LOT 90
KHOO SUI HOE
B. Kedah, 1939 – 2026
Red River, 2011
Oil on canvas
177 x 244 cm
Private Collection, Kuala Lumpur
Signed “Sui Hoe” on lower right. Illustrated on pages 62 of the Khoo Sui Hoe, Inscapes Through The Year exhibition catalogue held from April 29 – May 2012 at Pipal Fine Art.
RM 220,000 – 400,000
Khoo Sui Hoe is widely regarded as one of Malaysia’s most distinctive modern painters, celebrated for his dreamlike imagery, lyrical colour fields, and recurring themes of memory, childhood, and riverside leisure. His works often inhabit a poetic space between reality and imagination, where human figures, landscapes, and symbolic environments merge into a quietly surreal visual language.
In Red River (2011), oil on canvas, Khoo extends his long standing fascination with water as both a physical and psychological motif. Across his career, riverine settings have functioned as sites of recollection and emotional reflection, places where figures drift in states of ease, intimacy, or introspection. This work continues that lineage, suggesting not just a landscape, but a remembered world shaped by sensation and nostalgia.
Typical of Khoo’s mature practice, the painting is expected to balance simplified figurative forms with expressive colour and fluid composition, where the river becomes more than subject matter, it acts as a metaphor for time, memory, and the flow of life. His handling of oil on canvas in this period often favors a softened, atmospheric surface, allowing figures and environment to dissolve gently into one another, reinforcing the sense of a half remembered dream.