Born Tan Tiow Phuang (1911-1983) in Singapore, Dr Tan Tsze Chor went to China at age four for his education and returned at 17. A successful businessman known in the region as the ‘pepper king’, he was an avid collector of Chinese art and a philanthropist who donated money and artworks to various institutions, including the University of Malaya (now National University of Singapore) and the Singapore Art Society. Although Tan was largely influenced by ancient Chinese calligraphers such as Yen Zhenqing (709-785) and Liu Gongquan (778-865), who were masters in the regular script, he had absorbed the essence of the six calligraphy scripts and developed a distinctive style of his own. Tan’s free and confident strokes display his maturity in this calligraphy which features the seal, regular, running and cursive scripts.
