It’s foolhardy to think that you can catch a bird with your bare hands, unless if the bird is badly injured or has wings that could not fly. Khoo Sui Hoe has done several versions on this theme, with the type of bird and the numbers varying. Birds have chirped into his composition since as early as 1965, with it being reduced to a simple shade (Bird Greetings, 1978), and then in 1999 Sunset Solitude, the bird still in profile has been given an eye, a nice beak and a little colour to the otherwise monotonous body. It springs from his childhood memories of playing in the padi fields and rivers. Like a crocodile, the two children lie still submerged in water with only part of the head showing, with the open palms on top of the head on the hope that the bird would somehow perch on them. Futile maybe, but it’s a fun way for a child to while away the hours. A bird stands for freedom, but to a child, a bird in hand brings out a grown man’s lust of possession, never mind if he (the child) knows how to maintain it. Sui Hoe helped set up the Utara Group in 1977. In 2004, he set up the Alpha Utara Gallery in Penang based on the Alpha Gallery he set up in Singapore in 1972. His major retrospective, the Painted World of Khoo Sui Hoe, was accorded by the Penang State Art Gallery in 2007. Other retros followed by The Art Gallery Penang in 2013 and Soka Gakkai Malaysia in 2018, besides a two-part Overview exhibition in Singapore in 2015.