rain and sometimes the smell of the drains, I love to be painting outdoors because everybody who pass by or even came purposely to watch me painting give me a lot of motivation, encouragement. While indoors, although I paint in solitude, I also do it in a different way: after I paint something, I will expose it on social media and people can still cheer me on.

So that’s the only difference. Other than that, it’s the enjoyment of holding the brush, thinking through, imagining what you want to paint, and then slowly seeing the painting come to life. That really makes me very happy.

Jimmy
There are now two books that have been published about you your work. tell us a little bit about them. The Art of Joy and I Paint my Singapore. What is The Art of Joy about?

Yew Chong
The Art of Joy is a narrative book written by my friend Woon Tai Ho. In 2021, he approached me, “Oh, let’s write a book about your journey.” And I said, “What? Can’t be!” Because I knew Tai Ho has written books of veteran artists like Tan Sui Hian and Lin Tse Ping, and who am I?

So I said it can’t be right. And he said, “No, no, no, no. It’s not about the level or standard of the artist, but the story behind it.” So he convinced me, you know, and [he said,] “Your story is really interesting and you should be heard and read by many more people. And it also gives more meaning to the works when they know the stories behind it.

And I was still very apprehensive because if I allow all the stories to be written, they are out there for everybody and there’s no going back. So he convinced me by saying, “No, you tell me what you don’t want me to write. And then I can also have the last say to anything that I have said and he has written.”

So after discussing with my family, I agreed to have that book. And yeah, it’s been like a one and a half years.

Jimmy
So, The Art of Joy is, is a story about how you became an artist and your journey?

Yew Chong
Yes. Tai Ho actually followed me for one and a half years to all my arts-related events, and he watched me paint. He interviewed people who came to watch me paint or even some of the talks that I gave or activities. And he observed through his eyes, through his experience of how people react, how I react, how I imagine and put things together.

So it’s about human stories behind my works, how these works affect people, and in turn, how the people interact and give me back, to share the joy with me. And that’s why we call this the art of joy. So it’s not like a biography per se. Of course he has to write something about my own childhood in Chinatown. But a large part of it is just about how my art affects the people in society and in turn affects me back.

Jimmy
And I Paint my Singapore: Familiar Scenes of Home. What is that about?

Yew Chong
The book is a picture spread book. It has nothing but just those pictures. It is the entire painting captured inside this book. It has 27 spreads, so total 58 pages. I wrote a little caption for the whole painting of how I came up with the idea, and the process behind it, and that’s all. The book will be available for sale at the exhibition and thereafter available at the bookstores. I hope that people will come to the exhibition. They will pick up a book and keep it as a memento.

Jimmy
I’m sure they will. I have no space in my house for a 60-metre-long painting, but I can definitely find a space on my bookshelf for a book that has this painting captured within its covers.

Yew Chong
And the good thing about the book is when you bring it home, you can take your time to browse through the book and do like the...

Jimmy
Finding Wally?

Yew Chong
Finding Wally. Yes. And look for everything that you didn’t see in the exhibition.

Jimmy
You finish your very long painting. Are you working on any more murals? What are you doing now?

Yew Chong
Okay, I try to do less murals.

Jimmy
So you’re moving away from murals?

Yew Chong
Not moving away. I tried to do less so as to spend more time to do my next act. Yeah, I want to be a more diversified and international artist. I can’t be doing the same thing all the time, painting nostalgic murals on the streets or even canvases with Singaporean themes. So I am trying to embark on new themes. For example, I already started on a series of canvas paintings called My World. It depicts scenes of all of the overseas places that I have been, because I like to travel. So I’ve so far painted like four places. Bhutan, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and what’s that last place? Thailand!

So I will be painting many, many more places than I have been. And on top of that, I want to also diversify in terms of format, not just the themes. So I want to pick up some courses to learn digital art and animation, although I’m already doing a lot of digital art, but I wanted to do even more. I want to make it really slick, because in today’s world you don’t have anything that is animated, digital and moving. You know it’s to attract attention. And the other thing is I want to be ultimately a filmmaker.

Jimmy
Really?

Yew Chong
Yes. Actually, I wanted to be a filmmaker before I wanted to be an artist.

Jimmy
I did not know this.

Yew Chong
A visual artist. I mean, a filmmaker is an artist. way back in even the late 1990s, I dreamt that I want to be a filmmaker, but at that time there were like hardly any film schools in Singapore. And I researched a bit and I need to go to Finland or Sweden to study film. No way, I have a family in Singapore.

So I kind of put that idea aside. And then of course, in 2015 I got this distracted with murals and then from murals, I’m very happy, I am able to become the artist I am today. But that dream of becoming a filmmaker never goes away. It’s just buried inside me and waiting to be the third act.

Jimmy
Like, wow, okay. I take my hat off to you. We hope that your dream will come true, and we will be able to see these films in cinemas or on Netflix or something.

Yew Chong
Yes, I will.

Jimmy
So thank you very much for coming into the studio with us. We’re going to end this this whole interview by asking more lighthearted questions. So let me ask you, is there a local scene you would like to paint but you haven’t painted yet?

Yew Chong
I want to paint a scene of the funeral or the wake at Sago Lane where I grew up and saw it every day. Now, I couldn’t paint that scene yet, because number one if it is a mural, no one will commission a mural. Even if I volunteer even if is not commissioned, no one will allow me to paint such a scene on their house walls.

Jimmy
Do you ever have artist block? You can’t paint for any reason. And how do you overcome it?

Yew Chong
Whenever I have an artist block, I will go for long walks and look at the blue sky. And then after some walking and solitude, I think the ideas will start coming back again.

Jimmy
What do you think about Banksy?

Yew Chong
Banksy is a genius, not just an artist. He’s also a storyteller, an activist. Everything I know inspires me a lot how he brings everything together, whether it’s political message, a message about humanity and it’s sort of multifaceted. I have seen simple wall arts on the streets in London by him and also a canvas painting in even the last year’s SG Art [Week] held in Singapore, on canvas, on videos and news, how he puts the shredder to shred...

Jimmy
Yeah the shredder painting. I remember that one.

Yew Chong
So it’s the way you present different formats of art that intrigued me, and it’s so attractive. So yeah one day I hope I’m as multifaceted as him.

Jimmy
The last question. Complete the sentence: Art is...

Yew Chong
Art is my life.

Jimmy
Thank you very much for joining me on BiblioAsia+.

Yew Chong
Thanks Jimmy.

Jimmy
If you’ve enjoyed this episode, subscribe to the podcast and the BiblioAsia newsletter. Thank you for joining me on BiblioAsia+.

Woon Tai Ho, The Art of Joy: The Journey of Yip Yew Chong (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, 2023).

Yip Yew Chong, I Paint my Singapore: Familiar Scenes of Home (Singapore: Landmark Books, 2023).

This episode of BiblioAsia Podcast was hosted by Jimmy Yap. Sound engineering was done by One Dash. The background music "Di Tanjong Katong" was composed by Ahmad Patek and performed by Chords Haven. Special thanks to Yew Chong for coming on the show.

The BiblioAsia Podcast by the National Library Singapore tells stories about Singapore history.