“I’m trying to transfer this happiness, and put it up through the lines and the colours, to the viewer,” explained Chen Cheng Mei in a 2008 interview. For Chen C. M. – who is also known as Tan Seah Boey – the ‘happiness’ she found in her painting and printmaking, as in life, were most often derived from adventuresome travels, attention to quotidian scenes and proximity to nature. These experiences are conveyed in colourful canvases and lithographs, both figurative and abstract. Chen C. M.’s artworks reflect transformations she observed in postcolonial Singapore, as well as her journeys across the Global South, and her technically accomplished printmaking.
Proximity to nature began early for Chen C. M.: she was born in a then-rural area of Singapore, and her father cultivated orchids and durians while being a successful businessperson. Her mother was the niece of a close associate of Sun Yat Sen, and the founder of the Singapore branch of the Kuomintang. This early exposure to abundant tropical vegetation and relative socio-economic privilege had a lasting impact on Chen C. M., who never relied on artistic practice as a primary source of income, and whose first solo exhibition in Singapore was in 2004, when she was already 77 years old.

Chen C. M. enrolled in Singapore’s Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in 1949, where she was taught by pioneering artists including Lim Hak Tai and Cheong Soo Pieng. In 1951, she began full-time employment as a French translator at the Bank of China in Singapore, where she continued to work for twenty years, while having two children. She continued her education on a part-time basis, graduating in 1954. Chen C. M. would later resume informal studies in 1969, when she travelled to Paris to learn printmaking from Stanley William Hayter at the celebrated Atelier 17, a meeting place for many women and artists from the decolonising world.
In 1960, Chen C. M. initiated and organised a road trip to peninsular Malaysia with three fellow artists, including her brother, Tan Teo Kwang (b. 1941). The collective soon grew, and took on the name Ten Men Art Group. Chen C. M. proposed that artist Yeh Chi Wei (1915-1981) take over its leadership in her place. Together, they travelled extensively across Southeast Asia during the following decade, including in Java, Bali, Cambodia, Thailand, Sarawak and Borneo. Chen C. M. and her colleagues met with leading artists in many of the places they visited, and after most trips they held exhibitions of their work upon returning to Singapore. These activities were significant precursors to a regionalist approach to artistic practice in Southeast Asia.

During the 1970s, the group travelled to China and India, and Chen C. M. began her own prolonged period of self-initiated trips, journeying alone or with friends and relatives. On dozens of trips over several decades, she visited hundreds of places in Asia, Africa and Latin America, as well as Europe and elsewhere. Chen C. M. made sketches and photographs during her travels, and later returned to these in her studio, as well as depicting plants, people and places she encountered in Singapore during that period of rapid socio-cultural change.