This must be one of the best executed of Tay Bak Koi’s inimitable buffalo pictures to come into the market. Instead of the usual bright colours, a tawny brown veneer permeates with the lie of land and natural protrusions forming a geometric play with the animals’ hump backs. The Singapore critic Chia Wai Hon praised Bak Koi’s buffaloes as “… tightly stylized creature with a massive body supported on two pairs of inverted V-shaped legs, a small head and a sharp hump…” Singapore’s pioneer gallerist Della Butcher wrote: “Tay Bak Koi’s paintings are unmistakable. He combines fantasy and reality with such skill that his work has an appeal which is a mixture of colour, blending fine draftsmanship (sic, draughtsmanship) and impressionist mystery, a unique combination.” Tay Bak Koi, who studied at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Art in 1957-60, worked in the Nanyang Style. The son of a seafood wholesaler, he had his first solo of 40 works at the Singapore National Library in 1964. In October 1996, The Art Gallery Penang hosted a solo for him, In Harmony With Nature. Bak Koi’s works are in the collection of the National Gallery Singapore, Singapore Hilton and Bahrain’s Sheikh Isa Rashed al-Kalifa.