작품 상세

The year 1959 saw Lai Foong Moi at her versatile finesse. She had just returned to Singapore from studies in Paris and had painted several works of the Chinese tongkang (junks) in Singapore. The period was also notable for her Sarawak sojourn where she stayed with the Dayak in the longhouse and painted. Some of these tongkang works were shown at the University of Malaya Art Museum in Singapore in March 1959 in an exhibition curated by Prof. Michael Sullivan. The year 1959 is notable for several iconic works like Rumah Panjang Sarawak, Penari Iban, Morning In The Kampung and Gadis Melayu. Of course, her Samsui Woman is regarded as the symbol of Malayan feminism. Lai Foong Moi was actually born in 1928, the Chinese lunar Year of the Dragon, and died of cancer in August 1995. She is a pioneering legend in Malaysian art, inspiring many women artists before she took up Singapore citizenship when she taught at her alma mater, the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA) where she had studied from 1950-1953. She won a French government scholarship to study at the famous Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris from 1954-1958 where her mentor was Prof. Chaplain-Midy, the classmate of Georgette Chen, who was also her mentor in NAFA. Despite her prolific talents and versatility, she had only three solos in the 1960s – Kuala Lumpur, Penang and Singapore. For personal reasons, she stayed away from exhibitions and her last show was the Pont des Arts in Singapore in 1994. Her stature was such that her works were accepted into Paris exhibitions with their stringent standards, and even won Honorable Mention in a Societes des Artistes Francaise exhibition. In Ooi Kok Chuen’s obituary of her in The New Sunday Times on Dec 10, 1995, art historian Redza Piyadasa ranked her “a major artist”. “She was very important not only as a woman painter, but a painter of her generation… even in Southeast Asia.”