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.Lim was a firrm believer in the virtue of practice and he spent considerable effort on portraiture in the mid 1950s as a way to refine his representation of form. Although Lim is known as a watercolourist, his preferred medium for portraits was pastel as he felt it could better describe skin tones and textures.
