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. Written in Tan’s distinctive style that features the seal, regular, running and cursive scripts in a single piece of work, this verse is taken from ‘Treatise from Calligraphy’, the first significant theoretical work on Chinese calligraphy. Written by an early Tang calligrapher Sun Guoting, he had likened calligraphy to a phenomenon of nature.
