Chinese Zodiac, based on Eric Quah’s birth-year animal of the Dog in the Chinese almanac, was done when he was still in Australia, in the early 1990s when he just became a fulltime artist. It featured rough and smudged pictogram extracts of the 12 zodiac animals. At that time, he was also working on similarly small collage works, particularly on his Berlin Wall Series. The work was first exhibited in a gallery in the Kuala Lumpur City Centre run jointly by Penny Chen and Margaret Lim, now the owner of Art Accent. Eric Quah intoned: “I often express the importance of the journey by disregarding the boundaries that separate my Eastern inheritance with my Western training. I like to explode the logical order of issues, happenings (and) memories and allow them to blur, one into another, through conceptual collapse, the joy and pain exuding from the textural folds of pigments, the pasted and the peeled.” Eric Quah stayed put in Australia after graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Art at the Cauldfield Institute of Art (now Monash University) in 1976, and taught at the Chinese Language Department at Richmond College (1977-91) and became museum director of the Museum of Chinese Australians. He had also taught Art in Sabah. He had a stint at the New York Studio School in New York in 1982-83 under a scholarship, and a year teaching fellowship in Nanjing, China, in 1984-85. It was there that he created the mixed-media (de)collage, TIME (1982), which was featured in the seminal art collage book, Collage Handbook (Thames & Hudson, New York) in 1983. After three decades in Australia, Eric Quah relocated in 2003 to Penang, where he is based ever since, and in December 2001, he was honoured wth a Retrospective by the Penang State Art Gallery.