The art scholar and painter Min Naing, biographer of Ba Nyan, documents that after Ba Zaw returned to Burma in 1930 from three years of studies at the Royal College of Art in London that he began to teach watercolor “wash” painting to Saya Saung.
A well-known painter in Australia, Jesse Jewhurst Hilder (1881–1916), who never traveled to Burma or met its artists, had a large influence on the painting of both Ba Zaw and Saya Saung, and through them, many other Burmese painters.