DgcityThe streets and river life of mid-20th century Singapore have arrived in Shanghai in ink. A major exhibition dedicated to the late Singaporean artist Lim Tze Peng, titled Lim Tze Peng: A Singapore Story in Ink, opened at the Shanghai Art Museum on Nov 6, bringing his cityscapes and calligraphy to a Chinese audience.
Lim, who lived from 1921 to 2025, was one of Singapore’s most respected visual artists and a second-generation figure in the Nanyang school, the generation that blended Chinese artistic traditions with the lived environment of Southeast Asia. He worked first as a teacher and retired in 1981, but never stopped painting, producing new work into his final years.
He is best known for scenes painted on the spot with Chinese brush and ink. His paintings of the Singapore River, Boat Quay, Chinatown and streets such as Smith Street and Trengganu Street record shophouses, bridges and river traffic at a moment when the young nation was rebuilding at speed. Beginning in 1981, he produced roughly 300 ink works in an intensive period that became known as his Old Singapore series, now regarded as a valuable visual record of a vanishing cityscape.
The Shanghai exhibition is a posthumous one. Lim died of pneumonia in Singapore in February 2025 at the age of 103, less than two years after a centenary exhibition in his home city. The show at the Shanghai Art Museum lets visitors trace how a Chinese-educated artist used an ancient medium to describe a thoroughly modern, multiracial port city.
Calligraphy was the other great pillar of Lim’s practice. In his later decades he developed an expressive style he called hutuzi, or muddled writing, in which the form and movement of characters mattered as much as their literal meaning. He also experimented with color in calligraphy, an unusual departure from black ink, and in his eighties, unable to paint outdoors, turned to large, abstract works often built around trees.
His ties to China were long-standing. In 2009 he became the first Singaporean artist given a solo exhibition at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing, with the show also traveling to Shanghai’s Liu Haisu Art Museum. The new Shanghai presentation returns his work to a city he exhibited in nearly two decades ago, and frames his career as a bridge between Chinese ink tradition and the art of maritime Southeast Asia.
