The play of the three cherubic faces with mop hair is cute and brilliant with the double pair of eyes, as a water's reflection, and the children studded with saucer-shaped ears, maybe for steady grip. Behind them are two female figures with elongated necks and a nondescript expression - is it a mirror image or actually again, a reflection? Are they, is it, a symbol of Mother Earth? Whatever, both have crimson lips that emit no sound. The silence and placidity are hallmarks of the work. A phalanx of erect leaf stems acts like a protective barricade. The headline, Night Crossing, offers mystery. Why make a crossing at night? They seem poised to streak across the sky towards something bright and marvellous when daylight comes. In 1999, the artist Khoo Sui Hoe had visited Mexico City and climbed the Teotihuacan Pyramid. Could his already developed figure types be refined by the pre-Columbian artefacts he saw there? 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.