Lim Tze Peng

Biography

In 1981 Lim Tze Peng, the principal of a primary school, retired early. He had one reason: he wanted to record a city that was changing before his eyes.

He was born on 28 September 1921 in Singapore, into a family of pig and chicken farmers in Pasir Ris. His childhood name was Lim Swee Lian. He was the eldest of seven children. He studied at Guangyang Primary School and Chung Cheng High School (Main). He had no art education beyond drawing classes in his school years: he began to approach painting only in his twenties, was largely self-taught, worked with the Chinese brush and ink, and practised calligraphy. In 1949 he became a teacher at Xin Min School, a primary school, and in 1951 he was made its principal. He remained principal until 1981.

After leaving the school he set to work on a large series, “Old Singapore”. He worked on the spot, in ink and brush: he looked, selected, composed and recorded details in a single act. The result was about three hundred sheets: Teochew Street, Amoy Street, Chinatown, Elgin Bridge, rows of shophouses, wide panoramas of the Singapore River. The street names in his work read like a guide to a vanished city: Hock Lim Street, Merchant Road, Smith Street, Trengganu Street, Sago Lane, Pagoda Street. The series came out of years when urban renewal was moving very fast, and today it serves as a visual record of how these places once looked. The most recognisable feature of his manner, I think, is the calligraphic brushstroke, which grew out of his knowledge of Chinese writing; he rendered passages of light and dark in swift notations, and decisive strokes of the brush gave the subjects movement.

Among Chinese artists of the past he singled out those in whom he saw one dominant quality. In Pan Tianshou, by his own observation, the power comes from the scale of the forms; in Qi Baishi, from the sensitivity of touch; in Wu Changshou, from the balance of painterly dynamics. He felt close to Xu Wei of the Ming dynasty and Pu Huan of the Qing dynasty, whose work he valued for its directness and energy.

In 2000 Lim spent two months in Paris on an artists' residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts, in an apartment belonging to the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA) in Singapore. He brought back views of the city in Chinese ink and colour: the Eiffel Tower, the Moulin Rouge, the Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame Cathedral, as well as side streets and cafés. He later donated forty-five of these works to the academy.

In 2003 he was awarded Singapore's Cultural Medallion, and in 2016 the Pingat Jasa Gemilang (Meritorious Service Medal). In June 2021, at the age of ninety-nine, he was reported to be still at work.

Lim Tze Peng died in Singapore on 3 February 2025, at the age of 103.