Malaysian-born artist Khoo Sui Hoe, a key figure in the modern art scenes of Malaysia and Singapore, has died aged 86.
He passed away peacefully on 31 May 2026 at his home in North Little Rock, Arkansas, where he had lived since 1982.
Born in July 1939 in Baling, Kedah, Khoo studied at Han Chiang High School in George Town before training at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in Singapore under masters Cheong Soo Pieng, Georgette Chen and Cheng Chong Swee. He later won a John D. Rockefeller III Fund Grant to study printmaking at the Pratt Graphic Centre in New York in 1974.
In 1965, he won First Prize in Oil at the Malaysian Art & Craft Competition and was commissioned to paint “Children Of The Sun” for the Singapore Conference Hall. The work now belongs to the National Gallery Singapore collection.
Khoo co-founded Alpha Gallery in Singapore in 1971, an artist-run space that became a platform for critical exchange among Southeast Asian artists. An Alpha Utara Gallery was also established in George Town. In 1976, he set up the Utara art community in Penang, bringing together artists from northern Peninsular Malaysia.
Known for his surrealistic stylisation of figures, landscapes and masks, Khoo painted dreamlike scenes rooted in his childhood memories of Baling. His work featured rivers, luminous sunrises, limestone karsts and nostalgic settings.
“I paint human figures with backdrops of nature. I invite sun, moon, star, cloud and horizon to enter my painted world,” he once said.
Artist-critic Redza Piyadasa wrote in 1983: “Innocence and fantasy unite to take the viewer, ever so often, to a faraway land where there are no troubles but only innocent joys.”
Khoo held major retrospectives at the Penang State Art Gallery in 2007 and in Kuala Lumpur in 2017. His final career survey, “Selected Works 1965–2020,” was shown at G13 Gallery in Petaling Jaya in December 2025. His works are held in the National Gallery Singapore, Singapore Art Museum, National Art Gallery KL, Penang State Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia.
Source: The Straits Times
