Do cats kiss? To once wunderkind artist Dzulkifli Buyong, cats loom large in his canvas oeuvre which he invests with some poetic empathy while deeply rooted in childlike innocence and humour. Like Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Cats, he painted them as he perceived them, with great imaginative flair. The ‘child’ in Dzulkifli Buyong never left him all his life, even after his Japan art exposure stint. Green cats, tiger-furred cats…whatever, they are more than endearing pets and friends. To cats, touching nose may be a form of greeting like a handshake, and licking is a kind of grooming. With these three cats presumably kissing, it may even look like a pact. But a cat’s kiss refers to a cat’s eye blink, often affectionate. There’s also the subtle play of geometry, the cat’s triangular spread against that of the wall corner. Kitty, Kitty, Kitty…! Sensitive and reticent, Dzulkifli Buyong was a wunderkind of the Wednesday Art Group (WAG) in the 1960s and was influenced by Patrick Ng Kah Onn (at Victoria Institution) more than the WAG founder Peter Harris. At 14 (1962), he had swept the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Prizes, for pastels, in the Young Friends art competition and repeated the feat the next year with the 1st and 2nd Prizes. His other prizes were 2nd Prize (pastel) in the Joy of Living competition in 1964 and 3rd Prize in the Bahasa Kebangsaan Month poster competition in 1964. An informal art training stint in Japan for three years proved tough on him because of the culture shock.