As this work is done around the 1980s and Malaysian fishing villages are not dissimilar to Indonesians,’ it is unclear if Dato Chuah Thean Teng based this impression on his time in Indonesia in the early days, or from an original Indonesian community in Malaysia. The ubiquitous cracked lines would date this work to his early batiks. Simplicity is the key, with a solitary sampan in the waters in the middle, swampland represented by sparse branches in the foreground, and stilt-houses on the beach front in the distance amidst towering coconut trees. The composition guides the eye in meandering diagonals and framed by the tropical sun on the top left. 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). He 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.