Tan Tong’s documentation of the China-France Culture Year in 2004, illustrates symbolic pictograms. The artwork is composed in a grid like composition of 9 squares. It contains two illustrations of women in graceful poses, and a drawing of the Eiffel tower, celebrating exchange between the Oriental and Western civilisations. Tan Tong was given a retrospective by the Soka Gakkai Malaysia (SGM) called Homage To Tan Tong: His Life And Times, at its Kuala Lumpur headquarter from Dec 17, 2011 to Jan 1, 2012. This follows another major exhibition, Homage To Picasso, also hosted by SGM, in 2006. Tan Tong was given a French Government scholarship to study at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts (ENSBA), Paris, in 1964-1969, and he graduated with a double diploma (Painting and Drawing) in 1974 and 1975. In 1974, he won the Fondation Rocheron Award at ENSBA. He won the Consolation Prize for Painting at the National Art Gallery in 1991. Altogether, he had held 17 solo exhibitions since his first at the Foyer des Artistes Galerie, Montparnasse, Paris, in 1967. His other international solo was at the Meyer Art Gallery in Singapore 1970. He taught at the Malaysian Institute of Art for 26 years, retiring as head of the Department of Art and Design in 2002.