Soh Boon Kiong is a Malaysian painter whose practice has evolved continuously over more than three decades. Born in Kuantan, Malaysia, in 1966, he lived and worked in Paris from 1988 to 1993 and in Amagasaki, Japan, from 1998 to 2010. He is currently based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Rather than working through predetermined images or fixed compositions, Soh approaches painting as a process of discovery. A painting begins without a fully known destination and develops through successive decisions, adjustments and moments of controlled letting go. Intuition and spontaneity coexist with an underlying sense of order; unexpected events are allowed to enter the work, then absorbed, modified or redirected as the painting evolves.
Colour has remained fundamental to his practice, not simply as a visual element but as a means of creating relationships, movement, depth and emotional resonance. His paintings often contain considerable complexity, yet he seeks an eventual sense of effortlessness: richness without heaviness, intensity without excess, and simplicity that emerges only after complexity has been resolved.
This balance is central to his way of working. Soh describes the process as one of continual fine-tuning, in which proportions, forces, colours and spaces are adjusted until they arrive at what he intuitively recognises as the right relationship. Although the final state of a painting cannot be predicted at the beginning, it gradually reveals its own internal necessity through the process of making.
His wider interests in poetry, music, philosophy and chess have accompanied his painting throughout his life. These disciplines do not enter the paintings as subjects or borrowed systems. Instead, they contribute indirectly to an accumulated way of seeing and thinking—an artistic process that Soh likens to fermentation, in which years of experience, knowledge and cultural encounters may eventually become inseparable from a seemingly immediate gesture.
Underlying his practice is a continuing search for harmony, vastness and a form of naturalness. His aspiration is for a painting to exist with the inevitability of something found in nature: complex yet unforced, without displaying the struggle of its making. In this sense, the work is conceived not simply as an image to be observed, but as a world in itself—a space into which the viewer might enter and remain.
Soh was invited as Artist-in-Residence at the University of Malaya from 2010 to 2012, following solo exhibitions at the University’s Museum of Asian Art in 2008 and 2010. His work has subsequently been presented internationally through solo exhibitions and art fairs in Malaysia, Russia, France, Japan, Taiwan, Lebanon and Mauritius. In 2024, Askeri Gallery presented his solo exhibition in Moscow, the first solo exhibition by a Malaysian artist in Russia. He is represented by Askeri Gallery in Russia and the CIS.
