Tan Lip Seng: A Life in Colour

This National Day, Objectifs Centre for Photography and Film will open Tan Lip Seng: A Life in Colour, a retrospective exhibition honouring one of Singapore’s most distinguished photographers. Opening on Saturday, 8 August 2026, just a day before the nation’s 61st birthday, the exhibition presents a fitting tribute to an artist whose body of work, spanning more than six decades, quietly chronicled Singapore’s transformation from a young, developing port city into the nation it is today. The landmark exhibition will be accompanied by a newly published photobook featuring never-before-seen images from the late Cultural Medallion recipient’s final years.

Few photographers are as closely bound to Singapore’s visual memory as Tan Lip Seng (1942–2025). Self-taught and driven by an early fascination with light and colour, Tan spent over half a century photographing the everyday rhythms of Singapore life — market vendors, construction workers, religious processions, fishing communities and the shifting skyline — even as he built an internationally recognised body of pictorial and photomontage work. In 1970, he became the first Singaporean awarded a Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society in the UK, and in 1985 he received Singapore’s Cultural Medallion for Photography. His images are held in the permanent collections of the National Gallery Singapore and the National Museum of Singapore, and four of his photographs were selected for the Singapore Post’s Singapore Today stamp series marking National Day in 2008.

Tan Lip Seng: A Life in Colour brings together works spanning his career, from the black-and-white street photography that documented a nation under construction, to the vividly layered colour-derivation montages that made him internationally celebrated, to the meditative reflections and sunrise studies he continued to make well into his eighties. Presented as a retrospective, the exhibition traces not only the evolution of his technique but the enduring patience, discipline and quiet devotion that ran through all of it.