Antique furniture restorer in George Town calls it a day after more than 80 years

[손명숙]

                                                      (World Today Friday 1 September 2017)

    Antique furniture restorer in George Town calls it a day

                       after more than 80 years

Yuan Siew Lan has been restoring antique furniture and layering gold leaf on antique furniture

for almost 40 years. Photo: Malay Mail Online

Yuen painstakingly layers each gold leaf onto the motifs of a furniture part.

Photo: Malay Mail On Line

These gold motifs on a Peranakan furniture are not painted but each are painskatingly layered

with gold leaf by Yuen. Photo: Malay Mail On Line

The last worker at Wah Dah Furishing rushing to finish orders before they close the business

by the end of this month. Photo: Malay Mail On Line

It took Yuen many hours of painskating labour layering the gold leaf onto the motifs

on the Peranakan furniture. Photo: Malay Mail On Line

Updated 7:25 PM, September 01, 2017 

GEORGE TOWN, Penang — As a teenager Guan Ah Kow left Shanghai with his family to move to Malaya, as it was called then, in the early 1920s. They settled in Penang and Guan opened a shop making custom furniture in the 1930s.

Guan died in 1954, leaving behind eight young children and his widow.

His third child, Ms Yuen Siew Lan, was only 12 at the time but had already started learning the family trade.

“All of us lived upstairs so we grew up knowing the ins and outs of the trade and business,” she said in an interview with Malay Mail Online.

She said that after her father died, her uncle took care of the business until his death in 1978.

Ms Yuen took over and kept it going until this year. Now aged 75, she closed for good on Aug 21.

“I can’t do this much longer and there’s no one else to take over from me,” she said.

The furniture shop may have been around for over 80 years and located along the busy Burmah Road next to a temple, but it was barely noticeable as the building is set away from the road within its own ample grounds.

It specialised in making wooden furniture and, since the 1960s, the meticulous restoration of antique furniture. The shop was also well-known for the application of gold leaf for antique furniture and ancestral tablets.

Peranakan antique furniture was often covered in gold leaf but it can be prone to rubbing off over time.

“Applying gold leaf on the furniture is tedious work, it needs a lot of patience and a steady hand to make sure it’s done properly,” she said.

Ms Yuen said the gold filigree and motifs on antique Peranakan furniture needed to be painstakingly layered with gold leaf and Ms Yuen would spend hours just layering the gold leaf back onto them.

“Most of the antique furniture we get is in bad condition so we have to repair (and) replace the parts and reconstruct the carvings on it,” she said. “ It could take months to restore just one piece of furniture.”

Once the furniture was repaired, Ms Yuen would have it painted. Then the parts that needed to be layered with gold leaf would be brushed with a thin layer of teak oil.

“We have to make sure the oil is not too damp or too dry before I start layering the gold leaf on it slowly to make sure it is smooth,” she said.

She had to be patient – as she watched the degree of dryness in the teak oil - and very meticulous when layering the gold leaf to ensure a smooth finish before the teak oil dries out. She said not many people have the patience to learn to layer on the gold leaf, especially when it comes to smaller complicated motifs.

Ms Yuen, who is single, lives with her two sisters on the first floor, above the workshop and office. The siblings are finally moving out of the place after spending all their lives there.

“My father started renting this place when he opened the shop and we continued renting it all these years but now, since I am retiring and closing the business, it is time for us to move to our own home in Island Glades,” she said.

She said the rising cost of supplies coupled with the Goods and Services Tax for the gold leaf were reasons why she wanted to call it a day.

“I can’t take the rising costs anymore and I am too old to continue doing this [though] I can do this for at most another five years. It is time to say goodbye... even if I miss this place, there’s nothing more I can do,” she said.

MALAY MAIL ONLINE