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.
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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.
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The majority of the works which surfaced in Burma and the UK were of Upper Burma scenes—often of the old Mandalay Palace and moat, Mandalay Hill, boats on the Irrawaddy River, or village scenes.