For his artwork at Chinatown station, Tan Swie Hian wrote a poem entitled "Couplets on Chinatown", which chronicles the origins of the Chinese settlers in Singapore. Swathed in mythological imagery, the poem describes their journey to Singapore, the hard work of the coolies on arrival, and then the powerful nation which they laid the foundations for. Although celebratory, it does end on a note of nostalgia, as Tan observes “Roads, lanes and shops in the community still miss the sight of the bullock carts”.

The Chinese characters that make up the poem can be seen on the granite flooring on the platform level of the station, where people first place their feet upon arrival in Chinatown. Tan deliberately wanted to make the slightly provocative gesture of having calligraphy on the floor. One of the couplets that is one part of the whole poem, inked onto white paper. Translated it reads: “The buildings in harmony do away with the random shadows; The waste land of ruined gravel grows a million flowers.”

The process of setting the characters in granite was difficult, as they were made from pieces of lighter coloured granite inserted into specially cut holes in the darker granite blocks. Each detail and splash of ‘ink’ from Tan’s calligraphic pen, also had to be cut out of granite and fitted in like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

This poem complements a large mural created in vitreous enamel on the concourse level of the station. In startlingly bold colours, Tan depicts a phoenix flying to Singapore, and a journey through the history of the island right up to the present. The phoenix is adorned with five Chinese characters for Virtue, Righteousness, Civility, Integrity, and Benevolence. After it stands on the teeth-like rocks at the edges of Singapore known to early Chinese navigators as “Dragon’s Teeth Gate”, the bird passes through jungle and over muscular, larger-than-life coolies, portrayed deliberately, as Tan notes, “like Greek Gods”, before it is joined by many other birds in a spinning spiral of universal energy; a commentary on the never-ending cycle of life. Meanwhile the rocks and jungle have now become the skyscrapers of modern Singapore. The use of the mythological bird, the phoenix, as the main element of the mural’s narrative, comes from The Book of Mountains and Seas, an ancient Chinese classic text. One line in particular inspired Tan: “When the world is in harmony, a phoenix is spotted”.