Born in Amoy, China in 1912, Lim Cheng Hoe came to Singapore when he was 7. Primarily a self-taught artist, Lim studied art under Richard Walker, Singapore’s first Art Inspector of Schools, at the Raffles Institution in the early 1930s. Lim was a prominent and significant first generation artist due to his treatment of the local landscape in the watercolour medium and is associated with the Nanyang Style. He was also a founding member of the Singapore Watercolour Society. Lim passed away in 1979 in Singapore.After his retirement in 1966, Lim devoted more time to painting, capturing many vanishing scenes of Singapore on paper. ‘Kampong’ is a key example of Lim’s stylistic approach towards the theme of landscapes, and his interest in capturing local subject matter. This charming painting of a wooden house bathed in bright light and framed by trees in the shady foreground, is a study of balance between light and shadow. It also adopts a compositional format seen in many of Lim’s landscapes.
