Showing for the first time in Kilmorack Gallery in 2007, Hock-Aun Teh's paintings show a marrying of the spontaneity and expressive freedom found in the most highly prized of T'ang calligraphic masters to the colours and high-tech materials of modern western art. Teh's work is often classified in the West as abstract expressionism. But if it is, it's abstract expressionism with a considerable difference. For though born in Malaysia and working in Glasgow, he is by background and upbringing essentailly Chinese and was carefully schooled in calligraphy.

What Teh is after is a harnessing into precise tandem of both physical and emotional energy, so that he can communicate the essence of an experience in a moment, in which feeling and memory, sight, sound, smell and touch all play a part. For Teh brings into his paintings a kind of self expression. He uses, as he puts it, his whole body in what he does, and often works, as his calligraphic forebears did, very fast: channelling the force of feeling and memory, like an athelete, into a fresh expression of itself, onto the canvas or paper in front of him.

Teh's main source of inspiration are the experiences of his native Scotland and his regular travels around the world, particulary to the Far East. He passes through life as an observer, absorbing different cultures, traditions and ideas, separating out 'the good bits' from 'the bad', then bringing together what he wants to keep. The result is a different way of looking at things, a combing of cultures, of the East and of the West. He throws all of this at us through his painting. Biography
Born in Western Malaysia, the artist lives and works in Glasgow, making regular trips to South East Asia.

1998 CNN Profile, USA, world wide cable TV production 1997 Selected by Glasgow Museums to travel to India to study tigers intheir natural habitat

1995 Selected by the Foreign Office to be one of the subjects of the 'My Britain' series of documentary films

1991 Included in the Dictionary of C20th British Art

1980 Commendation of Merit, The Robert Colquhourn Memorial Exhibition

1979-94 Scottish Arts Council - Lecturer in Chinese & abstract painting

1978-81 Head of the Italian Landscape Course, Glasgow Summer School, San Gimignano, Italy

1977-79 Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow - Lecturer