Ooi Kok Chuen

is an art-writer and journalist, and the author of MAHSURI: A Legend Reborn (Ooi Peeps Publishing), an adult contemporary fantasy “movel” (a novel conceived as a mock movie) spun from a local legend.

152 posts

Malaysian artists join one of Singapore’s many shows

7 min read

Malaysia’s strong presence at Art Stage Singapore 2015 would have passed relatively unnoticed if not for Vincent Leong’s Kenapamu Malaysia (II), a...

Seeing art in passing time and peopled space

6 min read

Lee: Engaging pioneering communities.Art today can involve the most ordinary of people doing the most ordinary of things, fulfilling the Beuysian dictum o...

So much of Ismail Hashim to unpack or repack

6 min read

Some visitors were a wee bit befuddled, flummoxed and bewildered.They had trooped to photographer extraordinaire Ismail Hashim’s Unpack-Repack exhibitio...

Art thefts are big business

6 min read

The theft of well-known Indonesian artist Affandi’s Self-Portrait With Pipe (1973), which was sold at the Sotheby’s Hong Kong auction for 5 billion...

A show of images small, succinct and sensational

5 min read

Small is the new Big, and small certainly counts in the Imago Mundi (Latin for “Image of the World”) miniature global art outreach! The brainchild o...

Taking water and colours to new heights

6 min read

Watercolours are deemed low in the art hierarchy. But it is in that genre that Chang Fee Ming is a game-changer, known for constantly pushing the parameters of...

Paris – Source of inspiration for local artists

6 min read

Lai Foong Moi.Until Lai Foong Moi paved the yellowbrick road to the art world of Paris in 1953, few in Malaya/Singapore thought it possible for them to tr...

Calmness caught in epic colours

7 min read

Syed Thajudeen’s art is forged in the confluences of catalytic changes. When young, he savoured the euphoria of Independence in India (1947) and then in M...

Will Malaysia’s Bullish Art Market be Bearing Downwards?

6 min read

Will the Malaysian art (auction) market slouch in 2016? New artists’ records may have been set in 2015, but the market did end the year with a comparative...

Loving Paris in the Winter

6 min read

Winter is hardly the season of discontent as oft perceived – barren and calcified of major art-tivities because of the “wrathful nipping cold”...

A Massive Show that is Managing

6 min read

The Sixth Art Stage Singapore (AS6) ended on January 24, 2016 (vernissage January 20) with mixed signals: the hoopla of Singapore’s Golden Jubilee celebra...

Enough to Please Most Eyes

7 min read

It is the largest assembly of museum-quality fare on South-East Asian art, with a small selection of 8,000 works that has been borrowed from institutions and pr...