To Tew Nai Tong, Happy Life is a magic carpet ride of nostalgia back to the good ole Nanyang (‘Southern Seas’) days, when life was laidback and easy and pastimes were spent on the birds and the bees. The setting is oft the open untarmac-ed countryside, the rubber estates and the village marketplace. This veritable utopia drools with rustic charm and touching human-to-human-and-animals communication. The Sixties ‘time bubble’ is reminiscent of the everything ecstatically nice and poetic of Dana’s syrupy 1970 hit, All Kinds Of Everything, with caged birds, cows and goats, damsels and flowers, sampan (boat) and nelayan (fishermen)… Tew Nai Tong was the last of the Nanyang matinee heroes adapting the stylistic mannerisms of Cheong Soo-pieng. After his studies at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, he continued at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts. In 2007, he had a major survey exhibition, Odyssey, at the National Art Gallery Malaysia. He had won awards in competitions like Shell (watercolour, 1981), Esso (1982), Dunlop (watercolour, 1983). He had lectured at three art academies (Malaysian Institute of Art, Central Academy of Art and the Saito Academy of Art) for a total of 23 years before deciding to go fulltime in 1992. He was also co-founder of the Malaysian Watercolour Society, the Contemporary Malaysian Watercolour Association, and the Le Beaux Art Gallery in Kuala Lumpur.