With a smile, Malaysian diplomat and painter S.K. Choo recalls his first brush with art criticism.
"I'd been sent to a missionary kindergarten, and I didn't understand a word of English. The teacher came around and gave us little cardboard animals to trace and color. I got a duck. I laboriously traced three little ducks and carefully colored them. The teacher collected the papers and then paused at mine. She swiftly came dawn the aisle, handed me back nay paper, and told me to stand up. I was terrified - I didn't know what I’d done wrong. I stood up clutching my paper to my chest. She pointed to me and my picture and said loudly, 'Good!' Then she start clapping her hands, and the class followed suit." Choo's eyes sparkle at the memory, and he says with delight, "I was hooked."
Choo, currently minister counselor at the Malaysian Embassy in Tokyo, has served in Manila, Bangkok, and Bonn. Immediately previous to his posting in Japan, he was deputy chief of protocol for the ministry of foreign affairs in Kuala Lurnpur, Malaysia. It was during this home assignment in 1983 that he held his first one-man exhibition. The show consisted of fifty watercolors, a collection that had taken him almost a year to complete.
Mostly he had painted on Sundays, and always when he was happy. Entranced by the beauty of nature, he painted scenes familiar to him: the tin-mining landscapes of Perak State where he had grown up; the hills of the Cameron Highlands; Malacca, with its faded fuchsia buildings, limpid lily ponds, and tropic stands of banana trees.
Occasionally, he would veer from his favored landscapes. There was a winsome rendition of a porcelain Chinese god of happiness-the picture more whimsical and charming than the actual porcelain figure. Choo liked this painting so much he considered using it on the cover of his exhibition brochure. He decided against it only because he thought it would raise unrealistic ethnic expectations.
"People would see the name Choo, see a Chinese god of happiness on the cover, and they'd expect an exhibition of oriental paintings of bamboo and misty mountains," he reasoned. Instead, he used a lush jungle scene of shade and shadow and sunlit banana trees. Choo's exhibition was a success. The reviews were enthusiastic, and two of his paintings were nominated and eventually selected for the honor of inclusion in Malaysia's National Gallery of Art. One third of the collection sold the first day, everything had been sold by the end of the week, and would-be customers were left clamoring for more. "It was a triumph," a pleased Choo admits.
After his one-man exhibition, Choo was invited to participate in a prestigious exhibition that showcased several of the country's best artists, but only one for each artistic division. He was invited to show as the watercolorist, confirming his acknowledged success and skill with this medium.
Earlier in his career as a painter, Choo had considered watercolors inferior to oils. Basically a self taught artist, he had studied and experimented with oils. One day when he was in Athens, he saw a picture of the Acropolis. Compelled by the power and brilliance of the painting, he drew near and was startled to realize it was a watercolor. It caused him to reassess his ideas and to
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