My name is Koh Choo Siah, born in Malacca. This year, I am 62 years old.

I started carving at the age of 18. I used to make new products. Now I am doing repairs or custom-made. In the old days, carving was popular amongst the people, but now it’s a dying trade. Sometimes a customer will look for us to repair the old wardrobe, we will help them to fix it.

We learned wood-carving at a very young age. When we didn’t have skills earlier, engraving was not like this. We used coconut bark or the stem and started to carve from it. So, we experimented and found it out by ourselves.

We do all the temple furniture, all kinds of carved furniture but not the 3D type. Every type of wood is used. hemlock, merbau, rosewood or teak. It depends on the furniture that we want to carve. Cork wood is the most difficult to carve. Types of furniture depends on [type of] wood. For example for certain furniture it’s only suitable to use merbau, you can’t change it to teak.  In early days, merbau wood was not carved. Lately we started to engrave flower carving for merbau furniture. 

You can see there are only a few [in our team]. There is only one young guy here. So, many people in the industry ask us to continue the trade.