The theme of the herd boy and the water buffalo is popular in Chinese folklore and art since the Song-Yuan period of China. During Malayan Independence days before the onset of automaton, the buffaloes diligently worked with Man to plough the padi-fields, and the trinity of Man-Animal-Land is like a pastoral song. Artists from China like Ren Bonian, Li Keran, Indonesian Lee Man Fong and the more contemporary Li Zijian besides our own Huang Yao had visited this theme in their own inimitable style. The theme also abounds in the batik-art of Dato Chuah Thean Teng, who was one most attuned to the rural community and Nature, and had lived during the time of the bullock carts. When he built his Yahong Gallery in Batu Ferringhi in 1974 with the mountain behind and facing the sea, there were only a few hotel resorts around. As buffaloes go, nothing could be more regaling than the love fable of the herd boy and the celestial princess, who meet only once a year over a bridge of magpies. But it’s the nostalgia evoked, of a world gone by, that is most endearing. Teng, as the artist is more popularly known, was hailed by Professor Michael Sullivan as the ‘Father of Batik Painting’ (Chinese Art in the 20th Century, 1959). “In Teng, Malaya claims to have found her first national painter. Teng has conceived the idea of making pictures in batik – not just decorative designs, but large and frequently complex figure compositions,” Professor Sullivan gushed. Teng developed the traditional craft into a fine-art construct in 1953 and unveiled the innovations to great fanfare in his first solo at the Arts Council Penang in 1955 (He also had a solo of his batik art in London in 1959). The images of his works, Two Of A Kind, and Tell You A Secret, were chosen for Unicef’s greeting cards in 1968 and 1988. Teng was accorded a Retrospective in 1965 and a Tribute in 2008 by the National Art Gallery, and was invited to showcase among the Commonwealth’s greatest artists in an exhibition in London to mark Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee in 1977. The Penang State Government Awarded him the Dato title in 1998 and named him a Living Heritage in 2005.