ON a quiet afternoon in Damansara Heights, the white-walled rooms of Suma Orientalis Fine Art are filled with shifting fields of colour.
They are neither wholly abstract nor conventionally figurative, but instead, hover in the in-between: landscapes that dissolve as soon as one tries to name them, only to reappear as light, horizon or memory.
This is Horizons of Time, a new exhibition featuring eight paintings by Datuk Tang Hon Yin, spanning from the 1990s to the 2010s.
Running until Sept 21, the show invites visitors to trace the arc of a self-taught artist whose practice has steadily deepened over the decades, and whose work occupies a singular place in Malaysian modern art.
Born in Penang in 1943, Tang’s path into painting was far from linear. He graduated from Universiti Malaya in 1967 and completed a Diploma in Education the following year. Formal training in art was absent from his early years, yet that gap became the ground on which he forged his own visual language.
Working with acrylics and an airbrush, he cultivated a style that is recognisable for its expanses of colour and meditative restraint.
Between 1978 and 1991, Tang was an active member of the UTARA group, alongside figures such as Khoo Sui Hoe and Sharifah Fatimah Zubir. Those years marked a critical phase in Malaysian art, when artists sought to define local modernisms beyond inherited colonial frameworks.
Tang’s contribution was to turn away from direct representation and toward the evocation of terrain, atmosphere and temporality.
MEDITATIVE QUALITY
In the canvases on view at Horizons of Time, these qualities unfold with clarity. Bands of muted earth tones are offset by luminous passages of light. Contours suggestive of aerial views or coastlines emerge, only to dissolve into veils of pigment. The works feel both still and dynamic, holding contradictions in suspension: solidity and fluidity, earth and sky, present moment and passage of time.
“The horizon”, as the exhibition notes propose, “isn’t simply a line dividing earth and sky, but a metaphor for passage between decades, between places, and between states of being”.
In Tang’s hands, the horizon becomes less a fixed boundary than a threshold — an opening to contemplate how memory stretches across space, or how perception shifts as one moves.
This sensitivity to atmosphere has made Tang’s paintings widely resonant. His works have been acquired by major institutions from the National Art Gallery Malaysia, to Bank Negara Malaysia, Galeri Petronas and the Penang State Art Gallery, which dedicated a retrospective to him in 2018. They also reside in corporate and international collections, reaching as far as Belgium and Singapore.
Viewers often remark on the meditative quality of his paintings, which can suggest bird’s-eye views of earth or sea as much as they can evoke states of tranquillity. To some, they are terrains; to others, they are states of mind. Tang himself has long expressed a vision shaped by optimism and hope, filtering the world’s turbulence through an aesthetic that is both grounded and expansive.
INDELIBLE MARK
At Suma Orientalis Fine Art, the exhibition is framed within the gallery’s broader mission: to nurture conversations around contemporary Malaysian art.
Based in Damansara Heights, Suma Orientalis is known for programming that spans exhibitions, talks and critique sessions, with a focus on artists whose practices hold depth and relevance.
By situating Tang’s works within this context, the gallery underscores his continued significance in the evolving narratives of local art.
The exhibition also speaks to questions larger than art history. In Tang’s layered canvases, time itself seems to breathe. Colours sediment like strata, recalling geological time, while shifting tones resemble the fleeting impressions of travel — land glimpsed from a moving vehicle, or coastlines seen from the air. In this way, his work stages encounters between permanence and impermanence, between what endures and what slips away.
For visitors, standing before these works may feel like entering that liminal zone. One can search for the familiar — the suggestion of rivers, mountains or skies — but equally, one can allow the paintings to act as mirrors for perception itself, registering how we see, remember and locate ourselves in the world.
As Tang, now in his 80s, continues to live and work in Penang, his paintings remind us that artistic journeys can unfold slowly, without spectacle and still leave an indelible mark. They remind us too that horizons are never fixed: they shift as we move, carrying with them the weight of history, the texture of place and the light of possibility.
Horizons of Time: Selected Works of Tang Hon Yin
When: Until Sept 21. The gallery is open from 1pm to 6pm, and closed on Mondays and public holidays
Where: Suma Orientalis Fine Art, The Five @ KPD, B-3a-1, Jalan Dungun, Damansara Heights, Kuala Lumpur
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