Malaysian-born Chia Yu Chian (1936-1990) was the first Southeast Asian recipient of a scholarship from the French government to study in Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Paris (1959-1962). An active participant in the local and regional art scene in the 1950s and 1960s, Chia had exhibited extensively, regionally and internationally in France (1959) and Germany (1960), with his first solo exhibition in Malaysia (1956).In the 1980s, Chia was hospitalized on several occasions and it was then that he started the Hospital series that comprises over 25 paintings and many drawings of patients, medical staff and visitors, offering a rare perspective into an intensely personal realm. While Chia documented what he saw, he was conscious of never revealing the identities of the patients or their conditions. In ‘The Treatment’ a nurse attends to a patient lying in bed.