Yau Tian Yau's oil painting Rooftop uses a basic cubist-inspired format to depict the expanse of roofs of the old buildings in Chinatown. Yau attempts to capture the rhythmic geometry of the rooftops. Each wedge-shaped form is a piece fitted into the total composition of the scene that is viewed by the painter. Although the artist's approach is inspired by cubism and possibly the simplicity of forms used by Paul Klee, the main intention here is to produce a painting whose subject is based on a landscape. The painting is similar in intention to many artists' of Yau's generation, who were interested in the visual aspects of modernism but remained traditionalists at heart. Hence they borrowed the styles of modern art - primarily cubism and expressionism, to create their landscape and figure paintings.