Hla was born in a village by the name of Gyaung Wyne in the Tuntay township and received a monastic education.
[1][2] It is said that the monastery where he schooled was decorated in traditional Burmese floral arabesque and with imagery of mythical creatures and that M.T.
Gerald Kelly subsequently became a painter of note in Britain, becoming Official State Portrait Artist of the King and Queen during World War II and holding the office of President of the Royal Academy of Arts from the 1949 to 1954.
The occasional watercolor by M.T, Hla has emerged which appears to have been inspired by images in Talbot Kelly's book, a point to be expected as Talbot Kelly's book was widely disseminated in Burma and became a kind of manual of watercolor style for early Burmese painters attempting to learn Western painting.
[1] In Rangoon, his works sold readily at the Smart and Mookerdum bookstore, earning him a high income.
Hla's work sold well to British customers is born out by the fact that a large number of his paintings have appeared in the hands of dealers and auctioneers in England over the past 20 years.
Hla did not study at the Burma Art Club, where a generation of later painters in the Western style, such as Ba Zaw (1891–1942) and Ba Nyan (1897–1945), received more formal instruction by British colonials in Burma who had backgrounds in painting.
Hla studied gouache technique from Ba Nyan (and probably oil painting as well); thus, in some watercolors done by M.T.
Hla's landscapes are standard riverbank and boat scenes, often including the de rigueur image of a bright-red flamboyant tree.
He is recorded by the art writers G. Hla Maung and Nyan Shein as possessing strong skills in portraiture, to the degree that he could depict faces accurately and realistically, from memory, after 30 minutes or so of exposure to his subjects.
Hla's full body portraits reveal awkwardness of anatomical proportion, with figures appearing exaggeratedly short or squat, or standing stiffly as if posing self-consciously for a snapshot.
Hla's early background in Traditional Burmese painting, which is pictorially stiff in terms of its depictions, particularly of the Buddha or human figures, influenced these portraits.
One is a group portrait in oil at the National Museum of Myanmar entitled Ladies from the Hilly Region.
It is a portrait of a bare-breasted group of females in the hills of Burma, amid large baskets of fruits and vegetables, wearing odd cusps over their noses.
In Traditional Burmese painting, the focus of works of art up to his time had been religious (i.e., Buddhist) tales or monarchial events and subjects.
But there was very little history of depicting the common person in works of painting, let alone members of distant ethnic groups, somewhat alien to the Burmese.
[1] In the decade after 2000, the occasional undocumented oil painting appeared in Burma in the hands of art dealers.