Khoo Sui Hoe occasionally painted bathers, somewhat symbolic of the once-popular mandi safar ritual performed on a certain Wednesday, but usually as a private affair, and a bonding between a couple, as in this composition. The male is draped in a chequered sarong, for decorum, and the female is swathed in an ambiguous veneer. The subject also evokes Rembrandt's iconic A Woman Bathing In A Stream, while locally, there is Dato' Hoessein Enas' Morning Mist, five in number, of nubile maidens in figure-hugging wet sarong by the waterfall. Sui Hoe's bathers is about intimacy and trust and the old kampung habit of washing oneself by a stream, rarely waterfall, before the luxury of modern bathrooms. It's also about nostalgia about once upon a time Malaya where coconut palms swayed and buffaloes roamed. "I painted human figures with backdrops of Nature. I invite sun, moon, star, cloud and horizon to enter my painted world. Such backdrops also evolve to become specific landscape pieces," Sui Hoe had intoned. Khoo Sui Hoe died in Arkansas, the United States, on May 31, 2026, a great loss to the art scene! Khoo Sui Hoe, arguably one of the first fulltime artists in Malaysia, was the spiritual leader of the northern artist's group called Utara formed in 1977. He was accorded a Retrospective by the Penang State Art Gallery called The Painted World of Khoo Sui Hoe in 2007. He had two mini retrospectives, given by Soka Gakkai Malaysia in August 2017, and The Art Gallery Penang in 2013. Khoo graduated from the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in Singapore in 1961, and had his first solo, at the British Council in 1965. He studied at the Pratt Graphic Centre in New York under the John D Rockefeller Fund in 1974. He held a two-part Overview exhibition at the Private Museum in Singapore in 2015. He had a stint as a gallerist at the Alpha Gallery Singapore in the early 1970s, and the Alpha Utara Gallery in Penang in 2004. His early career was capped by his selection for exhibitions like the Commonwealth Art Today in London (1962-1963); Malaysian Art touring Europe (1965-1966); 1st and 4th Triennial of Contemporary World Art, New Delhi (1968 and 1978); the Sao Paulo Biennale (1969); and Man And His World in Montreal, Canada (1970); and the Contemporary Paintings of Malaysia exhibition at the Asia-Pacific Museum in Pasadena, California, in 1988. Few of his masterpieces are currently on display at the prestigious National Gallery Singapore, at prominent positions.