Artist Detail | Ilham Gallery
Fatimah Chik
1947, Malaysia
Fatimah Chik
1947, Malaysia

Fatimah Chik (b. 1947, Johor) is an influential Malaysian batik artist who arrived at art through textile design. In 1971, she graduated among the inaugural batch of the MARA Institute of Technology’s School of Art and Design (opened in 1967) with a Bachelors in Textile Design. After graduation, she worked under fashion designer Tengku Zubaidah at the Kutang Kraft atelier and also assisted artist Ismail Zain in some of his batik works. In the 1970s, she began doing her own research into the different varieties of batik in Southeast Asia, which inspired her to delve deeper into batik as an art form. She combined her wide-ranging formal training at MARA (which included architecture and principles of Islamic art in the design curriculum) with her research in regional textiles to produce the unique style that she became celebrated for. She also left her own mark on the batik tradition by combining the relatively modern method of batik-stamping with the ancient Japanese dyeing method of Shibori.