Celebrated Nanyang painter Kuo Ju Ping revelled in portraying the serenity of village life. Filled with sensuous colours and mastery of light, the work of an open market shows Kuo Ju Ping’s perceptive talent for capturing the atmosphere of the landscape. The work suggests a quiet morning market shed, with a gathering of women beautifully dressed in traditional attire of sarongs, baju kurung, and scarves. The proximity to nature is felt through the framing of vertical coconut trees, surrounded by a gaggle of geese in the foreground. Kuo Ju Ping (the name was taken after a water plant) was in the pioneering batch of students at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA) in Singapore but had to return a year before graduating to tend to his father’s import-export business, Sing Guan Thye & Co. He was a founding member of Thursday Art Group and Penang Chinese Art Club in 1936. He was one of the first artists to paint the ordinary people and places such as rubber estates, oil palms / cocoa plantations, padi-fields, kampung and make-shift hawker centres. Kuo died of a stroke in March 1966 at the age of 58.