A herd of buffaloes in Tay Bak Koi’s inimitable style of the animals shaped like Minangkabau roofs provides a welcome distraction in this work with two cowherds watching over. The topography is punctuated by the white curved horns like little sickels. The sharp-angled hump forms with thinly etched outlines and the play of colours are reminiscent of the cretaceous sandstone-and-siltstone rainbow mountains of China at the Zhangye Danxia Landform Geological Park, named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2009. Earlier works of buffaloes were limited to mostly green and blue. Chia Wai Hon wrote on his buffaloes: “… tightly stylised creature with a massive body supported on two pairs of inverted V-shaped legs, a small head and a sharp hump…” Tay Bak Koi, who studied at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Art in 1957-1960, worked in the Nanyang Style. The son of a seafood wholesaler, he had his first solo of 40 works at the Singapore National Library in 1964. In October 1996, The Art Gallery Penang hosted a solo for him, In Harmony With Nature.