This work came at the tail-end of Latiff Mohidin's iconic Pago-Pago series that synthesised Southeast Asian anthropology and architectural monuments and engendered a unique Southeast Asian Modernism. Tropika and Voyage were both done at the Pratt Graphics Centre in New York when he studied printmaking there, in 1969, after the socio-political fissures of the May 13 internecine riots. On Pago-Pago, Tengku Sabri Ibrahim, curator of the Abdul Latiff Mohidin Retrospective at the National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, wrote: "The influence of the style of German Expressionism is primarily strong in the Pago-Pago series. The line, colours and compositional elements reveal the expressive energy of a young artist with all his wiles and guts." Latiff Mohidin is a national treasure in painting, printmaking, sculpting, literature and letters (poet, essayist and translator), being fluent in three languages – Malay, English and German. He started as a hobo, where he created the iconic Pago-Pago series (1960-1969), the headlined mega three-month exhibition held at the prestigious Pompidou Centre in Paris in 2018, and organised by the National Gallery Singapore and Pompidou. Latiff was awarded a major Retrospective at the National Art Gallery Malaysia in December 2012 to June 2013, his second. His art studies were at the Hochschule fur Bildende Kunst in West Berlin. He won the John D. Rockefeller III Fellowship to study at Pratt Institute in New York (1965), and the French scholarship to study printmaking at the Atelier Lacouriere-Frelaut in Paris (1969). He also won 2nd Prize (Graphics) in the 1968 Salon Malaysia. In literature, he won the SEA Write Award twice (1984 and 1986) and the Malaysian Literary Awards from 1972 to 1976, and he was also appointed Guest Writer at Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka in 1988.