The SEA THRU series developed from the earlier shaped canvases. The moniker was derived from the neighbourhood in Petaling Jaya, SEA Park, that Choong Kam Kow had recently relocated to in the early 1970s. These works represented a turn in Choong’s conceptual trajectory: by introducing rectangular holes into the surface of the canvases and sculptural panels, he disrupted the planar integrity and pictorial illusionism of two-dimensional space, foregrounding the dimension of the ‘real’. The idea of cutting into the surface, as the artist puts it, “is an attempt to arouse the awareness of the space [existing] yet normally covered by the painting”, and was inspired by Lucio Fontana’s slashed paintings.