작품 상세

Jonker Street is often bustling and crowded, and with the buildings already spruced up and up-market. In this painting, Jonker Street is unusually “not busy” even with a ‘2002’ time-tag. The people were mostly doing morning marketing. It could be the artist Lui Cheng Thak’s nostalgia take or it could have been painted from impressions of the street years earlier, a decade earlier? The facades are given an antique finish with the short sloping zinc shades in front like a ballerina’s skirt or a poorly tugged blind. In the corner-lot building, another floor is created with its open left-side adorned with a jutting wall strip. Except for the rightmost louvred window, which is open and showing curtain and a bird cage in miniature, the rest were just closed up. Lui has not looked back in expanding and improving the quality of his oil-canvas repertoire since he graduated with a Diploma in Art & Design from the Kuala Lumpur College of Art (1987-89). His solos include As I Was Passing (Hotel Istana, KL, organised by Pelita Hati), Our Heritage (Rusli Hashim Fine Art, KL, 2001), As I Was Passing II (Galeri Citra, 2006), Circles: Nostalgia And Collective Memory, White Box, Publika, 2014) and seven solos at PinkGuy Gallery, KL, ending the collaboration with Endless (2017), where the prospective collector got to title he/she bought. Redeem in 2014 was PinkGuy’s most memorable with Lui where 12 of the paintings were sold within 18 minutes of the opening!