Born in 1939 in Singapore (d. 2005, Singapore), Tay Bak Koi graduated from Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in 1960. Adept at painting in watercolour and oil, Tay developed a distinctive style of simplified forms and reduced lines. During 1961-1970 Tay completed 300 watercolours for the then Hilton Suites, Singapore.In the late1990s, Tay created a series of paintings based on Singapore’s Chinatown as he remembered it to be prior to gentrification and sanitisation. As a record of history, Tay presents the viewer with makeshift stalls on the road (yet to move into permanent shop fronts), covered by stretched tarpaulins and rows of umbrellas; laundry hanging from residential shophouse windows; shoppers and hawkers milling around during what appears to be a quiet moment of the day. What the painting presents, as do Tay’s paintings of villages on stilts (‘kelongs’), is a sense of community, one that lives and works together.
