Tan Peng Hooi

He was born in Penang in 1942, of Chinese parents, and grew up along the waterfront that fills much of his painting. A 1981 profile records that he began copying pictures from his Chinese storybooks at the age of seven; the family was poor, and he made do with pencils and the occasional crayon.

He studied drawing in Penang’s elementary schools and later spoke of a good foundation in drawing and commercial art. He is best described as largely self-taught as a painter, with that early grounding rather than formal fine-art training. He produced his first oil painting as a teenager.

He sold his first painting in the 1960s, a view of Penang’s Weld Quay, to an American tourist. The sum was recorded as $50, though the currency is not certain. He held his first solo exhibition at the Penang Library in 1966, and by the early 1980s had shown his work in several successful exhibitions.

In 1998 the Penang State Art Gallery marked his work with a retrospective honour. His paintings are held in the collections of the Penang State Art Gallery and the Bank Negara Malaysia Museum and Art Gallery.

The reading most often drawn from his work is memory. He composes in the studio from memory, using field sketches only as a guide, so the paintings read as remembered and interpreted rather than copied. His recurring return to water, and to the vanishing waterfront shacks and village trades, gives the work its quality of keeping something before it goes.

Critics and catalogues have reached for Constable and Turner to describe his handling of light. These are comparisons made by others, not a lineage he claims.

This section is interpretation, offered as a reading of the work rather than established fact.