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Jolly Koh is a colour alchemist. The blobs on his canvas with the signature egg-yolk pigments mellowed to tangy golden hues has undergone remarkable transformations. The moon of his Terang Bulan series in the mid 1990s, has morphed into the rising sun from works in 1998, 1999, 2001 and 2003 under the label, In The Sun That Is Young Only Once. Sun or moon, the changes are only in the temperatures, for the mood effused from the heat or the glow of it. It is the same symbol of constancy, omnipresence and familiarity wherever on the globe one is in, except maybe for the two poles or when the season changes to bleak winter. Constance Sheares quoted him: “That moon over Malaya has accompanied in all my much-travelled life. I get a strange kind of emotional comfort seeing it ‘follow’ me to London, then in Europe, watching it from a train window whilst travelling from London to Greece; then to Sabah, and now in Australia.” Sun or moon, that blip strategically placed, strikes a balance among all the elements and symbolises an ephemeral beauty of visual delight, unreachable but invariably there.

Jolly Koh has not looked back since being given his first solo exhibition in 1958 at the British Council in Kuala Lumpur at the age of 19. He was to make his mark both as an art tutor and artist in Australia and Malaysia. He obtained his National Diploma in Design at the Hornsey College of Art, London in 1962, and the Art Teacher’s Certificate at the London University in 1963. He followed this up with a MSc under the Fulbright scholarship and Ed.D at Indiana University in the United States from 1970 to 1972 and 1972 to 1975 respectively. He was also a teaching associate at Indiana University from 1973 to 1975. He taught Art in Melbourne and Adelaide from 1976 to 1988, and was a senior lecturer at the MSC College (now SeGi) from 2000 to 2004. Having had exhibited extensively around the ASEAN region as well as in Melbourne and London, his works are held in collections of local and international museums, corporations, banks and hotels. Amongst them are J.D Rockefeller III collection, the National Art Gallery in Victoria, Australia, the Kasama Nichido Museum of Art, Bank Negara Malaysia and the Fullerton Hotel in Singapore.