Ong Kim Seng, born in 1945 and one of Singapore’s best known watercolourists, is largely a self-taught artist who learnt by observing pioneer watercolourists Lim Cheng Hoe (1912-1979) and Gog Sing Hooi (1933-1994) who painted by the Singapore River on Sundays. Ong, whose first solo exhibition in 1979 featured works from his 1978 trek to the Himalayas, became a full-time artist in 1985. In 1999 Ong was awarded the Cultural Medallion by the Singapore government, and in 2000 the prestigious Dolphin Fellowship by the American Watercolour Society, the only Asian to receive such an honour.‘The Drunkard’ features a man whom Ong noticed asleep along the corridor of a shophouse in Chinatown and smelling of toddy, a cheap alcoholic drink, made from coconut palm that was popular amongst odd-job labourers.
