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 is the president of the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts' (Nafa) Alumni Association. "For me, it was a way to mix Eastern and Western painting traditions."

With an Impressionist style to his oil paintings, Low tried it out on rice paper more than 30 years ago. He started painting on both paper and canvas, enjoying the differences between the two textures, and the visual effects they rendered. "Rice paper, for example, has a sheen to it, and because it doesn't absorb the oil so fast, the colours turn out slightly different," shares the 73-year-old.