Khoo Khay Tat was born in Penang in1938. At twenty-two he had success in an exhibition entitled Six Young Artists, in Penang (1960). In 1986, the National Art Gallery exhibited the artist’s work and, during the next decade, he held many exhibitions including several memorable showings with the Penang Watercolour Society - which he had joined in 1986.
From 20000 to the present Khoo Khay Tat has been prolific with his work. He has held nearly thirty exhibitions in countries as far ranging as Taiwan, China and Japan, culminating in his current exhibition in Kuala Lumpur.
In 2001 he won an award at the 20th Japan Modern Art Association, in Osaka, and in 2008 he was part of the Malaysian contingent of artists chosen to attend the 4th Exhibition of New Impressions of Asian Art, in Henan, Zhenzhou, China.
This current retrospective spans an artistic career of some fifty years and, in this way, is also a poignant landmark for the artist. Khoo Khay Tat, from his early years in the 1960s as a budding young artist, to his highly successful time as a watercolourist and through to contemporary times as an internationally renowned artist demonstrates his skill as an accomplished master, able to successfully turn his hand to any medium and elucidate any subject.
Khoo Khay Tat’s, richly deserved, fiftieth year retrospective exhibition presents a variety of new works from his delicately sensitive watercolours to his vibrant oils. In this way Khoo Khay Tat has recorded and interpreted his loves and his environment in an ever increasingly captivating way, drawing his audience into subjects which have alerted his attention and engaged his well practised eye.
In the esteemed contemporary company of Penang artist Sylvia Lee Goh, Malay expatriate Ali Rahmad and Perak’s superlative painter Yeong Seak Ling, Khoo Khay Tat is also a self taught artist. He is untainted by the art school factory mill and able to develop his own unique style of work, independent of academy and artistic confinements - which he does with increasing style and panache.
From early in his career as an artist Khoo Khay Tat has presented stunningly graphic representations of Malay kampongs, he has studied nature and depicted hard working fishermen dragging water-logged weighty nets across dazzling beaches and superb watercolour images of his home town – Penang. Trees, flowers, birds - all are captured in stunning detail, with mesmerising colour.
Yet Khoo Khay Tat’s acutely artistic eye does not only gaze upon Fishermen, nature and kampongs. The artist has become noted for his evocative, yet sensitive, renderings of buildings, especially in his light, airy, watercolour creations which at once capture reality as it is presented but also hint at a re-captured past forever encapsulated in Khoo Khay Tat’s watercolour wash techniques, and skilled artist’s observation.
The last few years have shown Khoo Khay Tat developing an immense love for oil painting as well as new directions for his watercolour, and acrylic work. In many of his later oil canvases the artist has revealed a deep love of horses, especially through images of thundering thoroughbred mounts, their heels kicking dust as they pound toward the gallery visitor who is trapped, unable to take their gaze away from the race and the magnificent rushing animals.
However, Khoo Khay Tat’s horses are not the docile mounts of Sir Alfred Munnings or the equestrian studies of George Stubbs, but a fine array of stunning images – naturalistic and fantastic, giving praise to all things equine.
As time canters past, the artist finds a greater fascination with horses of all kinds, be they the small Mongolian mounts in China, the fine Arab horses used for breeding or racing or horses of the imagination. Horses in all styles spring from the artist’s diligent eye and practised hand, delighting those who gaze upon his works.
Over five decades Khoo Khay Tat has developed his artistic ability, formulated it to captivate as well as sooth his audience. In this exhibition, coinciding with the artist’s seventy second birthday, he allows his gallery audience to luxuriate in a collection of some of his very best equine works, with a small sample of his other works and some of the artworks which inspire him.
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