This ravishing pastel portrait by Georgette Chen was made in the same year that Singapore became independent. At 60 years old, the artwork has, like Singapore, stood the test of time. It is the first work by Chen to be offered at auction this year and is riding the wave of Chen's already formidable reputation as it rises higher through a series of significant institutional exhibitions and art market records.

The sitter is Madam Tan Hong Siang (1914-2008), who started her tertiary education as a medical student but moved to London with her husband in 1950 and studied law as a mature student. On returning home, she was called to the Bar in 1953 and went to the top of Singapore's establishment as Vice-Chair of the Telecommunication Authority.¹ Like Chen, who she championed and with whom her son studied art, she broke barriers in Post-war Singapore.

The portrait shows an attractive, fashionable and poised woman. She looks less than her 50 years and her appearance is consistent with photographs of women in Singapore society in the 1960s. The warm mid-tone of the paper allows the pastel to pop, particularly in the white background to the pattern of the blouse that Madam Tan wears. As is typical in drawing practice, the presence of the artist is readable in the mark-making. We can see how quick, fluid gestures in the blouse reveal her mastery of line; the smooth gradation of light and shade in the face reveals mastery of tone; and the utterly believable rendition of flesh and clothing reveals her mastery of colour.

Chen is celebrated as the leading female Pioneer Artist in the Singapore arts scene. She is an international figure whose work has become canonical in Singaporean art history, and whose life has continued to fascinate the art world – not least because of the uncertainty surrounding her origin story. Hailing from a wealthy merchant family, her father was a political anarchist, entrepreneur and art dealer who split his time between Paris, London and Shanghai, returning permanently to China in 1911. This constant movement, and the fact that Chen herself was elusive about details of her birthplace, makes the occasion of her parents' fourth daughter's birth difficult to place with certainty.

Was Georgette born in Zejiang province in 1906, or in Paris in 1907? In terms of her practice, the question is irrelevant. Her Chinese family culture and her training and lived experiences – nature and nurture – are more prescient in terms of the Nanyang sensibilities she embraced after coming to Singapore in 1953. She attended art classes first in Shanghai and then at the Art Students League in New York in 1926-27, an atelier with plurality in its approaches to art education and forms of practice at its core. She then moved to Paris, where she had spent her childhood and adolescence. Here she joined the Académie Colarossi, one of the two most influential and cosmopolitan art schools in Paris, ranking alongside Académie Julian. Concurrently she attended the Académie Biloul, which seems to have been the studio of the painter Louis-François Biloul (1874-1947), a painting teacher at the École des Beaux-Arts.

In 1930, the year she married her first husband, the Chinese Foreign Minister Eugene Chen (1878-1944), she exhibited at the Salon d'Automne. NAFA artist Liu Kang (1911-2004), who was in Paris at the time, describes her from memory in a 1953 essay as "youthful, lively and elegant", and comments that in her work "she imbues every line, every brushstroke and every colour with specific meaning".² Contemporaneous writer Marco Hsü, in his A Brief History of Malayan Art (1963), records that as well as exhibiting in the Salon d'Automne she also participated in the Salon des Indépendents, Salon des Tuileries as well as the Women Painters' Exhibition in the Musée Jeu du Paume and the Paris Exposition in 1937.³

She was learning and developing in the intellectual hub of the art world, absorbing a Parisian Postimpressionist idiom of expressive, short brushstroke, light and colour. It was these painterly qualities that stayed with her for life, her rigorous training in drawing lying beneath structures even as her nascent Nanyang sensibility grew after she moved permanently to Singapore in 1953. In this sensibility, or philosophy, we see the spirit and motifs of Southeast Asia, executed with a fusion of Chinese and Western compositions and materials.

Like so many millions, she faced hardships between the years in Paris and the move to Singapore. Arrested by the Japanese when she and Eugene lived in Hong Kong in the early 1940s, the couple were placed under surveillance by the Japanese in Shanghai from 1942. Some 28 years older than his wife, Eugene Chen passed away in 1944. Georgette remarried and divorced in a short few years afterwards, but the move to Singapore was the invisible line where she launched in to the next phase of her life. Artistically, it was the most important one. She soon began to teach at NAFA part-time until her retirement in 1981. From her studio at 41 Siglap Plain, which was "frequented by local as well as international artists and scholars,"⁴ Chen drew and painted to increasing admiration.

Ranking in Artprice's top 1000 artists in 2024, Chen’s visibility as a key figure in Singapore’s art historical canon is matched by her rising profile in the art market. She was long celebrated as a Pioneer Artist, with the most extensive retrospective during her lifetime held in 1985 at the National Museum Art Gallery in Singapore. Her position was made even more institutionally significant in 2020, nearly three decades after her death, when the National Gallery Singapore mounted a retrospective titled 'Georgette Chen: At Home in the World'.

Over the last few years her long-standing auction sales record of HKD9.16m (US$1.18m, premium-inclusive), set in 2013 for Lotus Symphony,⁵ was broken five time times between 2021 and 2023. The current record is Still Life with Big Durian (c.1965), which stands at HKD14.29m (US$1.82m, premium-inclusive).⁶ Most of her most prominent auction records were achieved with works created in the 1960s, the period from which our pastel portrait comes. Only last year (2024) her work featured in the 'Historical Core' of the Venice Biennale's Central Pavilion, which focused on the Global South in order to set artistic bench-markers against, rather than in terms of, the Western canon.⁷ In a poetic counterpoint with the 60^th year of Singapore's independence and the 60th anniversary of Chen's Portrait of Madam Tan Hong Siang, the Venice Biennale was celebrating its 60^th edition.

While her still-lifes hold the sales records, Chen’s portraits are renowned for their spareness and sensitivity. Her 1946 Self-Portrait in the National Gallery of Singapore (oil on canvas, 22.5x17.5cm), has been reproduced numerous times in the media as a kind of poster child of Singaporean identity. Liu Kang referred to the self-portrait in his 1953 essay, writing: "Looking at her self-portrait, one can immediately tell that this is a person whom you would like to have as a close friend because there is not one single stroke of dull colour in the whole canvas."⁸

The same could be said of the Portrait of Madam Tan Hong Siang. It is an affectionate portrait of Chen's stalwart friend and supporter, who was an active member of the Singapore art circle that sustained Chen in her professional practice, just as she nurtured generations of students during her 27 years at NAFA.

A retrospective exhibition on this artist titled "Georgette Chen: At Home in The World" is currently being held at Hexiangning Art Museum, China from 9 August – 7 December 2025 organized by Hexiangning Art Museum and National Gallery Singapore.

---

¹ Prestige Gallery, Singapore, [COLLECT:ED Online Guided Tour]. https://prestigearts.com.sg/collected/
² Liu Kang, 'The Art of Georgette Chen', in The Selected Essays, 1953; translated and reproduced in Re-Connecting, T.K. Sabapathy (Ed.), Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore: 2005, pp.118-120.
³ Marco Hsü, A Brief History of Malayan Art, 2^nd edition, translated from Chinese to Englosh by Lai Chee Kien. Millennium Books, Singapore: 1999, p.77. Hsü states that the Women Painters' Exhibition took place in Germany but this would appear to be mistaken. Instead, it seems that she exhibited with the Society of Modern Women Artists, who formed in 1930 and held an annual exhibition in Paris between 1932 and 1938.
⁴ Ibid, p.77
⁵ Sotheby's Hong Kong, 5 October 2013
⁶ Christie's Hong Kong, 28 May 2023
⁷ Marian Ang, 'Women Embodying Foreignhood: Anita Magsaysay-Ho, Georgette Chen and Beatriz Milhazes', Sotheby's, 28 may 2024. https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/women-embodying-foreignhood-anita-magsaysay-ho-georgette-chen-and-beatriz-milhazes
⁸ Liu Kang, 'The Art of Georgette Chen', in The Selected Essays, 1953; translated and reproduced in Re-Connecting, T.K. Sabapathy (Ed.), Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore: 2005, pp.118-120.