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ILLUSTRATED
Page 175, 200 Malaysian Artists (Dato’ Dr Tan Chee Khuan, The Art Gallery, 2002)

LITERATURE
The Painted World Of Khoo Sui Hoe, Khoo Sui-Hoe Retrospective (Penang State Art Gallery, 2007)
200 Malaysian Artists (The Art Gallery, 2002. Compiled by Dato’ Dr Tan Chee Khuan)

Dubbed a Symbolist, Khoo Sui Hoe is known for his Shadow Man figure types in dream situations in surreal landscapes of the mind. Lovers’ Dance is a celebration of gestures extracted from dance. It is a unique double painting in that the new image in oil was painted over a previous work in acrylic from his Rock Series.

Sui Hoe works from his reams of copious sketches over time, and to keep close to the moods and thoughts sometimes project them in enlarged versions from transparencies, but ever conscious of the flow of lines.

Lovers’ Dance with two figures in profile silhouette but set apart by silky light brown tonalities against an idyllic littoral setting tells of the rhythm of a romantic interlude.

The work was made when he settled down in Houston, Texas, and is believed to have been featured in exhibitions at the Houston Center II in 1988 and Singapore’s Outram Park in 1990. In 1988, he was also included in the Contemporary Paintings of Malaysia exhibition at the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, California. Sui Hoe presently resides between Jacksonville, Arkansas, USA, and Penang, Malaysia.