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.Although known as a watercolourist, Lim preferred pastel for portraiture, as he felt it could better describe the human form. ‘Concentration’ is completed in the period considered as Lim’s golden period. It is also in this same period that Lim concentrated on portraiture in order to refine his observation and perception skills.
