Dato' Chuah Kooi Yong

I've never regretted choosing this challenging path. Despite its ups and downs, art allowed me to appreciate how beautiful life is.

The rooster on the wall #

Balik Pulau sits on the western coast of Penang island — separated from George Town by a mountain range, populated by fishing families and fruit orchards, connected to the rest of Penang by a single coastal road. It was not the kind of place from which art careers were supposed to originate.

Chuah grew up as one of ten children in that village. The family was not poor in the despairing sense, but neither was it comfortable. What the household possessed — and what changed everything — was a painting of a rooster, the kind of decorative image common in Chinese homes. Chuah could not stop looking at it. Something in the image communicated a possibility that the village offered no other language for: that a person could make something that outlasted the making.

He enrolled at Singapore’s Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, the most rigorous arts education available in the region at that time. But Singapore was not enough. He wanted to understand design at the level being practised in Europe — the formal vocabulary of visual communication that would prove, decades later, to be the foundation of a global creative economy. He sold paintings to fund a ticket to London.

At Hornsey College of Art in the 1960s — the institution that later merged into Middlesex University and that was, at the time, one of Britain’s most progressive art schools — Chuah earned a Diploma in Graphic Design. He was studying in a city that was reinventing visual culture in real time. He absorbed it. Then he came home.

The gap he came back to fill #

A self-taught artist from Balik Pulau who had earned a London diploma could have built a design practice, joined a corporate art department, or done what talented Malaysians of his generation so often did — remained abroad where the commissions were larger. He chose none of these.

What he had noticed in Penang was an absence. Northern Malaysia had no institution dedicated to visual arts education. The country’s growing appetite for designers, illustrators, and art educators had no formal local channel to fill it. The gap was structural and persistent: it would not close on its own.

He spent years after returning running a design company, accumulating the commercial experience that would ground whatever he built next. He was not racing toward the idea. He was preparing for it.

On 28 April 1987, Chuah and his wife Datin Pauline opened Equator Academy of Art in a rented second-floor suite on Penang Road. Seven students enrolled.

The founding detail that matters is not the small number. Small beginnings are unremarkable. What matters is that he and Datin Pauline had designed the institution before they had the students — that the curriculum, the philosophy, and the commitment to remain in Penang existed before the first class arrived. A man building a business starts with the market. A man with a conviction starts with what should exist.

What the school reflects #

Equator College now occupies a pre-war heritage mansion on Leith Street — a building whose address places it opposite the Cheong Fatt Tze Blue Mansion, one of the most photographed structures in the UNESCO World Heritage core zone. The location is not accidental. Craft educated in spaces that embody craft; heritage taught in a building that is itself heritage.

The institution Chuah built does not resemble the large for-profit colleges that dominate Malaysian private education. It has never attempted to be comprehensive. Equator offers what its founder understood: art and design, at the level where technique meets concept. The 6-star MyQUEST rating — awarded by Malaysia’s quality assurance authority, held by only fourteen institutions nationally — confirms that this narrowness is not limitation but precision.

The school has outlasted careers, outlasted competitors, and outlasted the credentialing fashions that have periodically convinced Malaysian families to abandon arts disciplines in favour of more directly vocational routes. In a sector where roughly 60 institutions closed in 2020 alone, Equator entered its thirty-eighth year with the same leadership that started it.

The FRSA — Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts — is a distinction held by fewer than 3,000 people worldwide at any given time, awarded for contributions to arts, education, and society. For a Malaysian arts educator from Balik Pulau, it represents international recognition that the work done in a small rented suite in 1987 was connected to a larger conversation about what education can be.

Resilience without a drama chapter #

The crises are documented in the sector’s history, not yet in Chuah’s personal telling. The 1997 Asian Financial Crisis devastated Malaysian private education — institutions closed, student numbers fell, families who could no longer afford fees withdrew their children. The COVID Movement Control Orders of 2020 killed approximately sixty Malaysian colleges. Equator survived both.

What the public record does not contain is the inner narrative of those periods: the specific decisions made, the moments when continuation seemed genuinely doubtful, the commitments honoured under financial pressure that most institutional founders would have abandoned. That conversation has not yet happened. The research notes say what the data confirms: interview urgent, age 85+.

What the record does contain is the fourth solo exhibition, held at the Penang State Art Gallery in August 2023, featuring more than one hundred works spanning six decades. Chuah was still painting. The institution he founded was still operating. “I’ve never regretted choosing this challenging path,” he told The Star. “Despite its ups and downs, art allowed me to appreciate how beautiful life is.”

That sentence is the output of a life’s work, not a press release. It carries the weight of thirty-seven years.

The open question #

Partial profiles exist because some stories are still being lived, and some conversations have not yet happened. The institutional arc of Equator College — 7 students to 6-star MyQUEST, Penang Road to Leith Street, founding to FRSA — is documented. What is not documented is the founder’s own account of the terrain between those markers.

What did the 1997 crisis feel like from inside the school? What did he tell his staff during the COVID lockdowns when the building went silent? What does succession planning look like for an institution built on one man’s conviction that visual arts education belongs in northern Malaysia? Who carries it forward?

These are the questions that belong to an interview that has not yet occurred. Dato’ Chuah Kooi Yong is now in his late eighties, still active, still painting, still the Chairman of the college he opened with seven students nearly four decades ago. The conversation is urgent — not because the story is unfinished, but because the person who can complete it will not always be available.

The school will survive the telling. Whether the full story survives depends on whether someone asks before it is too late.

Last updated: April 30, 2026