The Bee Gees song, New York Mining Disaster 1941, would have been an apt dirge to go with this painting by Dato Hoessein Enas. What was it about the Puchong tin-mining tragedy in 1984 that moved Hoessein, inured to portraitures and a royal artist at that, to paint about the landslide that caused the open-cast tin-mining Dredge No. 5 to collapse and took 13 lives? When the tin-mining licences expired in 1985, the Selangor State Government started embarking on a massive commercial and residential development. Hoessein had done a much earlier painting of a Samsui woman balancing construction materials up a rickety plank. The Hakka Samsui woman, now no more, were used to the dangers of their tough job. They had sworn to celibacy and lived frugally but often saved a tidy sum for their ‘retirement.’ But Hoessein had given this work a contemporary treatment with a prismatic filter, showing a worker on the wobbly walking plank with a massive pipe alongside all set at a precarious height. Indonesian-born Hoessein Enas founded the Angkatan Pelukis Semenanjung (later SeMalaysia), based on a similar society he formed in Indonesia. He was granted Malaysian citizenship in 1956. The then Sultan of Selangor made him ‘royal’ portrait painter in May 1990 and awarded him the Dato title in March 1991. Hoessein is noted for his Shell commissioned paintings of 56 called The Malaysians in 1956, and was given a Retrospective by the National Art Gallery in 1966. His awards include fellowships from Unesco (1960) and the United States (1968), an Asia Foundation grant (1960) and the Colombo Plan (1968).