Year of Birth:
1954

Disability:
Hearing Impaired

Occupation:
Artist

Between the milling throngs of festive shoppers, one would occasionally spot Peng Hong’s familiar stern face behind a temporary bazaar stall in Orchard Road or Chinatown. For several years before stall rentals skyrocketed, the resourceful artist with hearing impairment sustain self-employment by selling handmade costume jewellery.

In between bazaars, he would be burying himself at the National Library, thumbing art books for inspiration. In his house, dozens of paperbacks on Chinese Ink brush techniques stack neatly from the floor, on his bookshelves, in the TV cabinet. Skimming their pages, one could begin a home introductory course in Chinese Still Life by reading the printed text and imitating the juxtaposed strokes, lines and compositions on the coloured illustrations of carps, koi, peonies and themes Chinese.

Frustration and the stress of alienation sometimes sink Peng Hong into bouts of depression. Perhaps this is a more compelling reason for Peng Hong, like his hearing impaired art teacher, to deem Visual Arts as the expression of the hearing impaired. He avows Art to be a way of thinking and intellectual perception, a means for him to consolidate his thoughts on paper. Despite it all, pragmatic Peng Hong manages to shrug off life’s unkindness and live it to a measure that brings him contentment.

This is how industrious Peng Hong teach himself art, on the heels of his art teacher’s tragic death and the subsequent closure of the D D Art School in 1973. With little speech, sign language or writing literacy, learning from a hearing artist, let alone one whom Peng Hong can comprehend and intereact with, is a near impossibility. In this silent universe of swaddling isolation, reclusive Peng Hong has few acquaintances and meaningful relationships. Even well-meaning family members find it difficult to interpret his wishes, usually communicated through nods, gestures, snorts and simple written vocabulary.