The painter who preserves Malaysia's past

In August 1981, Reader's Digest ran a feature on a self-taught painter from Penang. The writer was Robert Kiener, then the magazine's deputy editor, and the title he gave the piece has outlasted the article: The Painter who Preserves Malaysia's Past.

Tan Peng Hooi's own catalogue records it as an honour not previously accorded to any other Malaysian artist. Read now, the title reads less like praise than like a description of the work itself. He was painting fishing villages, harbour mornings and village labour at exactly the moment those things were being built over. The magazine noticed early what the paintings were for.

The feature ran across pages 40 to 45. It opens on Penang's waterfront, follows his largely self-taught path and his habit of composing from memory in the studio, and reproduces several paintings: Malacca River Bank, Frolicking Pigeons, Sampans, The Tumbling Waves, and Feeding Ducks No. 1 and No. 2. In his own words, he wanted to record a way of life that is disappearing.