Tan Choh Tee

b. 1942, Singapore

Tan Choh Tee | 陈楚智 (b. 1942, Guangdong, China) is a second generation artist known locally for his landscape paintings of old Singapore.

Tan trained at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA) (1958 -  1962) under the Nanyang style pioneer artists Cheong Soo Pieng, Georgette Chen, Liu Kang and Chen Wen Hsi. He majored in Western oil painting, and studied Chinese brush painting under Chen Wen Hsi. Tan went on to work as a book designer at McGraw-Hill Far East before embarking on a full-time career in art in 1976.

Tan taught at NAFA from 1984 to1987 and attended a masterclass in oil painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in China in Beijing in 1987. He travelled extensively between the 1980s and 2000s to paint and attend exchange programmes. This included a three-month NAFA Cité Internationale des Arts residency (1998) in Paris during which he met artists from all over the world, and attended museum study tours. 

Tan has received several awards including the Creative Visual Art Award (NAFA, 2005), the Cultural Medallion (2006) and the Korean National Cultural Research Organisation’s Asia Visual Arts Award (2006). He has exhibited in Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, Japan and Europe. His list of solo exhibitions include Art in Action at the National Museum Art Gallery (1979). He has also exhibited at Imagining the City at the Singapore Art Museum (2007) and the Beijing International Art Biennale at the National Art Museum of China (2015, Beijing, China).

Tan’s works are in the collections of Singtel, the National Museum of Singapore and the National Museum of Brunei Darussalam.