Watercolourist Lim Cheng Hoe’s son Lim Hock Ann finds a regional market

SINGAPORE – Taking the call from the Philippines where he is promoting his art, Lim Hock Ann begins the interview boldly: “My father was Singapore’s sixth-biggest artist.”

Lim Cheng Hoe, who died in 1979 aged 67, was a founding member of the Singapore Watercolour Society in 1969. His peers were the four titans of Nanyang art: Cheong Soo Pieng, Chen Wen Hsi, Chen Chong Swee and Liu Kang.

Indeed, the elder Lim, encouraged by Cheong, had been invited on the famous 1952 Bali art trip that cemented the quartet’s name, but was forced to pull out after his superior at the Public Utilities Board rejected his leave application.

The fifth concession the junior Lim makes for his Singapore art ranking is the adored still-life painter Georgette Chen. Among the six, Lim says, only she and his dad spoke English, while the senior Lim communicated with the others through dialect, either Teochew or Hokkien.

“Unlike the others, he seldom travelled. I remember him going to Penang twice to meet (Malaysian artist) Yong Mun Sen. But otherwise, he took the bus to the Singapore River. That’s why he used watercolour – it dried faster and he did not have to take with him heavy canvases or easels,” says the 80-year-old. The one time his father used oil, it smudged other passengers’ clothes.

Lim Hock Ann’s story is one of a belated and circuitous return to art. The eldest of five siblings, he was the only one who showed promise in art and was his father’s lone hope for a successor.

Though he displayed an early predilection for copying weekend newspaper comics and pursued two years of art at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, he grew disillusioned at the financial prospects of being a full-time artist in Singapore, with some 90 per cent of his classmates from families that were firmly in the upper middle class.

His father was used to this depressed economic outlook and rejected several job offers from multinational companies like Guthrie Waugh Berhad, which offered him twice the pay for his services as a stenographer but required he sacrifice the weekends he typically spent painting en plein air.

All he wanted was enough money to buy art materials and the art books that would inspire the younger Lim from a young age. Lim Hock Ann, however, felt he had grander plans.

He confesses: “Part of the reason was also because I was too sociable and mixed with the older boys in school. I was too distracted and playful.”

Over the next 40 years, to the disappointment of his father, he would join the Housing Board and other construction companies, training in technical roles.

Art was far from his mind as he put time and money into various schemes, from selling a new piping system to an entrepreneurial enterprise for granite.

The only contact he had with art were the whirlwind stops he made to contemporary art museums when work took him to countries around the region and to East Asia. Lim says Singapore then had exhibitions that were few and far between.

The Singapore Art Museum was set up only in 1996. Prior to that, the Singapore Art Society held its exhibition only once a year at Victoria Memorial Hall and the only dedicated art space was the National Museum Art Gallery at the National Museum of Singapore in Stamford Road.

Coca-cola bottle caps in paintings

“It all got too tiring,” Lim says of why he finally exchanged his worldly ambitions for the paintbrush at 60. “I realised art has always been my ardent passion.”

He then spent five to six years thinking up ways to break new frontiers, haunted by his late father’s exhortation: “Music has transformed in leaps and bounds since the era of classical music. It’s up to you to be creative enough to do something new.”

In 2009, he secured a first exhibition at the now-closed Volvo Art Loft in Alexandra Road, where his neo-expressionist paper works – creased, folded and then applied with layers of watercolour, acrylic and matt polyurethane and epoxy – found some interest.

He sold seven of 22 works, a modest accomplishment. “I made some money, but not a lot.”

This passable result encouraged him to keep pushing boundaries, conceptually and geographically. His largest collector base now is in Indonesia and the Philippines, where collectors are less constrained when it comes to ink paintings, he says.

His latest abstract creations use a cacophony of upcycled materials that he picks up from the street – from Coca-Cola bottle caps to desiccants to small volcanic rocks.

Watercolour is mixed with acrylic and oil to create swirling, cracking effects that exploit the difference in the time they take to dry. They are atmospheric, but also boldly textured the way the most interesting abstract paintings are.

He says: “My paintings are not just for the eyes, but also for the hands to touch. If my father was more inspired by (English Romantic painter) J.M.W. Turner, I take reference from all artists who have done something new – Francis Bacon, Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso.”

There has been some interest from Singapore galleries, but “they expect me to paint like Lim Cheng Hoe”, says the younger Lim. “I refuse. My father said: ‘Don’t just use watercolours. This is a career you can imagine in many ways.’”

To reflect the regional interest in his art, he has taken on the moniker of Halim, a condensation of his Chinese name to something more pronounceable by collectors who do not speak Mandarin. It reflects a commitment to strike out his own path, though the line will end with him as his stepson is completely uninterested.

He says of his lonesome pursuit: “My father was so immersed in his art, he went to paint the river at low tide so he could smell it while painting. He spent his life capturing the soul. What have I got to lose?”