Kuo Juping’s beguiling compositions, executed with confident and deft brushwork, capture the essence of daily life and the bustling charm of the streets of old Malaya. His paintings offer an intimate glimpse into a bygone era, where the architecture, landscape, and everyday encounters are distilled into scenes of poetic beauty. Each painting reflects the artist’s keen observation on the streets and overlooked spaces that resonates till today.  Kuo Juping (the name was taken after a water plant) was in the pioneering batch of students at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts 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 ordinary people and places such as rubber estates, oil palms, cocoa plantations, paddy fields, kampung, roof tops and make-shift hawker centres. He was a mentor of Tan Choon Ghee (1930-2010) who became a legendary watercolourist.