With the strange conjunction of celestial bodies like what look like the sun, a sickle moon and a conflagration in white shooting upwards, or is it a downward-spiral?, this must rank as surreal and highly un-CheongLaiTong. Which is as it probably was, being a 1960 imaginative lark before Lai Tong, the Wednesday Art Group, wunderkind unleashed a more structured array of abstraction based entirely and exclusively on Nature, with a wild phalanx of protruding shoots and foliage coupled with gestural calligraphic strokes, often imbued with luminous colours. That this is seen as an important transitional piece to Lai-tong's identifiable AbEx 1962-and-after bears its pedigree. It's longitudinal banner folding resembles a Chinese scroll painting. The year 1960 was one of three Yang di-Pertuan Agong, and it also marked the first Haj pilgrimage to Mecca for the nation. Pendulous shapes drip from the top with the base shrouded in tawny brown. A precocious star of the Wednesday Art Group in the 1960s, Cheong Lai Tong was on a roll, but he became more engrossed in his career as Rothmans Malaysia creative director and then regional creative director, from 1963 to 1995. He had a short stint as an USIS Exchange scholar at the Skowhegan School of Art in Maine in the United States (1960), and the LCC Central Art School in London (1961). In 1962, he won the Major Award in the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank mural competition and he also won 1st Prize in oil and acrylic in the prestigious Salon Malaysia in 1969 and 1979. After a brief comeback in 1981 at Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, he became active again in solos at GaleriWan (1991, 1995), and NN Gallery (1998).