It’s not true that Cheong Lai Tong hit an artistic doldrum after award-winning performances when with the Wednesday Art Group, as this 1981 work amply shows. Significantly, he had a comeback solo in 1981, at Universiti Malaya. Admittedly, it was a time when he was kept busy first as creative director and then Asia-Pacific creative director with Rothmans. He could devote more time to his art again after retiring from Rothmans in 1995, after 33 years. He has chosen to paint in abstract after coming back from studies in the West in the early 1960s. And his subject is invariably, landscape, telescoping into memories of places he had been and seen, maybe not a particular place, but a composite, and in this case here, a mountainous vista, or something of higher elevation. To him, painting is a challenge about capturing the beautiful, or as he put it “a painting not seen before.” “Whatever I paint, I mainly want to show that I am different. I have no formula,” he always emphasised. Cheong Lai Tong made a huge impact in the 1960s. He was one of the stars of the Wednesday Art Group founded by Peter Harris. He won 1st Prize in oil and acrylic in the Salon Malaysia in 1969 and 1979. He won a major award in the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank mural competition in 1962. He was in major Malaysian exhibitions including the Commonwealth Art Today, London (1962-1963); Malaysian Art touring Europe (1965-1966); 1st Triennial of Contemporary World Art, New Delhi (1968); the Sao Paulo Biennale (1969); and Man And His World in Montreal, Canada (1970). He won a USIS Exchange scholarship of travels which included a study stint at the Skowhegan School of Art in Maine (1960) and the LCC Central Art School in London (1961). On his return, he was hired by Rothmans as creative director and in 1992-95, headed its Asia-Pacific region. He has had several solos which was capped by the Expression of 60 Years in 2014.