Foo Chee San apportioned a considerable part of his life nurturing the next generation of artists and is fondly remembered as a teacher to numerous younger artists. Foo was born in Hainan and later trained in Western painting and Chinese ink at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts from 1953 to 1956. Inspired by his teachers, pioneer artists Cheong Soo Pieng, Chen Chong Swee, Chen Wen Hsi, Georgette Chen and See Hiang To, Foo eventually became an art educator for over 50 years. To fulfil his other passions in life, Foo created a body of work consisting of woodblock prints, Chinese ink paintings and oil on canvas throughout his artistic career.

As an artist better known for capturing remote landscapes and the simplicity of everyday life, Untitled (Nude) is one of the few figurative works that Foo completed in his woodcut repertoire. The print demonstrates Foo’s training in figure drawing at the Academy, which was part of the curriculum for Western painting. In the artwork Untitled (Nude), Foo outlined the form of the figure instead of implementing the use of positive and negative spaces seen in many of his other woodblock prints. The solid black outlines firmly positioned a figure occupying the centre of the composition.