Tan Choo Kai
BORN: 1937
HOMETOWN: SINGAPORE
LIVED AND WORKED: SINGAPORE
Tan Choo Kai (b. 1937-2021) is one of the few prolific painters in Singapore who has been painting and teaching tirelessly after his retirement. His output demonstrates his diligence and truthfulness to his artistic vision.
Choo Kai is best at oils and well-known for his landscapes of various places and countries. Be it towering mountains, wilderness of ice and snow or desolate countryside and woods, he is able to present his landscapes in the most harmonious colours using skilled brush strokes or knife work, thereby holding viewers captive to his ‘artistic language’.
Since his retirement in 1997 from Nanyang Girl’s High School as the Head of Department of Art, Choo Kai has travelled extensively to capture beautiful sceneries with his camera while also doing plein air painting and sketching. Not bounded by the accuracy of physical forms, he paints from images of beautiful landscapes committed to memory. This reflects the sayings of China’s pioneer painter, Wu Dayu, “Being subservient to the physical form does not help to capture the artistic image. Real beauty exists between the physical form and the mental image.” As such, he is able to blend the natural elements to create a painting with a supreme sense of beauty.
Having striven diligently in the art world for half a century, Choo Kai has established a style of his own which blends the hallmarks of his revered teacher, Yap Chi Wei, namely in the colouring techniques of expressionism and the pursuit of aesthetics.