It’s a rare early work by John Lee Joo For, arguable one of Malaysia’s (and Australia’s) most versatile and flamboyant paint and print genius, but his strictures on anatomy and composition were already well honed by his triple England art stints at Brighton, then Camberwell and the prestigious Royal College of Art (1962-63). The work is boldly taken at the diagonal, with the awkward balancing act of the Samsui women, the amazons working on the treacherous tin mines, carrying tin ores on either end of the heavy trays strung over the shoulder with a pole, and sauntering steadily despite the rickety makeshift platforms. This was still his realism phase, before he launched into his world-famous Oriento-Byzantine art fusion. Apart from being a top-class painter and printmaker, John Lee Joo For was also a theatre director and producer and actor, and a prodigious playwright, sweeping the top national playwright award from 1969-1971 and Best Radio Playwright Singapore (1969) and known for great works such as The Propitious Kidnapping of the Cultured Daughter and Son of Zen, which was staged off- Broadway. Before he died in 2017, he was flushed in the spectacular success of his Christian musical, Call of Guadalupe – his best known since he migrated to Australia in 1973. He was also a novelist and an art lecturer, including at the Specialist Teachers Training Institute (Kuala Lumpur), and Art and Media Studies in Australia. In London, he co-founded the Malayan Art Circle (1961), and in Malaysia, he co-founded the Thursday Art Group and the Penang Teachers Art Circle. He was accorded a major retrospective by the Penang State Art Gallery in 2008.