Combining two art traditions

IF there's one thing Chinese ink painters or calligraphers like about their medium, it must be the way their brushes glide easily across the smooth surface of rice paper. Or, in the case of Low Hai Hong, it's the lower cost of rice paper - since he tore quite a few of them when he made the unusual switch from canvas to paper for his oil paintings.

Rice paper has always been the medium for Chinese ink artists, while oil paintings are a Western tradition and mostly used on canvas. "But I decided that I could use oil on rice paper, and be one of the first local artists to do it consistently and seriously," says Low, who …