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66-year-old, Kolay learned painting in the 1970s during the reign of Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma, which at the time was led by President Ne Win. The Ne Win government, which tried to follow its own path through Burmese socialism, excluded foreign capital investment and promoted the nationalization of businesses. As a result, people's lives grew increasingly impoverished. "The nationalization of companies made them all poor", Kolay reminiscences. "We didn't even have any canvases, so we sourced cloth and made them themselves."

He learned painting at the National School of Art in Yangon, and says, "Even if I learned it, it was very elementary." At that time, censorship was also strict, and some artists were imprisoned during this period. He went to the United States in 1985 to pave the way for San Francisco's art school, hoping that he would withstand the suffocation of this era and learn more free art.
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For Kolay, who had previously painted realistic paintings, the art he saw in the United States was so free in many ways. He managed to escape from what bound him and tried to come up with his own way of expressing himself. Several years after traveling to the United States, he made a collage of various colors on a canvas and created a technique to let the expressions that nature creates flow. He then abandoned realism.