His story

To understand how Tang Da Wu created all his work, let’s start with a short biography of the artist. He was born Thang Khain Hiong but he changed his name to Tang Da Wu when he studied abroad (in the United Kingdoms). It literally means « big bist ». Even this fact put the light on the strange personality of Tang Da Wu. What is stranger than changing his name to another name with such a meaning?

Tang Da wu was born in 1943 in Singapore. His father was a journalist with the Chinese daily newspaper Sin Chew Jit Poh. You can look here to one of the front pages of this newspaper. As you can guess, it is written in mandarin, I hope you are, not like me, part of the few people that are able to understand it and read it whitout using a translator :).

He grew up with three other brothers including one who became also a visual artist. He studied as a casual singaporean young guy, in a chinese-medium school. Even at the begining of his youth, he was told not to be a good company worker. He prefered indeed drawing than learning English.

After being acclaimed in 1968 by the National Youth leadership institute, and after successed in his first solo exhibition of drawings and paintings at the singapore chamber of commerce and industry, he studied in the UK, majoring in scuplture at the Birmingham polytechnic. He did very well and graduated in 1974 with the first class honours. He received the Bachelor of Fine Arts. He came back to UK later in order to receive a Master of Fine Arts at the University of London. Furthermore, he obtained a doctorate in 1988.  They were the sources of British contemporary arts.

Between undergraduate and master’s degree, Tang Da wu came back to singapore and did his first steps in the performance art.

In 1988, Tang Da Wu created the famous Arts Village, which is the first art colony. He wanted to enhance inspiration of artists to create works. The picture shows one of the basic meetings made by the "village".

Tang is married to an english woman, Hazel McInotsh. They have got one son, known as Zai Tang, who lived in UK and performs sound art.

In 2005, Tang Da Wu appeared in a documentary television serie, « 4*4 episodes of Singapore artist ». He became a sybol of arts in singapore.

During all his career, Tang received many awards for his works. As i said earlier, it began in 1970 with the drawings and paintings awards given by the Singapore chinese chamber of commerce and industry. It was his first exhbition. The last one is currently happening in the National Gallery of Singapore. The name is « earth work 1979 », it is about painting.