Born in Pontian, Johor in 1947, Fatimah Chik is a celebrated artist whose technical specialty as a “resist artist” encompasses batik, Shibori, screen print, and textile art. Hailing from a family of talents, her mother was adept in embroidery and tailoring traditional Malaysian clothing and her grandfather was a woodcarver who built houses without nails. In 1971, she graduated with a Bachelor of Design in Textile from MARA Institute of Technology. She married Redza Piyadasa, her former art history lecturer and accompanied him to Hawaii in 1974 where she began researching the Southeast Asian textile and motif traditions that would be greatly represented in her work. Upon returning to Malaysia in 1977, her motif designs were transferred onto batik blocks and began the transition from batik as craft to batik as fine art in the 1980s. From the 1990s, she began painting large serial artworks that incorporated batik collage. She was also an art educator at her alma mater and later at the Malaysian Institute of Art. She also served as a member of the judging panel for the Piala Seri Endon batik competitions.