To John Lee Joo For who has adopted the bull and horses as his alter ego, he finds horses intellectual, instinctive, robust and virile. In an interview with Ooi Kok Chuen in Melbourne for the catalogue of his retrospective at the Penang State Art Gallery, he waxed lyrical about the horses’ “beautiful shape, expressive movement, mathematical balance and a touch of the metaphysical.” He said his horses are often angry, demanding freedom, space and recognition (respect). “My horse is more spiritual than realistic, more symbolic than photographic,” he had intoned. A Meeting of Horses was created at a time when Joo-for’s graphic works were sensational like his creative overdrive in playwrighting. Novelist, playwright, director, lecturer, artist-printmaker, Joo-for migrated in 1973 to Australia where he became a born-again Catholic in 1976. He taught Art and Media Studies in Australia. He won a four-year scholarship for his National Diploma of Design certificate at the Camberwell College of Art in 1959-62. In 1962-64, he studied Graphic Art at the Royal College of Art, the cradle of British Pop Art (David Hockney was also studying there then, while Australian Brett Whiteley was getting a lot of attention in London) and which specialized in monoprint. Joo-for co-founded the Malayan Art Circle in London in 1961, after a solo at the Commonwealth Institute in London in 1960. He also co-founded the Thursday Art Group and the Penang Teachers Art Circle. He had taught at St Xavier’s Institution in Penang in 1948-64, Penang Free School from 1964-66, and later the Specialist Teachers Training Institute. He was on a creative roll, and he made his mark as a playwright, winning the Best Playwright Award from 1969 to 1971 besides the Best Radio Playwright of Singapore in 1969 for The Flood. His other notable plays include The Propitious Kidnapping of the Cultured Daughter, Son of Zen and the Christian musical, Call of Guadalupe.