Dato’ Tay Mo Leong started his career as a watercolour artist and gradually evolved into a batik artist in the early 1960s. His accomplished technique in watercolour paintings and passion for batik was admired and well known. He became Chairman of the Penang Watercolour Society for twenty years, from 1985 to 2005. Since 1961, he has held more than 10 solo exhibitions and has participated in many local and international exhibitions. Here, luminous blocks of colour were used to represent a village scene. Dato’ Tay Mo Leong learnt about batik art when he was in Taiwan, where he graduated from the Taipei Normal College in 1960. On his return from Taiwan, he mastered the medium itself through visits to Kelantan and experimentations. In 1965, he was confident enough to stage his first batik-art exhibition at the British Council in Kuala Lumpur featuring 64 works. In 1970, he studied at the Art Centre in Florida, USA. He was given the Foreign Minister’s Award and exhibited at the Nippon Modern Art Association, Osaka, Japan in 1997, and the Osaka Government Award in Japan in 2003. He travelled all over to study the batik techniques and materials there and he has invented a new technique which he termed ‘double-resist’. He was conferred Dato’ship, by Penang State Government in 2009, the year the Penang State Museum Art Gallery honoured him with a Retrospective.