Chen Cheng Mei

Chen Cheng Mei (; 1927–2020), also known as Tan Seah Boey, A loose collective of Singapore-based artists, the Ten Men Art Group made work based on their travels around Southeast Asia in the 1960s, and around China and India in the 1970s.

She initiated a trip with three artists to Peninsular Malaysia in 1960, which led to another journey the following year with ten participants, this time headed by artist Yeh Chi Wei after Chen proposed that he lead the trip in her stead. Chen, who was rather private about her practice, Chen’s father was a successful businessperson and orchard owner, and her mother the niece of Teo Eng Hock, the founder of the Singapore branch of the Kuomintang and a close associate of Sun Yat-sen. The Ten Men Art Group would make several more trips in the next few years, with Chen and Yeh Chi Wei discussing the destinations between each other. Chen, in depicting the Global South in her work, has been described by curator Roger Nelson as being "encounterist" in her approach, with her work seeking "to dramatise and restage the artist’s subjective experience at the ephemeral moment of encounter, rather than characterising or judging the essential nature of the people, place or culture being encountered." In this sense, in contrast to Western primitivism which saw its subjects as "un-civilised", Chen's work recognised the inherent modernity of other cultures and did not seek to portray these cultures as more "exotic" or "pure" than her own.