Time was when you doubted Jolly Koh would ever veer from his vibrant primary palette into a twilight zone of dark polyps of what look superficially like brown and grey, to Jolly Koh more a play of red-orange-blue, producing a tiptoe between yellow-tan and light-brown. Such suggestively nocturnal pieces can be found in his immediate new millennium pieces like Night Sky and Red Nocturne and in the later part, his ‘China’ works. Does one’s vision and palette aged, or mature like cliched phasal developments from teenaged angst, youth to middle-age… or is it, as it more likely, Jolly Koh’s new adventure into a terrain of more sombre colours? It’s unusual to find such a beautiful conjunction of artist and academician, one with a sharp intellect. For Dr. Jolly Koh, his life is the stuff of an art adventure. Born in Singapore, grew up in Malacca, made an impact as a boy wonder of art in Kuala Lumpur, he pursued his academic credentials in UK and the United States, and on his return, taught briefly at the Mara Institute of Technology and Sabah’s Gaya College, before uprooting to Australia to teach there, and then back to Malaysia to teach, and now relocated here. His education read: Hornsey College of Art, London, 1959-62; London University’s Institute of Education, 1962-63; Indiana University in the United States (MSc, Ed.D, Masters), 1970-75. Jolly Koh was accorded a benchmark exhibition celebrating 60 years of art in 2017, at the Whitebox Publika, Kuala Lumpur (organised by Curate Henry Butcher), which was accompanied by an impressive monograph – a proud journey since his first solo, at the age of 17, at the British Council, Kuala Lumpur, in 1958.