Born in 1941 in Malaysia, Tay Chee Toh studied at Singapore’s Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts and has a postgraduate degree (Oil Painting) from China. He is the recipient of numerous painting and sculpture awards, and in 1985 Tay was conferred the Government of Singapore’s Cultural Medallion Award.This is one of three batik works by Tay in the Museum’s collection, each work stylistically diverse and technically evolving, and most closely resembles in terms of compositional design his hard-edge paintings of the 1980s in which colour was used as major compositional components. Another element of this work that will carry over into the paintings is the ‘porthole’ window that contains or frames the energetic free-floating forms within the calm, monochromatic pictorial plane. His ‘80s paintings will feature various classical window designs offering views into his dreamscapes, as if the past were framing the present.
