Khin Maung's painting techniques were influenced by European theories and techniques, derived initially from the British artists in Myanmar during the colonial era. He is known, for instance, to have done early paintings in the British Watercolor School style, which his Mandalay predecessors, Ba Zaw, Saya Saung, and Ba Thet, were fond of (though Ba Thet would ultimately rebel against this style). Later, he became intensely interested in the 20th century European and American movements in modernistic painting. His work was not aggressively modernistic, but it did show cubist and other vanguard influences. The most provocative aspect of Khin Maung's work, however, is that in searching for a modernistic idiom which would suit Burma and not disenchant the conservative tendencies of Burmese culture, he also deeply sought inspiration from the mural painting of Bagan, which was 800 years or so old. This leap in thought was rather brilliant, for it revealed to Burmese painters who were interested in modernising stagnant forms of painting in Burma, namely naturalism and realism, that they did not have to wholly mimic or entirely borrow from the outside world to do so. They could find plenty of inspiration for figurative or non-figurative abstraction in the history of Burmese art itself, in the ruins at Bagan.
