Toya Lim Khoon Hock
Toya Lim Khoon Hock, Sampan, 2004
Batik Like None Other
One look at Toya Lim Khoon Hock’s (Malaysian, 1943-2016) art and you’ll realise they're like nothing you’ve seen before. Is it oil? Pastel on paper? It's none of the above. You're looking at batik impressionism, artworks that are intricately detailed, revealing the realities of everyday workers in rural Penang, where he lived.
However, despite a strong international presence in his time, having exhibited in major cultural centres such as Paris, Amsterdam, and Bangkok [1], Toya has been largely under-recognised in contemporary accounts of Southeast Asian art. Recognised in the 1980s as a vanguard of Malaysian batik art [2], his prolific career was well-documented in both regional and foreign press.
We’d like to bring back some significance to his incredible body of work Following his death in 2016, collectors who knew Toya personally spoke of a full and remarkable life. It was in learning about his story through oral accounts, getting our hands on instructive and comprehensive literature, and obviously witnessing the incredible works he created, that we realised we needed to begin sharing what we know of Toya and his art online.
Toya
Born Lim Khoon Hock, he chose the name Toya to reflect his connection to his land—‘Toy’ meaning soil in Cantonese, and the ‘ya’ intended to be phonetically similar to the ‘Ayer’ of his hometown, Ayer Itam.
He’s a true rags-to-riches story, having had a childhood preoccupied with struggle. “I came from a very poor family. When we got too hungry we drank water. When we wanted to go somewhere, we walked,” he told Sam Choon Hei, writer for the Consumers’ Association of Penang in 1988. [3]
Toya, 1970
His journey included an apprenticeship under Chuah Thean Teng [4], regarded as the father of Malaysian batik painting. Yet Toya would diverge from his mentor’s path in crucial ways. Where Chuah emphasised the visual language of batik—the cracks, outlines, and resist lines—Toya worked to eliminate these signatures of the medium altogether. To Toya, batik offered limitless potential for mark-making and a way to execute precise, detailed depictions.
After committing fully to the medium of batik, he gained critical acclaim, exhibiting across Europe, the US, Southeast Asia, and Australia throughout the '80s and '90s. He held lectures at universities and was written about by academics in the countries where he showed his work [5]. At his peak, Toya offered a revolutionary way of appreciating batik to international audiences.
ABN Bank Charity Art Exhibition, 1991
Tan Choon Ghee, Toya, Datuk Kee Phaik Cheen, Dr Chew Teng Beng, Roh Broedelet.
A Practice Rooted in Discipline
Batik, as an art form, allows no corrections during production. Every step is final. That makes it a discipline of precision, requiring deliberate planning and patience.
Toya worked with a canting (pen-like tool to apply liquid hot wax) like every other batik artist, but his stylistic commitment made the process far more time-consuming than most. He developed each piece over weeks, sometimes months, applying his vision spot by spot, layer-by-layer. This meticulous point-by-point approach echoed the focus of artists like Monet or Seurat—but using only dye and canting, without a single brush.
This decision wasn’t simply aesthetic. It was philosophical. Toya's objective was not to showcase the technique but to submerge it, allowing the subjects of his work to emerge free from the visual constraints of traditional batik. He sought to dissolve the medium’s tell-tale signs, achieving an effect where his images became less about “how” they were made and more about “what” they evoked.
These works are of large creative value, with a depth of time, practice, and commitment that makes them near-impossible to reproduce. To understand this level of artistry, you’d have to behold one of his works in real life yourself.
Stories of the Everyday
Toya’s subject matter reveals another layer of commitment. Across his catalogue, you’ll see images of the working person: workers in fields, harvesting grain, herding animals; a rickshaw puller; hawkers in markets; wood harvesters in forests; compost pickers… Their repetition reflects a deep and consistent interest in rural scenes of labour.
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| Fishing boats, 1998 | Closer look at the cakes, 1983 | Digging compost, 1974 |
Toya’s connection to the working class reflected his genuine interest in telling their stories. In 1990, he told the New Straits Times, “I identify with the poor for I have been too. I may not be able to write about their plight, but I can paint and portray their hard life.” [6]
Through his reflection of the lives of people often hidden from society, where he did not glorify poverty, but chose to represent it how he saw it, was a testament to his desire to tell stories. Not just any stories, but the kinds that required time and patience—just like the lives he depicted.
The Stillness of Time
There’s a striking stillness in Toya’s work. His works were largely produced in the 80s and 90s, and yet, not 50 years later, their stillness feels especially poignant today. Life in the city has long been fast-paced, but the rise of digital technology and rapid communication has accelerated this even more. We see these effects in the art world, too, where trends, artists, and markets shift at breakneck speed.
To engage with a Toya painting is to confront a precise moment. A hawker mid-task. A cow herder frozen mid-stride. Even the still life of a toilet reflects a life lived slowly, attentively. His process—hours spent layering resist dyes, shaping gradients—demands time, a commodity increasingly scarce today. Skills like these are hard to come by, not just due to the effort involved, but also the scarcity of mentorship and the loss of craft transmission.
Toya working, 1973
The stillness of his works demand a quiet reckoning, its technique so intriguing it forces the viewer to really observe. Their stillness is not sentimental; it is structural. It invites sustained attention and highlights just how much labour—both the artist’s and the subject’s—went into those captured scenes.
A Master Technician
Toya’s batik is technically radical. Even among unconventional batik artists, his approach pushed the medium’s limits as both a craft and a language, taking traditional methods and transformed them into technical innovation.
Photographs don’t do justice to the subtle textures, the tonal shifts in his work or the refraction of light through the material. He used just three synthetic dyes, mixing his own shades, often favouring earthy browns and yellows. These tones lend his work a nostalgic quality, as if recalling a world already fading.
Toya Lim Khoon Hock, Going Home, 1996
He spent over two years developing a lineless batik style. Traditional crackle effects and strong outlines were discarded in favour of gradients and tonal suggestion -- minute shifts in hue and intensity that suggest form rather than impose it.
The resemblance to pointillism is not superficial. Like the Impressionists, Toya paints light itself. But where Seurat used tiny dots of pigment, Toya uses resist-dye applications, achieved without any mechanised tools. His process echoes the original etymology of the word batik, from amba titik, meaning “to write with dots.” In Toya’s hands, this writing became a precise, deliberate form of visual language.
Toya’s practice does not declare ideology; as batik works are very often attached to nationalism, but explores the boundaries of what a medium can express. His focus on material, on technique, on the very making of the work, demands that we see the medium not as secondary, but essential. In his practice, context does not replace material—it works through it.
Toya’s Home, 1990
A Legacy of Integrity
Toya’s paintings appeal to a generation of collectors looking for more than trend or status. His art is rooted in heritage, but relevant to contemporary questions about craft, labour, and the everyday.
These works are significant not only for how they were made, but for what they preserve. In a time where images circulate faster than they can be processed, Toya’s batik demands pause. His compositions invite attention, holding stories that are fast-disappearing.
Today, Toya Lim’s paintings are rare finds. His death in 2019 marked the loss of a singular voice in Southeast Asian art, but his legacy persists in the very fabric of his work. Collecting a Toya Lim is not simply about acquiring a beautiful piece, but honouring a lineage, a technique, and a point of view that continues to resonate.
At Art Again, we champion this kind of art—narrative-driven, craft-based, and culturally significant. We believe that Lim’s work belongs not only in private collections but also in public conversations. His batik paintings are not relics, reminders of history and home and artists with deep commitment to their art.
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If you are interested in the works of Toya Lim Khoon Hock, our marketplace offers several. See the listings below and explore his works. There are more works available, for serious inquiries please email us at sales@artagain.co
Toya Lim Khoon Hock, Padi Field in Java, 1998
Wax and dye on cloth
68 x 86 cm (visible), 80 x 98 x 5 cm (framed)
View listing.
Toya Lim Khoon Hock, Bullock Cart, 1996
Wax and dye on cloth
68 x 86 cm (visible), 80 x 98 x 5 cm (framed)
View listing.
Written by Fithriah Hashim.
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Footnotes:
[1] He had solo exhibitions in Bangkok (1969, 1970), Australia (1971), Indonesia (1972), Switzerland (1974), the United States (Trona, California in 1967 and SoHo Tapestries and Cordy Gallery in New York in 1975 and 1976 respectively), and England (1988)
International Batik Artist: Toya Retrospective (Penang, The Art Gallery, Penang, 1997), Page 11
[2] As referred to in a Leisure Times segment of the New Straits Times, published on April 4, 1988, by journalist Ooi Kok Chuen.
International Batik Artist: Toya Retrospective (Penang, The Art Gallery, Penang, 1997), Page 77
[3] International Batik Artist: Toya Retrospective (Penang, The Art Gallery, Penang, 1997), Page 78
[4] Chuah Thean Teng (Malaysian, 1914–2008) is widely recognised as the father of Malaysian batik painting. Trained in China before settling in Penang, Chuah pioneered the use of batik as a fine art medium in the 1950s, developing a figurative, narrative style that gained national and international attention. His work played a foundational role in shaping modern Malaysian art.
[5] He has been written by
Dr. Kia of the University of Leeds, England, A brief description of dye painting technique, 1997.
Professor Anna Shuttleworth, London, An Appreciation of Toya’s Art, 1988
[6] International Batik Artist: Toya Retrospective (Penang, The Art Gallery, Penang, 1997), Page 81
Selected Sources & Archive:
Below are published accounts of Toya Lim, written in English, across Malaysian and Intenational publications. The team has meticulously scanned and archived several hardcopy editions detailing Toya's illustrious career.
| A folk art's best side Canberra News, 14 July 1971 |
The Unknown Artist The Sunday Star, January 25, 1981 |
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| Barefoot Batik Painter Utusan Konsumer, December 1988 |
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| The cover of a gallery guide from Toya's Exhibition in New York, dated 1976. | The cover of a gallery guide from an exhibition in Geneva, 1974 | The cover of a gallery guide from an exhibition at the University Gallery Leeds in England, dated 1988. |
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