Traditional Blacksmith

(Also called Shop at Amoy Street , 厦门街店铺 in the exhibition)

• 2020
• 1650 x 2280 mm
• Chinese ink and colour on paper

You can trust Lim Tze Peng to bring the dying trades back, resplendent in bright colours and alive with human figures busy at work. Here, the big format artwork has been recreated from a smaller original painted on location. Three shophouses with blacksmiths at work; the blacksmithing activities have been given an unusually detailed treatment. This has been possible because of the size of the painting; the early small works did not have the space for such fascinating and descriptive strokes. The name of each shop can be read; the hammers used are carefully drawn, even the requisite paraphernalia of each shophouse has been given sufficient attention to suggest the artist wants the art to serve as a record, betraying his own melancholy for the demise of the trade. Like Salted Fish and Wayang, this is nostalgia, but with an added tribute to the men and women who had been largely unsung, even though they had, in one way or another, ‘welded’ the country together.