This monochrome by Penang’s legendary watercolourist Tan Choon Ghee utilizes white space and the play of shadows afforded by the narrow cover of the five-foot ways of Straits Eclectic colonial buildings in the Penang ‘old town’ conurbations. Regulations of hygiene and obstructions have seen the removal of many makeshift food stalls sprouting on the edge or outside on the immediate road front. Here, the customers are provided unusually comfortable benches as they wait for their favourite teh-tarik (pulled tea, a Malaysian specialty) or a hot bowl of noodles. From the semi-permanent stall contraption, the hawker is likely operating from his own house front. In 1981, the year he did this ink on paper, he held a solo exhibition at the Chin Woo Stadium Gallery in Kuala Lumpur. Choon Ghee trained at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Art in Singapore, graduating in 1951, and continued his studies at the Slade School of Art in London, graduating in 1969. After receiving a German Government painting scholarship and an Australian Government TV set design scholarship, he worked for TV Singapore and TV Broadcasting Ltd in Hong Kong. But he gave up a cushy job to go full time into painting at the end of 1967, and never looked back. He was given a retrospective by The Art Gallery Penang in 1992, and a grander one chronicling his works from 1957 to 2000 by the Penang State Art Gallery in 2000.