Time stands still in Khoo Sui Hoe’s idyllic world, a carefree time with the ole world charm set in pastoral settings. The serenity, the harmony and the balance in perpetuity as seen in this 1977 Crescent Moon (there is a 1996 landscape with a similar title). Noted for placing figures in landscapes, usually in twosomes of different gender, Sui Hoe adds the added constancy of the moon, here crescent and unrounded with the crescent or hilal construed as a key symbol of Islam, marking the start of Ramadan. It is a spiritual awakening, a new beginning, with the figures juxtaposed on top of each other, placed on opposite ends with the head on either side. You find the rhapsodic lyricism of Chagall, that is why the great Frank Sullivan dubbed Sui Hoe “a poet in paint”. For more than six decades, Khoo Sui Hoe has been a practising professional artist, ever since he graduated from the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA) in Singapore in 1961. His career is topped by a Retrospective, The Painted World of Khoo Sui Hoe, given by the Penang State Art Gallery in 2007. Wisma Soka Gakkai Malaysia, honoured him with another retrospective. His two-part Overview exhibition, was held in Singapore in 2015. After NAFA, he furthered his art studies at the Pratt Graphic Centre in New York in 1974, under the John Rockeller III Fund. Sui Hoe, the spiritual leader of the now defunct Utara Group, had won Honourable Mention in the Salon Malaysia in 1969 and 1st Prize (Oil) in the Malaysian Art and Craft competition in 1965.