Working on the fringe of the music market, 42-year-old Tan Chin Seng is invisible and unknown outside of the small violin community in the region. Yet, for over a decade now, Tan has been making bespoke violins, violas and cellos from his shop in the residential township of Bandar Sri Damansara, north of Petaling Jaya. Virtuosos from France, Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia place orders to craft and customise their instruments and each project he takes on is a labour of love, resulting in just over a handful of completed instruments a year.
Craftsmen and carpenters are a niche group of people, and within that, luthiers even more unheard of in this part of the world. This is not a glamorous or lucrative profession.
While he owns his workshop and music school, dubbed Deciso—to mean decisive and firm—Tan is more craftsman than businessman. Like many other 21st-century craftspeople,
