Three's a crowd in Khoo Sui Hoe’s painted repertoire, dominated mostly by two evocative figures or one in solitary bliss or careless abandon. The figures are often depicted Chagall-like, in levitation since the 1970s exuding a freedom and nary-a-care attitude, often in natural settings, whether it be among the clouds, in a lake or amidst some vegetation. Love and togetherness are the perennial driving force, often with a touch of humour for a cutesy feel-good affinity. Time just stands still, there is no urgency for anything at all but to luxuriate in the eternity of the moment. There are so few works that go beyond the figure ‘2’ that they can be easily marked, like Three Flying (2006) and some others with four or five or even figures, but they are few and far in between. No wonder, Sui Hoe is dubbed by the pioneer Malaysian art promoter Frank Sullivan as a “poet in paint.” Khoo Sui Hoe is the spiritual leader of the Utara Group, formed in 1977. He was a fulltime artist since graduating from the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in Singapore, in 1961. He was awarded the John D Rockefeller III Fund to study at the Pratt Graphic Centre in New York in 1974. He was accorded a Retrospective, The Painted World of Khoo Sui Hoe, by the Penang State Art Gallery in 2007, and later another by Wisma Kebudayaan Soka Gakkai, Kuala Lumpur. There were mini retros of sorts, given by the Penang Museum Board, in 1978 (works from 1963-1973) and The Art Gallery Penang in 2013 (works from 1967-2013). In 2015, Khoo held a two-part An Overview exhibition, in Singapore. He won Honorable Mention in the prestigious Salon Malaysia in 1969 and also 1st Prize (Oil) in the Malaysian Art & Craft competition in 1965. He was in charge of the Alpha Gallery Singapore in 1972, which he revived in Penang in 2004 as the Alpha Utara Gallery. He was included in the Contemporary Paintings of Malaysia exhibition at the Pacific Museum in Pasadena, California, in 1988.