Famous Paintings in Singapore

4 August 2026 · 4 min read

Quick answer: the best-known paintings in Singapore come mostly from the Nanyang artists of the 1950s to 1970s — Liu Kang, Georgette Chen, Cheong Soo Pieng, Chua Mia Tee, Chen Wen Hsi — and most of them hang at the National Gallery Singapore, free to citizens and permanent residents.

Ten worth knowing, what each one shows, and why the group of them matters more than any single canvas.

Why these paintings matter

The Nanyang style came out of a specific problem: a group of Chinese-trained artists living in Southeast Asia, painting Southeast Asian subjects with techniques learned from Chinese ink and Parisian modernism. What they arrived at was neither, and it is the closest thing Singapore has to a founding visual language.

A 1952 field trip to Bali by Liu Kang, Cheong Soo Pieng, Chen Chong Swee and Chen Wen Hsi is usually treated as the turning point. What they brought back set the direction for decades.

Ten paintings worth knowing

National Language Class, Chua Mia Tee

Painted in 1959, and probably the most reproduced painting in the country. A group of young adults of different races in a Malay language class, one asking the question chalked on the board behind: Siapa nama kamu? — what is your name. Painted as Singapore moved towards self-government, it is a picture about becoming a nation, and it does it through a classroom rather than a flag.

Epic Poem of Malaya, Chua Mia Tee

From 1955, and the companion piece in spirit. A group listening to a young man read aloud, all of them caught in the same attention. Social realism at its most direct, and a reminder that this period of Singaporean painting was political as much as aesthetic.

Life by the River, Liu Kang

Bold outlines, flattened forms and unbothered colour — riverside life rendered in a way that owes as much to Chinese ink as to European modernism. Liu Kang is the artist most often used to explain what Nanyang means, and this is the painting usually used to do it.

Artist and Model, Liu Kang

From 1954, and a picture about its own making: a Balinese model, an artist at work, the Bali trip turned into a subject rather than a source. It sits at the centre of any account of how the Nanyang style formed.

Self-Portrait, Georgette Chen

Chen trained in Paris and Shanghai and settled in Singapore in the 1950s, teaching at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts. Her self-portrait is quiet, direct and unsentimental — a painter looking at herself without arranging anything, at a point when very few women in the region were being taken seriously as artists.

Lotus in a Breeze, Georgette Chen

Still life at its most economical: a few lotus stems, a lot of empty space, colour doing all the work. Worth seeing next to the self-portrait, because the same restraint is at work on a completely different subject.

Drying Salted Fish, Cheong Soo Pieng

From 1978. Cheong pushed further towards abstraction than his contemporaries, and here figures become elongated, stylised shapes — recognisably people, recognisably working, but simplified almost to pattern. It is the clearest example of the Nanyang style moving away from what it sees towards how it sees.

Two Gibbons Amidst Vines, Chen Wen Hsi

The most widely seen painting on this list, though most people have not noticed: a version of Chen’s gibbons appears on the Singapore fifty-dollar note. He painted them repeatedly, in ink and in oils, and the looseness of the brushwork against the precision of the animals is the whole appeal.

Fishermen, Chen Chong Swee

Chen Chong Swee brought Chinese ink technique to Southeast Asian subjects more literally than most of his peers — river scenes, boats, working figures, handled with watercolour restraint. His work is the quietest on this list and the easiest to overlook.

The Wave series, Anthony Poon

A generation later and a different argument entirely. Poon abandoned representation for hard-edged geometry and shaped canvases, working in curves and stripes. Seeing his work after the Nanyang painters makes the shift from depicting Singapore to simply making things in it very clear.

Where to see them

The National Gallery Singapore holds most of the above across the former Supreme Court and City Hall buildings. Entry to the permanent galleries is free for citizens and permanent residents.

The Singapore Art Museum leans contemporary, and NUS Museum holds strong holdings of Southeast Asian and Chinese work. Gillman Barracks is where to go for commercial galleries and current work rather than the canon.

Borrowing from them

These paintings are also unusually good source material if you paint. Not to copy — to steal structure from.

Liu Kang’s flattened shapes and heavy outlines are far more achievable than a photorealistic landscape, and they teach you something about how much detail you can drop. Georgette Chen’s still lifes work on three or four colours. Poon’s geometry needs no drawing ability at all.

Take the composition and the palette, leave the rest. Easy paintings anyone can do covers which subjects are forgiving for a first attempt, and how acrylics behave covers the mechanics — most of these were oils, and acrylic will get you to the same place faster.

If you would rather try it somewhere already set up for it, studio sessions have the materials laid out and someone on hand when a painting goes wrong halfway through.