The Mother-and-Child theme is perhaps one of the most endearing and poignant of Dato’ Chuah Thean Teng’s ‘canvases’. It resounds with his own experience of a mother’s love, warmth and care. This work is in the vein of Teng’s iconic Two Of A Kind, that was chosen for the UNICEF’s greeting cards in 1968 (the image of another work, Tell You A Secret, was chosen in 1988). It shows two mothers facing each other in conversation, with their child in their arms also getting to know each other, and the bluish tones providing a night setting. The children, symbol of the next generation, is obviously well-nourished with one of the mothers shown well-endowed. Teng, as the artist is more popularly known, was hailed by Professor Michael Sullivan as the ‘Father of Batik Painting’ (Chinese Art in the 20th Century, 1959). “In Teng, Malaya claims to have found her first national painter. Teng has conceived the idea of making pictures in batik — not just decorative designs, but large and frequently complex figure compositions,” Professor Sullivan gushed. Teng developed the traditional craft into a fine-art construct in 1953 and unveiled the innovations to great fanfare in his first solo at the Arts Council Penang in 1955 (He also had a solo of his batik art in London in 1959). Teng was accorded a Retrospective in 1965 and a Tribute in 2009 by the National Art Gallery Malaysia, and was invited to showcase among the Commonwealth’s greatest artists in an exhibition in London to mark Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee in 1977. The Penang State Government awarded him the Dato’ title in 1998 and named him a Living Heritage in 2005.