Kuo Juping's delicate canvases record his immediate surroundings and gives a nostalgic feel depicting a bygone era. Absorbing the viewers' attention along a wooden pathway, the artist directs our gaze into the entrance of traditional village homes built on wooden stilts. Painted finely with the artist's rustic and subdued palette, it suggests a restful and calming time of the day, where the boats are at rest. 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 the ordinary people and places such as rubber estates, oil palms, cocoa plantations, paddy fields, kampung and make-shift hawker centres. He was a mentor of Tan Choon Ghee (1930-2010) who became a legendary watercolourist. Kuo died of a stroke in March 1966 at the age of 58.