SINGAPORE – Lim Tze Peng, Singapore’s oldest living artist best known for his Chinese ink scenes of old Chinatown and the Singapore River and his distinct calligraphic idiom termed “muddled writing”, has died at 103.
According to a report in Chinese daily Lianhe Zaobao, the artist died on Feb 3 at 6pm. His eldest son, Mr Lim Su Kok, told Zaobao that his father was hospitalised for pneumonia in January.
Lim is the subject of a major ongoing solo at the National Gallery Singapore and at least three concurrent exhibitions in private galleries. In one of the last interviews the centenarian gave in October 2024, a visibly ebullient Lim told The Straits Times that he was actively painting everyday: “Because of art, I am rarely ill.”
Mr Ong Teng Huat, managing director of ArtSafe Gallery, who has collected more than 100 Lim works, said he was deeply saddened by the news: “Mr. Lim once told me ‘cho lang ai ho’ (‘be a good person’ in Hokkien). I will forever treasure his guidance and kindness over our 32 years of friendship.”
Dubbed Singapore’s national treasure and a cultural titan, Lim estimated that he had made more than 20,000 works of art over his lifetime.
The eldest of seven children, Lim was born in Singapore in 1921 to a rubber planter father and a housewife mother and grew up in a kampong in Pasir Ris. He practised Chinese ink daily from young – studying under the likes of Liu Kang and Yeh Chi Wei – but only received belated recognition in the form of his first solo exhibition in 1970.
For much of his life, Lim painted on the side while he was a full-time educator – teaching at the now-defunct Sin Min School in 1949 and serving as principal from 1951 to 1981. After retirement, Lim fulfilled his dream of being a full-time artist and was eventually conferred the Cultural Medallion in 2003.
The pioneering artist was the first Singaporean to have a solo exhibition at the National Art Museum of China in 2009 and the first living Singaporean artist to have a work sold for more than S$100,000 at auction in 2012.
Counted amongst his prominent patrons are pioneer architect Koh Seow Chuan, who donated 150 of Lim’s works to the Singapore Art Museum in 2003, and Mr Ong Teng Huat, managing director of ArtSafe Gallery, who has collected more tha...