Fan Chang Tien had long been known to many in Singapore as one of the nation’s most important and respected artists. Never one to seek fame and fortune, Fan was dedicated to nurturing a younger generation of artists and helping them develop. Born in Jieyang, Guangdong, he studied art at Xinhua Art Academy and Changming Academy of Fine Arts under the Shanghai school master Wang Geyi, and others such as Wang Yiting and Pan Tianshou, and was especially steeped in the works of Wu Changshuo. Fan’s poetry, calligraphy, painting and seal carving all bear a strong character of the Shanghai school. His works show an inclination for calligraphic brush strokes that hark back to the robust style of ancient masters, supple and vivacious. I particularly like his orchids and bamboo where the stems and branches appear swaying gently and the leaves luxuriant and lush. His painting exudes a misty Taoist ambience which draws the distant viewer near and looks as though it blows breezes into the viewer up close. It displays a character no lesser than that of Zheng Banqiao just as what he writes in the poem he inscribed on a orchid-bamboo painting: “Painting randomly a new bamboo much in the old way, With some hidden orchids appearing as elegant, Unending remarks I hear about the right and wrong of my paintings, Who knows how difficult it is to command the ink tones of a millennium?”