Lim Tze Peng's calligraphic scenes from Singapore on show in Mumbai

The country's oldest living artist, 99-year-old Lim Tze Peng, holds his first solo show, The Spirit of Ink, in India

The bad news is that the artistic temperament with its gnawing self-doubt and restlessness can persist even at 99 years old. The good news is that age can make the artist court validation less and less. It is what has allowed Singaporean painter Lim Tze Peng develop a somewhat controversial style of calligraphy in his twilight years. Where the traditional form is judged for its precision and beauty, Lim’s hu tu zhi or “muddled” characters are illegible. The intervention gives an inspired painterly quality to the words.

Even today, the nearly-100 Lim is busily creating and searching for another “breakthrough”. “Sometimes he stays awake at night thinking about how to improve his art,” says Jazz Chong, who has known Lim for a decade and is the director of Singapore-based Ode to Art. Her gallery will partner with the Bhau Daji Lad Museum and the Singapore Embassy to show his work in Mumbai. At least five of the recent abstract pieces will be displayed in public for the first time. 

Lim is a self-taught artist from the Singaporean neighbourhood of Pasir Ris. Like all good risk-conscious Asians, he maintained a steady job alongside his art practice for decades, teaching art in a primary school where he later became principal. After retiring in 1981, all his hours have gone into making art which some describe as “traditional yet contemporised”. Throughout, he is said to have sharpened his knowledge of international and Chinese art on trips with modern art societies to various countries including India. In 2003, Lim won a Cultural Medallion, his nation’s top arts honour. Some paintings, including Singapore River Scene sold in 2012, have fetched record prices at Christie's auctions in Hong Kong.

If the recent part of his career has been about charting a new course, the early years had been about appreciating what was old and familiar. Around the 1970s, while Singapore began to redevelop and urbanise, the days of kampong or village life as the artist knew it became numbered. He urgently committed such scenes to rice paper. He paints these ramshackle homes and markets with a sympathetic and loving eye. It is clear to the viewer why the works exude intimacy when Lim explains in an old video interview that he was on those very streets “with a singlet on” and eating in the same chaotic shops he depicted. 

The etchings may seem cacophonous but the thick strokes are carefully considered and conjure a distinctive sense of place and people. Images of trees and mosques appear in his oeuvre too, as do Chinatown and the Singapore river, heritage sites and enduring symbols of the city-state. “You can't see that bustle or people selling wares in Singapore any more, it is clean and sanitised, not as messy and impromptu,” notes Yuh Ting Tan of Ode to Art. For this reason, observes Jazz Chong, “he is not just a part of Singapore’s art history, but rather, its history.” 

As he aged and shifted more of his work indoors, the pieces grew in size and ambition. From using only soft tints, if any, being consumed by black and white, Lim has moved to playing with bolder colours. The exhibition Spirit of Ink will showcase these shifts in style in a selection of about 25 paintings from among 10,000 pieces.

Spirit of Ink

 

It is hard not to be amazed by Lim’s long double life as painter-educator, achieved with a discipline that has only grown. He also credits his wife, who now suffers from dementia, for having looked after the family during his periods of artistic struggle. Lim still has admirers among the young, who call him “lǎoshī” (Mandarin for teacher). Those who know him describe him as cheerful and active; he is able to climb a floor up to his studio unassisted. Briefly, an injured finger prevented him from painting but otherwise, he paints for three to four hours daily out of big bowls of Chinese ink.
 

“He has mentioned before that he would paint for another 100 years if he could,” notes Jazz Chong. For him, art is an eternal, never-ending journey while life is transient. Transient but filled with possibilities, for recently Lim has been stamping his works with the words xi yu nian (“treasuring the remaining years”).

(The Spirit of Ink will be exhibited at the Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai from August 3 to September 15)