Lip Seng Tan

23/05/2026

A post from the family :

Honoured to see our late father featured in the special tribute showcase at the 21st Ngee Ann Photographic Exhibition (NAPE) 2026, alongside fellow past Ngee Ann Photographers of the Year Mr Foo Tee Jun and Mr Desmond Teo Puay Chuan.

A Cultural Medallion recipient and Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society (FRPS), my father devoted much of his life to photography — always believing that light, colour and everyday moments could tell stories that words sometimes cannot.

Thank you to the organisers for remembering and celebrating the contributions of these photographers. If you are nearby, do drop by the exhibition and support the local photographic community.

📍 LASALLE College of the Arts
📅 13–23 June 2026
🕛 12pm–7pm daily (closed Sundays)
🎟 Admission free

https://www.instagram.com/p/DYoulXCkoyi/

28/04/2026

A post from EL:

From the family archive…

"Time for Candy" was taken around 1976–1977 and later exhibited in Dad’s 2009 exhibition, "Painting With Light & Shadow: A 50-year Chronicle".

That little boy is me, looking for candy from Mum.

I went back to the original Kodak PhotoCD file and reprocessed the colours to bring it closer to the original slide. Considering the slide was already more than 20 years old when it was scanned, I’m still amazed by how beautifully the colours have held up.

The backlighting is brilliant too. Especially on slide film, getting the exposure right would not have been easy. Dad nailed it.

This was also one of Dad’s personal favourites at home. Like the earlier Botanic Gardens photograph, it adorned one of the walls in our family home for many years.

27/04/2026

A post from EL:

From the family archive…

Taken at the Singapore Botanic Gardens around 1976–1977 during one of our family walks. Dad often brought his camera along — we naturally became his subjects.

This image was later used as the cover of a paediatric book.

To my knowledge, he had not shared this picture online before. It was certainly one of his favourites — it adorned one of the walls in our family home, and he even had a replacement printed when the old one broke not too long ago.

21/04/2026

📸 A post from EL (Lip Seng’s younger son):

While going through my dad’s hard drives recently, I came across this photograph that he had scanned from a 35mm slide. I don’t recall seeing it shared online before.

This was likely taken at Marina South during the Singapore International Kite Festival in 1986. I clearly remember posing for him, and the tiny figure at the centre of that spiral of colours is me.

The colours here have been slightly boosted digitally. The original slide was just as vibrant, but the scan was done many years later and had lost some of that intensity. The photograph itself is now about 40 years old.

Looking at it again now, it reminds me how much he enjoyed strong patterns and colour, often placing a small human element within the scene to complete the composition.

A rediscovery from the archives, and a rather personal one for me.

11/04/2026

[A note from Lip Seng’s family]:

This page is now lovingly managed by Tan Lip Seng’s family in his memory. We will continue to share his photographs, writings, and archival materials, while clearly indicating when a post is written by a family member.

07/04/2026

A note from his sons:

We were quite surprised to discover this on ResearchGate of all places — a paper presented at the 2024 conference Colour Photography and Film, which uses Tan Lip Seng’s montage colour slides as a case study.

What struck us most was that it goes beyond preservation alone. The paper looks closely at how he worked, how he thought about “the decisive moment”, and how he pushed colour montage beyond simple documentation into something deeply expressive and distinctive.

It traces how his style was shaped by both his medical photography work and his years in the camera club and salon world, and even examines the actual materials and techniques he used in constructing his slides. In that sense, it is not just about conserving old works, but about understanding the mind, craft, and artistic intentionality behind them.

We found this an unexpected and meaningful discovery.

(The article, written by Esther Ng, Kong Yen Lin, Ivan Djordjevic and Lynn Chua from the National Heritage Board can be read on pages 50-64 of the linked document).

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/388917537_Evaluating_the_stability_of_colour_slides_30_years_of_natural_ageing_at_the_National_Museums_of_Denmark

06/04/2026

A note from family:

It is almost a year since Dad passed on.

Even during his period of illness, he never really stopped seeing the world as a photographer. He continued to make images, and there remain many unpublished works which we hope to share gradually in the days ahead.

In the meantime, I wanted to revisit something special from an earlier chapter of his journey — his 2009 exhibition, Painting With Light & Shadow: A 50-year Chronicle.

The commemorative CD-ROM that accompanied that exhibition was something I had created back then as my own small contribution to it — very much a labour of love. Revisiting it now, and rebuilding it into a format that can be viewed in modern-day browsers, has been an emotional experience for me.

In doing so, I have tried to preserve the contents and spirit of the original CD-ROM, including the congratulatory messages contributed by the VIPs at the time.

It is both a return to an important milestone in his photographic life, and a way of keeping his work accessible for those who may be discovering it anew.

— Eng Loy / family

https://lite-n-shadow-2009.elcreations.org/

05/07/2025

https://www.facebook.com/share/1HpUejaBXr/

05/07/2025

https://www.facebook.com/share/16xuPioCDA/

In the July 2025 edition of the Photographic Society of America Journal … thank you Agatha Anne Bunanta for the write-up and heads-up

13/04/2025

美國突破發現！南瓜加它一起煮，對腫瘤有顯著效果，可惜大多數人都不知道！

07/04/2025

When the Ripples were Created

Visit the post for more.