Lim Tze Peng was 43 when Singapore became an independent country in 1965. Born in 1921, the Singaporean artist’s prodigious practice even at his advanced age made him a national icon of sorts – aged 103, he passed away on February 3, 2025. His mid-career works chronicle a fast-disappearing Singapore, the syncretic disarray of a maritime hub slowly edged out by rapid urban development – 50 years later, the city’s skyline is a mix of Supertrees, the glass and concrete ship marooned over a tall triad of hotel towers, or the clay roofs along the Singapore river, subsumed by the slow creep of skyscrapers. Now the final exhibition organised in his lifetime, Becoming Lim Tze Peng (on view until March 23, 2025) at the National Gallery Singapore draws on a vast body of work by the artist, holding space for his practice alongside simultaneous exhibitions by other Singaporean artists (Kim Lim and Teo Eng Seng) and—adding regional context—vast showcases of art in Singapore and Southeast Asia from the 19th to the 21st century.

Becoming Lim Tze Peng was organised by National Gallery curator Jennifer KY Lam, with curatorial advisor Yeo Mang Thong. In a video conversation, Lam spoke with STIR about Tze Peng’s oeuvre and the exhibition-making process. Tze Peng’s work was rooted in Chinese calligraphy, which he extended into abstract modes later in his career. As ethnic groups in Singapore arrived at specific formations of national identity, for Singaporeans of Chinese origin, calligraphy was in popular demand; it was taught in schools and visibilised through public competitions. Tze Peng is now cemented into these formations; the national art collection has 299 paintings by him.

The exhibition is divided into three sections that locate Tze Peng temporally and spatially in relation to Singapore. The first section, From Dàpō to Xiǎopō, references the colloquial Chinese terms for the areas around the Singapore River. Besides his calligraphy training, Tze Peng was a self-taught artist, absorbing influences from his surroundings. He held outdoor drawing sessions on the banks of the river with other artists, documenting the changing city-state. An early painting of the Singapore River from the 1960s shows the river thronged by motorised twakows, small wooden boats, displacing tiny but visible amounts of water as they move. Buildings flank the other side of the river, all of different heights, with narrow spaces between them. In another view of the river from 1979 (Singapore River II), the flatness of life on the river—all boats and long bridges—is at odds with the urban landscape surrounding it; the buildings get taller and taller as the eye travels outwards.

Snatches of Singapore that Tze Peng painted are still soldered into its tourist imagination. His Corner Coffeeshop from 1982 shows a group of street vendors catering to customers, the various components of their enterprise all laid out on the street, under a makeshift roof and awning that may have been extended as the business grew. In the foreground, a woman on her haunches scrubs used pots and pans. Food and communal eating continue to be a part of Singapore’s urban experience, with contemporary modifications – in Lau Pa Sat, a popular hawker centre housed in a Victorian structure, the vendors wear plastic gloves and even face masks. On Joo Chiat Road, a Peranakan precinct built by mixed heritage descendants of immigrant settlers and the local population, cafes and niche stores now occupy the early 20th-century shophouses with intricate facades.

From 1950 to 1981, Tze Peng worked as a school principal. His artmaking in this period reflects condensed bursts of activity – like his participation in the Ten Men Art Group, of which he was a founding member alongside artists Chen Cheng Mei, Choo Keng Kwang and Yeh Chi Wei. The group went on art expeditions across Asia, meeting local artists and communities, setting up outdoor drawing sessions and using unfamiliar (hence) exotic locales for inspiration. In photographs, they resemble a group of middle-aged travellers, dressed in practical clothing, posing in neat linear formations for the camera. Tze Peng travelled to Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and even India on such tours. On returning, the artists mounted exhibitions of their work. A 1965 message by S. Rajaratnam, Singapore’s first Minister for Foreign Affairs, congratulates the artists for contributing to nation-building efforts. “Our artists constructively help the Government in this new task, such as forging national identity, promoting international goodwill and projecting our image to the rest of the world,” he writes.

Travel was also an entry point into experimentation, where portrayals that breached prevalent conventions could easily be situated in the unfamiliar. A bolder example from another exhibition at the National Gallery (Singapore Stories: Pathways and Detours in Art) is Chen Wen Hsi’s painting of a bare-torsoed Balinese woman (around 1953), her lower half clad in a sarong. For Tze Peng, these regional explorations informed his work in ink and colour. In scenes from Bali, painted between the seventies to the nineties, ink is a dominant force, used to sketch and delineate monochromic natural landscapes, with thickets of gnarly black tree branches, while the people in them wear clothes in vibrant colours, engaged in routine activities.

The final section of the exhibition, On My Own Grounds, emphasises artistic freedom in the latter half of Tze Peng’s career when he began to work with calligraphy as an abstract expression. A 2013 video shows Tze Peng, then 92, at work in his studio, painting a large canvas in broad black brushstrokes. The scale of the work demands a certain physicality, with Tze Peng reaching up on tiptoe and then squatting as he paints from top to bottom. Periodically, he steps away from the canvas to view it as a whole, taking breaks to dip his brush into a well-used container of black paint.

After he retired, Tze Peng devoted more time to his artistic practice, painting frenetically for a period with the intention of documenting urban development in Singapore. In the spirit of Rajaratnam’s words, he became an exemplar of national culture for a young Singapore, both for his role in chronicling the postcolonial nation-state and also for creating an artistic style that was simultaneously rooted in Singaporean identity and a signifier of it.