A curated guide to the most important artworks at the National Gallery Singapore, aka the famous paintings that actually make it worth stepping inside.

If you’re going to stand in a museum for an afternoon in Singapore, it should be the National Gallery—and these are the famous artworks that justify it. Housed in a pair of beautifully repurposed colonial buildings, the Gallery holds the world’s largest public collection of modern Southeast Asian art. That sounds big? It is. And overwhelming. Which is why some people end up lost somewhere between Georgette Chen’s portraits and a corridor full of monkeys.
This list cuts through the fog: these are the National Gallery Singapore’s most famous, influential, or unmistakably iconic works of art. The ones locals grow up learning about, and curators keep front and center for a reason.
1. Chua Mia Tee – National Language Class (1959)
Location: City Hall Wing, Level 2, DBS Singapore Gallery
You’ll find this early, and it’s not subtle. A group of young adults sits in a sparse classroom, learning Malay—the new national language of post-colonial Singapore. “Siapa nama kamu?” scrawled on the blackboard. What’s your name?
It’s a painting that every Singaporean schoolkid has seen by the time they’re twelve. Painted in 1959—the year of self-governance—it’s loaded with that specific blend of hope, tension, and youthful over-preparedness that marked the era. It is a snapshot of a country mid-sentence, mid-identity.
The perspective is tight, almost stage-like, and Chua Mia Tee’s realism is surgical: pressed shirts, cheap wooden stools, faces that seem paused mid-thought. Start here. Everything else makes more sense after this.

2. Chua Mia Tee – Epic Poem of Malaya (1955)
Location: City Hall Wing, Level 2, DBS Singapore Gallery
This is the cinematic sequel to National Language Class, only it came first. Epic Poem of Malaya is pure, propagandistic theatre: a man stands dramatically mid-speech, waving a red book, surrounded by rapt listeners in white tees and earth-toned trousers. Think revolution, but polite.
Chua painted it when socialist and anti-colonial movements were gaining momentum across the region, and the tension shows. The speaker’s stance is heroic, but his audience is mixed: some inspired, some wary, some just tired. It’s propaganda with good lighting and enough ambiguity to make it interesting

3. Liu Kang – Life by the River (1975)
Location: City Hall Wing, Level 2, DBS Singapore Gallery
If National Language Class shows where Singapore wanted to go, Life by the River shows what it looked like before it got there.
This massive, mural-like canvas by Liu Kang captures a kampung scene from the early ’60s. Men bathe in the brown river, women hang out laundry, chickens strut around as if they’re paying rent. It’s idyllic, sure, but not naïve. Liu’s style—thick black outlines, flattened figures, Fauvist colors—pulls from both East Asian ink painting and European modernism, landing somewhere uniquely Nanyang. If you don’t know what that means, it’s okay—just know this: it became Singapore’s signature art movement for decades.
The piece is huge, and people tend to walk by without realizing it’s one of the most famous paintings in the National Gallery Singapore. Don’t. Stand in front of it long enough and it becomes a portrait of a way of life that urban planners erased in a single generation.

4. Cheong Soo Pieng – Drying Salted Fish (1978)
Location: City Hall Wing, Level 2, DBS Singapore Gallery
If you’ve ever seen a Singaporean $50 note from the 1970s, you’ve already seen this painting, sort of. Drying Salted Fish was chosen to grace the Orchid Series currency, which basically makes it state-sanctioned art history.
But even without the monetary endorsement, the work holds its own. Four women, rendered in Cheong Soo Pieng’s signature elongated, stylized forms, stretch fish on racks beneath a blank, burnt sky. Their arms are impossibly long, their limbs angular. What he’s doing here is taking a hyper-local, everyday kampung activity and abstracting it into something ritualistic, even iconic.
In a gallery filled with heroic tableaus and political symbolism, this quiet little row of drying fish might be the one that sticks.

5. Georgette Chen – Family Portrait (c. 1954–1955)
Location: City Hall Wing, Level 2, DBS Singapore Gallery
Georgette Chen helped shape modern art in Singapore. She trained in Paris, lived in China and New York, and eventually landed in Southeast Asia with a style that merged Western oil painting with regional light, texture, and tone. Family Portrait shows how she made that blend feel natural.
This scene, painted in the mid-1950s, brings together several figures in a quiet domestic setting. It reads like a moment between conversations—a hand resting on a chair, a sideways glance, the soft edges of furniture in afternoon light. Chen’s control of color and composition carries the weight. There’s clarity in the architecture, warmth in the skin tones, and restraint in the brushwork. Every detail feels earned.

6. Chen Wen Hsi – Gibbons (1977)
Location: City Hall Wing, Level 2, DBS Singapore Gallery
Chen Wen Hsi painted gibbons the way other artists paint lovers or gods: obsessively and reverently. This version, from 1977, is the one everyone remembers: ink on paper, spare but precise, with two white-furred gibbons perched in a tangle of black vines and negative space.
It’s all gesture. The brushwork is fast, confident, and controlled in a way that barely makes sense until you remember Chen studied in Shanghai and taught in Nanjing.
Why gibbons? You can read it a dozen ways: elegance, isolation, a kind of near-human introspection. But the truth is, he just got them right. The way they hang, the way they balance, the eerie calm in their blank eyes.

7. Koeh Sia Yong – Here They Come! (1965)
Location: City Hall Wing, Level 2, DBS Singapore Gallery
This is what happens when you take the idealism out of the independence era and just show people trying to live. It’s a chaotic, beautiful street scene: hawkers yelling, kids running, old men watching from plastic chairs, all of it vibrating with noise you can practically hear.
Koeh Sia Yong painted Here They Come! in 1965, the year Singapore became a nation, but this isn’t a flag-waving kind of picture. It’s more like a snapshot of a country trying to feed itself and stay upright. His style is crowded and kinetic, with faces that are quickly sketched, limbs that blur together, details that get sacrificed to energy. That’s the point.

The Link Corridor: from City Hall to Supreme Court
The National Gallery Singapore is hosted in two separate buildings: the former City Hall and the Supreme Court. The transition between the two unfolds under a canopy of glass and steel, in a corridor that feels almost ceremonial. This is the Link—part architectural bridge, part breathing space.
Above you, the old colonial facades stretch toward the light, framed by contemporary engineering. You get skylights, arches, restored plasterwork, and a contrast between history and innovation that feels extremely on-brand for this country. It’s quietly theatrical, and it gives you time to breathe between galleries. It’s also the best photo spot in the entire museum. But that’s just a bonus.

8. Raden Saleh – Boschbrand (Forest Fire) (1849)
Location: Supreme Court Wing, UOB Southeast Asia Gallery
Nearly four meters across, Boschbrand (Forest Fire) throws you straight into a stampede of terrified animals—deer, tigers, wild bulls—racing for their lives through a burning Javanese forest.
Raden Saleh painted this in 1849 while living in Europe, and it turned him into Southeast Asia’s first art-world celebrity. Trained in Dresden and The Hague, he spoke the language of Romanticism better than most Europeans—but brought with him the color, scale, and violence of the tropics.
Boschbrand is important because it isn’t just about fire. It’s about spectacle; control; what happens when nature no longer behaves. And what happens when the painter, born in Java, turns that European genre inside out and gives it back, bigger, louder, and smoking.

9. Latiff Mohidin – Pagoda II (1964)
Location: Supreme Court Wing, UOB Southeast Asia Gallery
This painting is a cornerstone of Southeast Asian modernism. Latiff Mohidin reworked the Southeast Asian landscape into something sharper, stranger, and closer to a state of mind than a literal place. Pagoda II, from his landmark Pago-Pago series, reads like an architectural hallucination, with fractured forms layered in ochre, rust, and black.
Born in Malaysia and trained in Berlin, Latiff spent the 1960s traveling through Laos, Cambodia, and Indonesia, sketching temples and village scenes. He came back with these: dense, symbolic structures that feel like meditations. In Pagoda II, the lines push upward, the forms compress inward, and the surface tension does most of the talking.

10. Juan Luna – España y Filipinas (1884)
Location: Supreme Court Wing, UOB Southeast Asia Gallery
Juan Luna painted this in Madrid at the height of Spanish colonial rule over the Philippines, and yes, it was meant to flatter. A tall, serene Lady Spain gestures nobly toward the horizon while a more delicate Filipina follows behind. It’s a vision of guidance, of progress, with soft light, pastel skies, neoclassical charm.
But context turns this into something else. Luna was Filipino. He painted this while navigating elite European art circles, playing the game to win visibility for his homeland. And he did. España y Filipinas ended up in exhibitions, books, government buildings. It sold a story about empire, but it also marked the moment when a Filipino artist took control of how that story looked.

11. Nguyễn Gia Trí – Landscape of Vietnam
Location: Supreme Court Wing, UOB Southeast Asia Gallery
This is Vietnam’s most important painter working at the height of his ambition. Nguyễn Gia Trí took lacquer—a material usually reserved for decorative screens and small boxes—and turned it into a monumental medium for modern painting. Landscape of Vietnam is layered, literally—resin, gold leaf—and visually too: history, memory, mythology, terrain.
What you see is a composite vision of Vietnam. Temples, hills, and trees drift through panels that shimmer and absorb light differently from every angle. Trí was building a national language in lacquer, and nobody else in the region pulled that off with this kind of technical mastery or cultural confidence.

12. San Minn – Age of Full Bloom (1979)
Location: Supreme Court Wing, UOB Southeast Asia Gallery
Painted during a time of heavy censorship and political repression in Myanmar, Age of Full Bloom delivers its critique wrapped in metaphor—but barely. San Minn’s style leans surrealist, but there’s nothing dreamy about the tone. The painting shows a female figure with crossed arms, dressed in Western clothes and jewelry, but her head has been replaced by a dense cluster of pink flowers. The background radiates acidic yellow, creating an uneasy tension between beauty and discomfort.
This isn’t subtle, and it’s not trying to be. San Minn came of age during Burma’s military dictatorship, and this painting is the kind of visual protest that somehow made it past the censors. The flowers on the figure’s head signal identity erasure, loss of voice, and the strange flowering of imposed ideals.

13. Pratuang Emjaroen – Red Morning Glory and Rotten Gun (1976)
Location: Supreme Court Wing, UOB Southeast Asia Gallery
Pratuang Emjaroen, one of Thailand’s most radical modern artists, painted Red Morning Glory and Rotten Gun in the aftermath of a political massacre in Bangkok. The canvas bursts with color and tension: curling plant forms and skeletal shapes twist together in a chaotic, almost cosmic swirl.
There’s no mistaking the message. This is what it looks like when violence gets left out in the sun too long. The work reflects Pratuang’s belief that art should challenge complacency and confront societal collapse. The red morning glory blooms signal vitality but also entanglement, while the decaying gun points to the failures and rot at the heart of political violence.

14. Hernando R. Ocampo – Dancing Mutants (1965)
Location: Supreme Court Wing, UOB Southeast Asia Gallery
No humans appear in Dancing Mutants, but it still feels like a crowded room. This is Hernando R. Ocampo at full tilt—organic shapes twisting, swelling, pulsing against each other like cells in a heatwave. Bright orange, acidic green, electric blue. The surface looks alive, and a little unstable.
Ocampo was one of the leading voices in Filipino modernism, and this painting lands right in the middle of his most experimental decade. Abstract, yes, but never cold. His forms suggest mutated bodies, irradiated foliage, maybe something from a future biology textbook. That tension mirrors the Philippines in the ’60s: hopeful, turbulent, veering into the unknown. Plenty of paintings in this wing make arguments.

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