Charting Thoughts: Essays on Art in Southeast Asia 9789811128653, 9789811419621

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Charting Thoughts: Essays on Art in Southeast Asia Edited by Low Sze Wee & Patrick D. Flores

Contents 6

An Introduction

7

90

Low Sze Wee

Address of Art: Vicinity of Region, Horizon of History

12

Pre-war (1886–1941) Art Activities of the Chinese Community in Singapore through a Narrative Framework of Diasporic Bonds Yeo Mang Thong

Patrick D. Flores

7 104 1 22

When Was Modernism? A Historiography of Singapore Art

Yvonne Low

Kevin Chua

8 120

34

Adrian Vickers

The 19th-Century “Origins” of Singapore Art

9 130

3

Ushiroshoji Masahiro

10 140

4



The Javanese Painter Raden Saleh (c. 1811–1880): A Star in the Firmament of Indonesian Modern Visual Art

11 154

Marie-Odette Scalliet



Towards a History of the Asian Photographer at Home and Abroad: Case Studies of Southeast Asian Pioneers Francis Chit, Kassian Céphas and Yu Chong Gael Newton

Conditions of Freedom, Contingencies of Art Patrick D. Flores

5 78

The Birth of ‘Fine Art’ in Southeast Asia, 1900–1945

Colonial Art as a Space of the Asian Modern John Clark

60

Balinese Modernism

2

Kwa Chong Guan

44

A “Forgotten” Art World: The Singapore Art Club and its Colonial Women Artists

The Transition of Thai Traditional Art to Modern Art in the 1950s and 1960s Somporn Rodboon

12 164

Landscape Painting in Indonesia: Continuity and Change in President Sukarno’s Collection Susie Protschky

13 174

Confict and Denial: The Discourse of Identity in Indonesian Art, 1950s –1980s

20 278

Yin Ker

Aminudin TH Siregar

14 188

Lim Hak Tai Points a Third Way: Towards a Socially Engaged Art by the Nanyang Artists, 1950s –1960s

Unpacking the Legacy of an Exceptional Artist from Myanmar: Bagyi Aung Soe (1923–1990)

21 292

Seng Yu Jin

Emergenc(i)es: History and the Auto-Ethnographic Impulse in Contemporary Cambodian Art Ashley Thompson

15 202

214

The Woman and the Vista: Intimate Revolt of the Cultural Left

22

Simon Soon

Rhetorical Postures and the Photographic Condition: A Minor Malaysian Detour

16

Adele Tan

Cultural Wars in Southeast Asia: The Birth of the Critical Exhibition in the 1970s

304

23 318

Seng Yu Jin

Undoing the Global: Contemporary Art of Singapore June Yap

17 232

Reading Conceptual Art in Southeast Asia: A Beginning

24 328

T.K. Sabapathy

18 246

The Singapore Contemporary and Contemporary Art in Singapore

Venka Purushothaman

25

C.J.W.-L. Wee

Continuity and Change: Vietnamese Art in the Age of Đổi Mới

Metonym and Metaphor, Islands and Continents: Refections on Curating Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia

Nora A. Taylor

Lee Weng Choy

336 19 268

Drafting History: Meditation on Location, Institutions and Myth-Making in Visual Arts in Postcolonial Singapore

349

Figures 1.1 to 25.5

479

Notes on the Contributors

An Introduction Low Sze Wee

The writers invited by National Gallery Singapore to contribute towards this publication were given a main brief that their essays should further the understanding of the history of modern art in Singapore and Southeast Asia. This was aligned to the Gallery’s own research interests, as refected in the framework of its two inaugural long-term exhibitions—one on Singapore modern art and the other on Southeast Asian modern art. Whilst the curatorial narratives of both exhibitions were shared with the writers, it was left open for them to choose whether their essays would complement, expand, critique or highlight aspects of art histories covered (or not covered) in the two exhibitions. The eventual essays in this anthology, organised chronologically according to the periods and practices under study, cover a wide terrain. In a sense, they also refect the current scholarly preoccupations in a feld that has gained considerable depth over the past few decades, but continues to suffer from critical gaps. On Singapore The writers requested to refect on Singapore art responded in diverse ways. A number took the opportunity to cast light on overlooked or lesser-known aspects of Singapore art history. For instance, Kwa Chong Guan highlights how materials such as 19th-century colonial natural history paintings and photographs inform our understanding of the beginnings of art in Singapore, which have hitherto been conventionally associated with the founding of the

Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in 1938. Similarly, Yeo Mang Thong extensively researched pre-war Chinese-language newspapers to foreground the vibrant cultural scene amongst the Chinese diaspora in Singapore then. His essay provides a refreshing account of the lively literati exchanges and fervent nationalistic activities by painters and calligraphers in the years leading up to World War II. This has, in turn, shed new light on why the local art scene was able to rebound with relative ease in the 1950s, after the war came to an end. Yvonne Low, a younger scholar, has also done admirable research on early 20th-century art activities in Singapore—an area which has, to date, received insuffcient attention. Low’s essay examines the contributions of colonial women artists working in social art clubs in Singapore. Such amateur artists are often overlooked in mainstream art historical accounts which privilege the role of professional artists. Moreover, postcolonial discourses of art also tend to lack colonial references. Hence, Low provides a much-needed exploration of the now-forgotten Singapore Art Club which was set up in the early 1880s, and how such social clubs survived and further developed in post-independent Malaya. Her essay also makes mention of a few early 20th-century artists, including Low Kway Song, a Singapore-born artist who enjoyed considerable success in the predominantly European expatriate art scene at the time. His achievements notwithstanding, he as well as his contemporaries are little-discussed in conventional art historical discourse today,

An Introduction

7

which tends to emphasise the contributions of the Nanyang School artists who came into prominence in the 1950s onwards. Yet, as Seng Yu Jin points out through his piece, there are still layers of complexity that need to be better understood. Seng focuses on the practice of Lim Hak Tai, a fgure most known for his role as the founding principal of Singapore’s oldest tertiary art school, the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts. Seng urges a rethinking of both Nanyang and social realist art in Singapore. Challenging the notion that such rigid categories are mutually exclusive, he contends that such classifcations become problematic when applied uncritically to our understanding of Nanyang art and social realism. Seng argues that although Lim did not seek to evoke explicit social change through his works (unlike other social realist artists), his works should be seen as a form of Nanyang art which sought to raise social awareness. Hence, such “socially engaged” Nanyang paintings offer a possible way to bridge the seemingly opposed positions of the Nanyang and social realist discourses today. Three writers chose to examine the period from the pivotal 1980s until the present. As C.J.W.-L. Wee points out, the 1980s was a decade of transition for arts and culture policy making in Singapore. There was a new emphasis on developing the cultural sector to enhance Singapore as a tourist destination and an attractive place for Singaporeans and foreign talents to live and work. By the 1980s, Singapore was seen as having attained economic success and therefore, “inhabiting at least more of an equally shared present” with the advanced economies of the West. This meant that Singapore had to be “more of a transnational space” due to its increased interconnections with the global economy. Against that context, Wee describes contemporary art of the period as a “fexible art practice” that departed from mediumspecifc and object-based modern art. This resulted in an expanded use of seemingly non-aesthetic material for art-making that 8

facilitated Singapore artists to examine the “incomplete fragments of life in the historical present” and engage with the impact of modernisation from the 1960s. In her essay, June Yap extends the discussion on the contemporaneity of art in Singapore by looking at the neoliberal globalisation of capital post-1989, and how the aesthetic expressions of the global—its fows, interruptions, disjunctions and limits— are manifest in the works of a range of artists including Tang Mun Kit, Simryn Gill, M. Faizal Fadil, Tang Da Wu, Lee Wen, Amanda Heng, Vincent Leow, S. Chandrasekaran and Lim Tzay Chuen. Lastly, in their respective essays, academics Venka Purushothaman and Kevin Chua pose thought-provoking questions on how, why and for whom art history is written. Whilst Purushothaman raises issues of location, institutions and myth-making in the historicising of art in Singapore, Chua examines the state of art historical writing in Singapore in three broad periods, or what he calls “three moments of modernism” in Singapore: the 1300s–1890s, 1920s–1960s and 1970s–2000s. In his analysis of art historical texts by key writers like Marco Hsu and T.K. Sabapathy, he highlights the critical importance of understanding how an artwork moves through time, meeting different audiences, making new meaning and gathering complex layers of interpretations along the way. On Southeast Asia Of the essays dealing with art in Southeast Asia, more than half are devoted to studies on either the nation or the individual, the latter usually in the context of national art history. The nation therefore looms large in the study of art history in Southeast Asia, especially with the end of colonialisation and rise of nationstates after World War II. Over the years, academic courses, publications, exhibitions and collections have been developed within this deep-rooted nationalist paradigm. Interest in

Low Sze Wee

the region and art historical research with a regional perspective has been sporadic. It only began picking up momentum from the 1990s onwards, with the advent of a growing art market in Southeast Asia. This was underpinned by rising affuence in the region due to the postwar economic boom of the 1970s and 1980s. The period also saw the emergence of institutional interests, as evidenced by the establishment of international biennales, triennales and museums with a regional focus in the 1990s. In a way, the profle of our writers also refects these developments. For instance, Ushiroshoji Masahiro was the founding Chief Curator at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in the 1990s, an institution critical to promoting greater scholarship in Southeast Asian modern art. Likewise, John Clark, whose comparative approaches in the study of Asian modern art has nurtured, over the years, many younger scholars in the feld. In their respective essays, a number of writers have highlighted the limitations of using Western (Euro-American) art historical frameworks for understanding modern art in Southeast Asia. In such paradigms, modern art has been generally understood as a rupture with the past and a preoccupation with the new, as refected in the succession of styles from realism to abstraction from the late 19th to mid20th centuries. Modern Southeast Asian art, therefore, sits uneasily within such defnitions. As Marie-Odette Scalliet notes, an artist like Raden Saleh is not considered “modern” under such a framework since he did not take up any of the modernist styles associated with Western art. Other essays commissioned for this volume also reveal that searching for clear ruptures with the past is problematic. For instance, in the case of Indonesia, its modern art beginnings are conventionally understood as a clear departure from the Mooi Indiës (beautiful Indies) of its colonial past. However, Susie Protschky demonstrates that there are clear continuities in both subject and style in works from the colo-

nial to the early post-independence period, as refected in the art collection of its nationalist leader President Sukarno. Likewise, how does one account for an artist like Bagyi Aung Soe from Myanmar, whose eclecticism has defed Western categorisations, and whose exceptional practice has left no obvious legacy in terms of followers or students? In that respect, scholars like Yin Ker and Ashley Thompson have shown that disciplines such as sociology, anthropology and ethnography can help to open up the discourse, and facilitate alternative insights into artistic practice and production in Southeast Asia. In the discussions about art and the nation, a number of essays have coalesced around Indonesia: one of the largest countries in the region with a relatively longer history of modern art development. This is mirrored by substantial discussions about Indonesian art and its relations with the nation. What is Indonesian modern art? What is “Indonesian” about Indonesian art? How does one defne local or national identity in art? These are issues that have preoccupied Indonesian artists and commentators since the early 20th century. In his essay, Aminudin TH Siregar surveys the longrunning cultural debates in Indonesia that emerged in the early years of her struggles for independence. These debates continued in 1969 when Oesman Effendi controversially argued that most art produced then was still derivative of the West, and Indonesian painting with national characteristics had yet to emerge. Siregar concludes in his piece that the issue of Indonesian art’s identity is not easily resolved, given its complex web of “acculturation and enculturation processes.” These processes become evident in Adrian Vickers’ study of Balinese modernism from the 1920s to 1940s, which spotlights the diffculty of accounting for such art within the conventional nationalist narrative of Indonesian art. Each generation will need to fnd its own answer to these complex issues. In fact, as Scalliet discusses in her detailed study of Raden Saleh, an artist’s identity and

An Introduction

9

standing was highly malleable at the time, and could change from generation to generation. Initially marginalised in the early 20th century due to his European affliations, Raden Saleh’s reputation was later restored by the founding President of Indonesia, Sukarno, who admired his art and positioned him as a nationalist artist. Somporn Rodboon’s and Nora A. Taylor’s respective studies of Thai modern art and Vietnamese contemporary art both highlight the dilemmas and contradictions in art practice and writing. In Rodboon’s succinct account, she examines how Thai artists grappled with Western modernism and Thai traditionalism in the 1950s and 1960s. When Bhirasri’s students were criticised for using modernist styles, their teacher defended them by arguing that such use was a “natural development” so long as it could convey their individuality. Likewise, Taylor provides a nuanced analysis of the Vietnam art scene from the 1970s to 1990s. She demonstrates how a reading of the conventional association between the rise of Vietnamese contemporary art and the Đổi Mới governmental economic reforms in the mid-1980s can be complicated by the agencies of individuals like Bui Xuan Phai and informal associations like Salon Natasha. Adele Tan uses Malaysian artists as her case studies for arguing that closer attention be paid to photographs of artists posing with their artworks, found as illustrations in publications or reports. Usually regarded as supplemental or marginal to an essay, Tan makes a case for using such materials as critical resources to appraise an artist’s work, attitudes and politics by examining the “ways they interpose on how we read artists, their art and their unexpected lifeworlds.” Acknowledging the limitations of nationcentric discourses, with their essentialist tendencies and unproductive binary relationships, scholars like T.K. Sabapathy, John Clark, Ushiroshoji Masahiro, Patrick D. Flores and Lee Weng Choy have looked to the region to play up relationships, fows and connections 10

that are more refective of the fuidity and complexities of identity formation and artistic production in Southeast Asia. In his analysis of the development of conceptual art (and conceptualism) in Southeast Asia, Sabapathy highlights such diffculties, and cautions that researchers are unlikely to fnd “continuously linked lineages” but rather, “broken and separate genealogies” arising from diverse geographies and histories. Looking across time and space, Clark, Ushiroshoji and Flores analyse parallel developments in the region from the 19th century to the 1960s. Whilst the impact of European colonialism has been much commented upon, Clark’s analysis of 19th-century art from Thailand, Indonesia and Philippines surfaces connections beyond Europe by introducing intriguing connections with the Indian Company School and Chinese trade paintings. Flores’ analysis illuminatingly maps artistic developments against the complex processes of “the struggle with successive colonialisms, the coming to terms with independence and the process of belonging to the international world.” Arguing against a simplistic understanding of Southeast Asian art as a series of stylistic infuences, Ushiroshoji voices concern about the over-reliance on Euro-American frameworks in discussing art from Southeast Asia, given the syncretic nature of art practice in the region. For instance, the art academies established in Hanoi, Bangkok and Singapore in the 20th century all advocated hybrid approaches in art education, where Western art styles and techniques were taught alongside traditional art forms. Whilst Sabapathy and others have embarked on broad comparative analysis, younger scholars like Soon and Seng look at more specifc instances of common historical experiences and artistic developments in Southeast Asia. Soon compares leftist art movements in Indonesia and Singapore, and fnds common strategies in the politics of inclusion and use of the body as a weapon to challenge power structures. Seng examines the

Low Sze Wee

phenomenon of what he terms “critical exhibitions,” organised by artists in the 1970s. This was a new exhibitionary mode at the time, led by student–artists who challenged thendominant categories of art and promoted socially engaged art. Conclusion In closing, Lee’s acute observations come to mind. In thinking and writing about Southeast Asian art, a degree of self-refexivity is critical in the “diffcult and complicated process

of making sense” of the terrain. As he asserts, “[c]oncepts like modernism, realism or conceptualism become even more contentious when applied across cultures and geographies.” In her essay on the Burmese artist Bagyi Aung Soe, Yin Ker maintains that each artist is exceptional, and merits scrupulous study in examining how he/she responds to specifc problems arising from an evolving context. Ultimately, as she persuasively argues, scholarship needs to be open to fux, plurality and challenges, and not seek the safety, singularity and stability of theories and defnitions.

An Introduction

11

1

2

3

4

Roger D. Abrahams, “The Past in the Presence: An Overview of Folkloristics in the Late 20 th Century,” Studia Fennica Folkloristica I, no. 24 (1992): 32–51. Elizabeth Mansfeld, “Introduction,” Art History and its Institutions: Foundations of a Discipline, ed. Elizabeth Mansfeld (London: Routledge, 2002), 1–8. See for instance the efforts of the Clark Art Institute, the Getty Research Institute, the Tate and the Guggenheim, to name the most prominent. Southeast of Now, “Call for Papers: Volume #1— Discomfort,” Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art, http://southeastofnow. com/call-for-papers-issue-1-discomfort/ (accessed 2 November 2016). The journal has been published.

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6 7

8

“The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World,” MoMA, https://www.moma.org/calen dar/exhibitions/1455 (accessed 2 November 2016). Glenn D. Lowry, The New Museum of Modern Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2005), 15. Johannes Fabian, Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Hélène Cixous, The Hélène Cixous Reader, ed. Susan Sellers (New York: Routledge, 1994). Michael Ann Holly, “Mourning and Method,” in Compelling Visuality: The Work of Art in and out of History, eds. Claire Farago & Robert Zwijnenberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 175.

Address of Art: Vicinity of Region, Horizon of History Patrick D. Flores

In Bahasa Indonesia and Melayu, address is alamat; in Filipino, alamat is lore or legend. In this universe of language, origin is more than just locus or inscription that hews, oftentimes even overdetermines, identity. It is a cosmological condition. It is a world conceived not in terms of possession or domain that condenses in discursive property; it rather ramifes in myth and tale, in a conjuring. It is more atmosphere than territory. In such a scheme, the art that must fnd its address does not necessarily have to take on the habit of identity, because it must not. It must, in fact, refuse it. After all, apart from being fable or saga or parable, address is speech (text, texture, context), a performative act that signifes as well as dissembles; its truth contingent on its telling and its teller, the very procedure of its history in an expressive public sphere.1 12

Art history in Southeast Asia cannot be merely marked as a province of the “history of art” as conceived as an academic vocation at the Musée Napoléon in 1803 and at the University of Berlin in 1844.2 It cannot likewise just be a fallout of the crisis of the discipline of art history, burdened by its 19th-century provenance and impedimenta, and at the moment diligently recalibrated in various algorithms by art history departments, research centres and museums in the West.3 An art history in Southeast Asia must revisit the address of whatever art history it has known, written, and continues to mediate, its declaration and its dream, its norm and its fction, its écriture. In returning to this alamat, it must decidedly be deconstructive but at the same time true to the spirit of its legend and lore, to the integrity of its persistent cosmology. It must cherish and defend an incessant world.

Charting Thoughts

This alamat is reckoned in the present. In Philippine dictionaries, alamat is a narrative of wonder and translation, generated from telling to telling and proves diffcult to confrm at the moment of its utterance. (And for sure, it is uncanny that the alamat evades the very modus of verifcation.) This present is seductively and urgently depicted as the “now.” In this regard, it might be instructive to point to two evocations of the “now.” In 2015, an editorial collective was working towards a journal titled Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art. The brief for its inaugural issue invited contributions that “explore discomfort as a vehicle in the thinking of art histories and curatorial discourses connected to localities within the region known as Southeast Asia. It seeks to interrogate, recover, challenge, and redefne the ‘contemporary’ and ‘modern’ through new readings of art practices connected to the region.”4 In New York in the same year, the Museum of Modern Art opened the exhibition The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World. It presented the work of 17 artists whose paintings refect a singular approach that characterises our cultural moment at the beginning of this new millennium: they refuse to allow us to defne or even meter our time by them. This phenomenon in culture was frst identifed by the science fction writer William Gibson, who used the term ‘a-temporality’ to describe a cultural product of our moment that paradoxically doesn’t represent, through style, through content, or through medium, the time from which it comes. It defnes its key term thus: A-temporality, or timelessness, manifests itself in painting as an ahistorical free-forall, where contemporaneity as an indicator of new form is nowhere to be found,

and all eras coexist. This profigate mixing of past styles and genres can be identifed as a kind of hallmark for our moment in painting, with artists achieving it by reanimating historical styles or recreating a contemporary version of them, sampling motifs from across the timeline of 20thcentury art in a single painting or across an oeuvre, or radically paring their language down to the most archetypal forms.5 The “now,” therefore, is caught up in the logics of refusal, profigacy, reanimation and discomfort. On the one hand, the “region” that is Southeast Asia is almost painfully refunctioned so that it can hopefully “address” a particular presence. On the other, in an institution that professes to be “metabolic” or “self-renewing,” art is imagined to whirl in some kind of heady ether, in an “ahistorical free-for-all” that infnitely progresses.6 It is at this conjuncture of abandon, in the sense of both licence and recklessness, that the now is intuited. In the copious context of the now, we ask this: What happens to the past and how does the future transpire? Johannes Fabian speaks of “remembering the present” when he intertwines painting and popular history in Zaire while Hélène Cixous contemplates a “present passing.”7 The annotator of the intellectual history of art history, its historiographer, Michael Ann Holly, abides by melancholy, inviting us to “suffer the sting of loss” and relive the “incision” of the “aesthetic capacity of the work of art to wound, to pierce.”8 These are elusive phrases that at the same time bear the weight of the ethnographic art-historical and the feminist philosophical, or of a dense “historical,” but one that is partial and restive. It is a historical no longer ensconced or captured. It can, in fact, overcome the pressure of its supposed fundament or be indifferent to a “futural horizon” or “coming community” altogether. In the mind of the Japanese critic Sawaragi Noi, “The world that is here now has nothing to do with the future.”

Address of Art

13

In other words, according to Kenichi Yoshida, the now can be an index of “severance” and “uselessness” and not only a metric of allegiance and productivity.9 In discussing tendencies in how art history has been and is being written in the region that is carved out as Southeast Asia, central is the concept of timeliness, which implicates the crisis in art history with regard to the region in terms of omission, absence, misrepresentation, orientalism, denigration and outright negation. It is the task of a timely art history to question the basis of this lapse in art historical judgment through intense critique and an equally intense effort to move beyond the absolutely essential critique. Thus, in tension with the timely is the untimely. This art history should be committed in the same vein to anticipate the untimely, to altogether lift itself off the time that it has suffered for so long but cannot seem to fnd the means of a proper parting.10 And so, one of the strongest tendencies in the writing of art history in Southeast Asia or in Asia for that matter is the postcolonial critique of the normative text that springs from a perceived Euro-American intelligence. Partha Mitter, for instance, looks at how texts on Indian sculpture and architecture such as Fergusson’s A History of Indian and Eastern Architecture and A.M. Hocart’s Decadence in India regard Indian form in terms of decadence. Mitter offers an alternative approach through the concept of ornament; in Sanskrit, the verb alamkar is to decorate and literally means “to make enough,” to complete, or accomplish the form. A profound shift takes place when decadence is replaced with ornament.11 T.K. Sabapathy, for his part, dwells on how art historiography in Southeast Asia would be conditioned by a strategically nonWestern knowledge system. Sabapathy probes this problem through the texts History of Indian and Indonesian Art by Ananda Coomaraswamy and The Indianized States of Southeast Asia by George Coedes. His main point is that 14

Southeast Asia gains the privilege of identity through India; in fact Coomaraswamy calls the region Farther India. Coedes for his part would reduce Southeast Asia to the process of Indianisation or Sankritisation, prompting Sabapathy to argue that he “has imposed a programmatic design of Indian infuence onto Southeast Asia […] tantamount to propounding a colonial doctrine.”12 It is here where we can tease out the strand of the Great Tradition or oriental antiquity that privileges the HinduBuddhist sphere as the space of Southeast Asian art history and the impulse of the creative life it encompasses, something that a Philippine moment can challenge through its peculiar and precocious mediations of the West and the region beyond the pale of this highly Sinitic and Indic Great Tradition. The second tendency pertains to the formation of a national modernity in which art history distributes its attentiveness to the modernity of art and the modernity of nation and the historical form that is aesthetically mediated through the artefact of art and the artefact of nation. In other words, the history of art is braided with the history of modernity in the context of the emergence or the “unfolding ontology” of the nation. In this scheme, modernity may be construed as a consciousness of art; modernisation as the rationalisation of art; and modernism as a refnement of the sensibility for the potential of art. What is therefore paramount in this regard is the anxiety of context and the fear of repeating the anti-context which is the universal, on the one hand, and the necessity of worlding in which a notion of the outside is posited and then transformed so that context may be wrested from the universal, on the other. The said context is almost already understood as “country” and as Clifford Geertz has asked: “What is a country if it is not a nation?”13 And more often than not, this country that is a nation is made to characterise the category of art as if no problematic or frisson inhered in the conjuncture. Thus, the terms

Patrick D. Flores

Kenichi Yoshida, “Deactivating the Future: Sawaragi Noi’s Polemical Recoil from Contemporary Art,” Review of Japanese Culture and Society 26 (2014): 318. 10 See Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2005) and Fenella Cannell, Power and Intimacy in the Christian Philippines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 11 Partha Mitter, “‘Decadent’ Art of South Indian Temples,” in Views of Difference: Different Views of Art, ed. Catherine King (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 93–118. 12 T.K. Sabapathy, “Developing Regional Perspectives in South-East Asian Art Historiography,” in The Second Asia-Pacifc Triennial of Contemporary Art: Brisbane Australia 1996 (Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 1996), 16.

13 Clifford Geertz, Available Light: Anthropological

Indonesian or Cambodian art present themselves almost naturally, with the presumption that the proposition of art is as transhistorical or transcultural as the rubric of aesthetics. A cognate situation would be appending the term “aesthetics” to a cultural conception like the Yoruba or Inuit to form another naturalised phrase such as Yoruba or Inuit aesthetics, as if the constitution of Yoruba or Inuit could not resist the aesthetic to render itself sensible.14 In these formulations, it is as if the category of country did not mediate the category of form (or sensible life), found in or in fact constituting, the country. Aside from “country,” the other mediating category of context is “culture,” which is seen to endow the art with distinction or even authenticity. This is a tricky operation basically because culture, in the way it tends to reify the mess of lived practice, is actually a corruption, a fction and facture of coherence and not a fact of feld work. It is supposedly culture that animates the particularity of art from Southeast Asia. We can perhaps trace this anthropological

turn in Southeast Asian art history to Cornell University’s Stanley O’Connor who has expressed the belief that the “aesthetic attitude” is not so much a study of privileged objects; it is rather “rooted in social customs concerning death and a speculative investigation into the nature and the destiny of the soul.”15 It can be noticed that the work of Nora A. Taylor and Astri Wright who came from the same programme of art history at Cornell is committed to the description of culture that surrounds the art.16 In fact, Taylor characterises the story of painters in Hanoi as an ethnography. Needless to say, such a turn to and of the ethnographic needs to be subjected to the thoroughgoing critique within the discipline of anthropology itself. For instance, it is fair to ask: How far can a trained art historian really do ethnography and how can this art historian not instrumentalise the ethnographic just to sustain the art historical? It is in the realm of culture that the binary, and the potential dialectic, between tradition and change, temporality and cosmology tend to overdetermine postcolonial practice. The

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Refections on Philosophical Topics (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001). 14 Tom Ingold, ed., Key Debates in Anthropology (London: Routledge, 1996). 15 Stanley J. O’Connor, “Art Critics, Connoisseurs, and Collectors in the Southeast Asian Rain Forest: A Study in Cross-Cultural Art Theory,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 14, no. 2 (September 1983): 408. 16 Nora A. Taylor, Painters in Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009); and Astri Wright, Soul, Spirit, Mountain: Preoccupations of Contemporary Indonesian Painters (Kuala Lumpur, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

Address of Art

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16

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Claire Holt, Art in Indonesia: Continuities and Change (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967). 18 Alice G. Guillermo, Image to Meaning: Essays on Philippine Art (Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2001) 11, 13. 19 John Clark, Modern Asian Art (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998); Flaudette May Datuin & Patrick Flores, eds., Women Imaging Women: Home, Body, Memory (Manila: Ford Foundation, Art Studies Foundation, Cultural Center of the Philippines, 1999); and Simon Soon, “What is Left of Art: The Spatio-Visual Practice of Political Art in Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines 1950s–1970s,” (PhD diss., University of Sydney, 2016). 20 Sakai Tadayasu, “Was Japanese Fauvism Fauvist?” in Modernity in Asian Art, ed. John Clark (Sydney: Wild Peony, 1993), 128–34. 21 Patrick D. Flores, “Turns in Tropics: Artist–Curator,”

in Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art: An Anthology, eds. Nora A. Taylor & Boreth Ly (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), 171–88. 22 Hans Belting, “Contemporary Art as Global Art: A Critical Estimate,” in The Global Art World: Audiences, Markets, and Museums, eds. Hans Belting & Andrea Buddensieg (Ostfldern: Hatje Cantz), 38–73; Reiko Tomii, Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan (Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2016). 23 See Afterall Books series on exhibition histories. 24 Patrick D. Flores, “The Exhibition as Historical Proposition: An Introduction” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 13, no. 2 (2014): 103–4. 25 June Yap, “Retrospective: A Historiographical Aesthetic in Contemporary Singapore and Malaysia,” (PhD diss., National University of Singapore, 2014).

work of Claire Holt (continuities and change), the First Asia-Pacifc Triennial in Brisbane, Australia (tradition and change), and Apinan Poshyananda’s travelling exhibition Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions/Tensions for Asia Society based in New York are helpful in this respect.17 Alongside culture, there is likewise an insistence on the coordinates of the social and the historical in the projection of the context of art as thought through by the art critic and historian Alice Guillermo; she locates art within iconic, contextual and evaluative planes. Through the contextual, she clears a relatively autonomous space for art as, in her own felicitous phraseology, “reverberating in the real world,” revealing “numerous ramifcations of meaning,” grounded in the circumstances of its production.18 In these various elaborations of context, of material conditions and materialities, the discipline inevitably dissolves to give way to the interdiscipline or the transdiscipline, with various epistemes infltrating the premises of the study of art, from the social sci-

ences to visual culture, and on to the hybridities, to which a so-called new art history would become hospitable. The said national modernity, however, is not fated to stasis; it is, rather, in fux, always inclining outward, open to belong to a broader assemblage of forces. It is at this point that a corollary tendency arises in the writing of art history in Southeast Asia, and this is largely about the history of transfer and translation, investing agency in the region as a locus of critical mediation and not just passive acceptance of so-called infuence or diffusion. Here, the procedure of comparison is set in high relief so that the possibility of a comparative modality can be made to play out through a survey or comparison of national modernities (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, the Singapore Art Museum/National Gallery Singapore, the Japan Foundation, and the exceptional work of John Clark over time) or a scanning of social practice through a thematisation of, let us say,

Patrick D. Flores

gender or politics.19 The production of monographic projects around artists or forms that tend to represent a national expression or tradition is well within this tendency. These include efforts that prop up a stylistic category as a node or transmitter of artistic technology from the West, such as Cubism by way of the exhibition Cubism in Asia, or realism via Realism in Asia. Another case in point is Sakai Tadayasu’s essay in which he asks if Japanese Fauvism was truly Fauvist and to which he answers: its “strangeness” became so “adjusted to the Japanese ‘climate of sensitivity’ that in the end it really does not seem so strange anymore.”20 To be noted here is ambivalence, of a condition of almost, but not quite, strange. The stability of such a national modernity and its comparativities may be unhinged or suspended if a certain turn were initiated, for instance by a polytropic agency, like the artist– curator, or the production of a provocative text, like the manifesto. The work of Jim Supangkat, Redza Piyadasa, Raymundo Albano, and Apinan Poshyananda and the seminal role of the manifestos in Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines and Malaysia in the 1970s are important ciphers in this landscape.21 It is at this critical crossing that a break with the modern may have been effected, or if not a break, at least a complication or a critique, or a movement towards the global contemporary or international contemporaneity in the register of Hans Belting or Reiko Tomii respectively.22 The third tendency in the writing of art history in Southeast Asia can be found in the exhibition and the history of exhibitions, from 19th-century expositions to the biennales of recent time. Many exhibitions have endeavoured to confgure the history of art of the region and have proposed periods, themes, artists and ecologies of art worlds. And there have been incipient attempts to historicise the exhibitions and to regard as discursive, the exhibitionary gesture and aesthetic; and they are in conversation with the global interest in the history of exhibi-

tions.23 The question that needs to be asked in the face of these initiatives pertains to method. Is the history of exhibition just a supplement of the history of art?24 Or is it another realm of inquiry altogether? With this privileging of the exhibitionary comes the intervention of the curatorial, and its exceptional talent to convene an intersubjective space and to form various responses from various constituencies. It is the curatorial that can dissipate the sedimentation of data in the archive of the art historical. It is also the curatorial that transforms the art historical in more idiosyncratic ways and is the project that is inclined to erode the tenacity of art historical knowledge in the atmosphere of engagement, institutional critique and activism, critical institutionality, speculation, space making, political action, refexive social research, and a range of intersubjectivities. Finally, it is through the curatorial that a contemporary subjectivity may be able to shape the art historical. Related to this predilection in the writing of art history is the production of art that tends to write art history itself as embodied in a “historiographical aesthetic” in which “the aesthetic purpose may be conjectured as examining the production of history,” including art history.25 The fourth tendency in the writing of art history in Southeast Asia is articulated through the archive, such as the Asia Art Archive and the Indonesian Visual Art Archive. The archive in this case has become a mutating apparatus: a repository of documentation, an exhibition platform, and a discourse generator through research, publication, and dissemination. As a place of accumulation, the archive is an enchanting forest of data, but by the very nature of its temperament to amass that underlies its political economy, its authority to programme the terms of the discussion and inability as yet to cut through the thickets of local discourse may actually fatten the history it collects in the guise of merely documenting it. And the last tendency is the writing of the history of art history in Southeast Asia, a kind

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of metacommentary on both methodology and material. T.K. Sabapathy has charted that history in Singapore by implicating the germinal texts The Art of Southeast Asia: Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Burma, Java, Bali by Philip Rawson and Art in Indonesia: Continuities and Change by Claire Holt. The former would proceed from the history of art; the latter from the polemics on culture, but both nevertheless would distend the term “art” into a transcultural and transhistorical category with only a shift in orientation—one of possession (of Southeast Asia), the other of location (in Indonesia). This device of the polemic, which in the 1970s refgured as a manifesto, is of interest because it introduces a particular diction and tenor of the crisis in art history as it converges with “aspirations towards the formation of new nations or states and at other times revolv[ing] around heightened claims of individuality and the self.”26 In light of these tendencies in the writing of art history in Southeast Asia, the succeeding initiations should cluster around the reconceptualisation of the region that is Southeast Asia. To think of the region or regionality is to think of the vaster world of which it is a vital part. In many ways, therefore, the region is a moment of a constant worlding, a “process geography” in the words of Arjun Appadurai who warns us of reducing places to stable characteristics or traits, “driven by conceptions of geographical, civilizational, and cultural coherence […] with more or less durable historical boundaries and with a unity composed of more or less enduring properties.” On the contrary, Appadurai looks at geographies in terms of “precipitates of various kinds of action, interaction, and motion—trade, travel, pilgrimage, warfare, proselytization, colonization, exile, and the like.” Moreover, according to him, “regions are best viewed as initial contexts for themes that generate variable geographies, rather than fxed geographies marked by pre-given themes.”27 Thus, Southeast Asia as a setting should be seen as a 18

level or a layer in the conception of a shifting geography and should not be made to overdetermine or colonise the domain of a region in the process of constant forming across different scales from river to street, from hemisphere to archipelago. There is a need to hold out this possibility because the prevailing imagination of Southeast Asia was forged by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations beginning in 1967, which was in cadence with a larger sequence of efforts to bind the region in some kind of defence and trade alliance. This is a restrictive geopolitical imaginary, one that must be transcended because the geopolitical is one thing; but the geopoetic, the mediation of the earth through the aesthetic and the aesthetically mediated initiations to gather, is another. A more refexive geopolitical and geopoetic rendering of Southeast Asia should be able to open up the region, or the problematic of the southeast, to other axes and coordinates, such as Southeast Europe, for instance, or South America. It could re-enter the sphere of the Pacifc and re-engage with Austronesian archaeology and the Silk Route past and present, and it could deepen the relational links to migrant communities across the world as well as intersections that lie beyond the compass of the nation-state or the inter-nation regional assemblage; the Sulu Zone comes to the fore as an instance.28 If one were to take the case of a national art history like Singapore’s and ventilate it, so to speak, it would be helpful to track the dispositions of the discipline, or the habits of its writers. In this volume, we can glean some symptoms of the struggle to write art history in Southeast Asia by way of Singapore. For certain, the spectre of historiography hovers at the outset; to critically refect on the intellectual history of the art-historical modality is an essential exercise. This becomes acute if seen in relation to the more popular, more mediagenic appraisals of art that preponderate in the art market or the leisure industry. What must be attended to is a rigorous conceptualisation of

Patrick D. Flores

26 T.K. Sabapathy, Road to Nowhere: The Quick Rise

28 James Francis Warren, The Sulu Zone, 1768–1898:

and the Long Fall of Art History in Singapore (Singapore: The Art Gallery, National Institute of Education, 2010), 3. 27 Arjun Appadurai, “Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination,” Public Culture 12, no. 1 (2000): 1–19.

The Dynamics of External Trade, Slavery, and Ethnicity in the Transformation of a Southeast Asian Maritime State (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2007). David Lloyd, “Representation’s Coup,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 16, no. 1 (2004): 1–29.

the “historical moment” so that the history of art, or its movement “through time,” becomes less vulnerable to the appropriation of the “latest.” From such a historiographic approach, the temptation to render time in terms of periods is diffcult to resist. But again, with a frm grasp of the historical moment, one does not merely “periodise,” to lapse into an infelicitous word; one rather, historicises the geography of art, which extends to diasporic formations. In this volume, we see Singaporean scholars grapple with the temporalities of the 19th century and the contemporary, with the thrill of origins/ beginnings and the bedeviling prospects of termination as referenced by the prefx “post.” It is uncanny, of course, that the 19th-century and the contemporary thicken and thin out in the face of the self-metabolic modern. In this context of interrogation, monographic excursions are charted. In this respect, the oeuvre of Lim Hak Tai and reprographic practice (cartoons, woodcut) are furnished ample realms in which to unfold. Deepening this surface are efforts to stake out the ground with problematics such as “gender” and the “global”—how to foreground it; how to undo it. Finally, the institutionalisation of art through the museum and art history is enfolded into the critique, subjecting it to equivalent reconsid-

29

eration. The challenge perhaps is not to tarry with the institutional critique but to rethink its governmentality so that its institutionality could become more redemptive. Otherwise, the threat of the Futurists to destroy all museums would become the only politics with a chance. In light of this, further work in Southeast Asia needs to be pursued still. And here are some aspirations: First, there is a necessity to surmount the idea of an alternative art history and try to create instead a conceptual space for an art-historical alterity, a deconstructed art history that is so radically different from a supposedly originary Western discipline that it does not only include the excluded, but shifts the parameters of what to exclude and where to begin the inclusion, which need not be in the postcolonial modern nation-state or through the aporetic process of decolonisation.29 The latter tends to inscribe alterity, or subalternity for that matter, in a national folklore (or the folklore of nation) and makes it legible through the tropes of authenticity, syncretism, or hybridity, thus foreclosing the possibility of a third moment beyond the native and the colonial. Here, the problematics of naming; the obligation to overinvest in the category of art to embrace even the archaeologi-

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30

31 32 33

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value,” in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen, 1987), 155. Appadurai, op. cit., 11. Darby English, How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2010). Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven: Yale University Press), 10–1.

cal and the ethnographic; and even the privileging of aesthetics as a supposedly transhistorical and transcultural term are foregrounded alongside the procedure of what Gayatri Spivak calls the “enablement” of a “violation” from which renegotiated techniques of inquiry may arise and which should at the same time reiterate that no “total undoing” could ever be realised.30 Second, it is imperative to build up a lexicon of inclinations, words and phrases emerging in Southeast Asia that reference extensive localities and vectors of region. The imagination of the national, the international, and the global has been suffciently mediated by diffcult, sometimes eccentric, words and phrases crafted and circulating in Southeast Asia, and several of these are catechetic, willfully or inadvertently straining language to the point of near error or errant signifcation, such as “developmental art,” “mystical reality,” “visible soul,” and “preter-national.” This disposition to spin words and let them unravel in practices is a full-bodied sign that the discursive context in the locality is dense, open to play and keen on urgency, and that its word makers are unafraid to both mix and master with the patience and the agency of a native and a migrant. 20

34 Remigio E. Agpalo, “Liwanag at Dilim: The Political

35

36 37

Philosophy of Emilio Jacinto,” in Third Lecture (Manila: University of Philippine Press, 1976), 8. Zeus A. Salazar, “Ang Kartilya ni Emilio Jacinto at ang Diwang Pilipino sa Agos ng Kasaysayan,” in Bagong Kasaysayan (Manila: Bakas, 1999), 90. Ibid., 91. Lloyd, op. cit., 12.

Third, essential is a kind of critical writing that resists the requirements and customs of Western academic writing in the social sciences and in the course of this experiment recover the animus of the material of the feld. Arjun Appadurai reframes the research imagination and revisits possible ways to generate knowledge without depending too much on a “prior citational world and an imagined world of specialized professional readers and researchers.” Appadurai fnds wisdom in the “virtuoso technique, the random fash, the generalist’s epiphany, and other private sources of confdence.”31 It is likewise important to avoid the capture of meaning and cognition, refuse the temptations of thematisation, and fnally restore the potency of the act of sensing and the activity of a mindful body. An art historian has likewise reminded us of the need to “frustrate perception” and instead foster the “elements of surprise and encounter that signify that a rearrangement of mind […] has occurred” in the sensible mediation of art.32 Crucial here is a kind of writing that is performative and ludic and takes liberties with orthodox syntax; it is generative and idiosyncratic and if English is appropriated as a medium, it is not smoothed

Patrick D. Flores

over. It is rather made to sound like a strained second or third language, prone to error and improvisation, made to enunciate a theoretical vernacular. Moreover, data should be engaged with critical theory and a theoretical imagination and constellate these data with ideas and speculations through a kinetic curatorial sensibility, or the instinct to gather persons and things in a “sudden vicinity” in the cogent words of Michel Foucault. It is only by taking up these challenges that art historians in Southeast Asia can become true interlocutors of the history of art who signifcantly threaten the narrative of art history and so cease to remain as native informants summoned from provincial art worlds to merely supplement the fantasy of an everrenewing modernity and its global permutations. In other words, this art history, aside from being resolute in its timeliness, could also be spiritedly untimely, that is, out of the time along which it has been made to decline or progress. In this tension between the timely and the untimely, art history may be able to survive what Geeta Kapur calls civilisational hubris on the one hand, and the crisis of representation, on the other; or the deconstructive and the dialectical; or the negation of the centric and the normative—and fnally risk the play of extensive local modes of sensing, quirky semantic formulations, and discrepant ways of being in and remaking the ways of the world in relation to the conditions of the new, the demands of the now, and the persuasions of the not-yet. In this matrix of art history, it is essential to grasp the instance of art as an affective interest within a historical and cognitive horizon, so that when taken as a repertoire it becomes a sensible responsibility that demands and deserves explanation. The art historian Michael Baxandall proposes that: “If we wish to explain pictures, in the sense of expounding them in terms of their historical causes, what we actually explain seems likely to be not the unme-

diated picture but the picture as considered under a partially interpretative description.”33 In Filipino, to explain is to shed light (magpaliwanag). The revolutionary and organic intellectual Emilio Jacinto had written a tract titled “Liwanag at Dilim” in which he distinguishes between what is likely an emanating light from within, on the one hand, and brilliance or sparkle on the surface, on the other. For him, the latter mediates and therefore is prone to misrecognition or tempts beholders to misrecognise. Because it is glare, it blinds and impairs vision (nakasisilaw at nakasisira sa paningin). Moreover, it is bent, distorted, deceitful (maraya), and so in a way, it can be compared with the apparatus of the ideological, or the force of doxa as contrasted to episteme.34 Liwanag for its part requires the “eye,” or a discriminating seeing (kinakailangan ng mata), to discern the total truth of things (upang mapagwari ang boong katunayan ng mga bagay bagay).35 Those who are lured and enchanted by the glitter are condemned to a life of grief and misery (hinagpis at dalita).36 Seemingness and representation, or “what at frst appears (or presents itself ) to sensation has to be subjected to refective analysis in order for an accurate comprehension to be had of relations whose apparent immediacy or self-evidence is deceptive.”37 Liwanag is an ethical substance, an armature rather than a carapace, a kind of truth that addresses an emergent lifeworld, spreading and scattering towards a climate, light in light, as it were, ever imminent: an alamat, the lore like the letter that always arrives and is actually the destination.

Parts of this paper were delivered as a keynote address titled “The Art-Historical World of Southeast Asia” for the conference Southeast Asia and Taiwan: Modernity and Postcolonial Manifestations in Visual Art, 21–22 November 2015, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Republic of China.

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1

2

3

Or maybe it was stillborn: while T.K. Sabapathy has written about the history of the discipline of art history in Singapore in the 1960s and 1970s (in Road to Nowhere: The Quick Rise and the Long Fall of Art History in Singapore (Singapore: Art Gallery, National Institute of Education, 2010)), one wonders whether such mourning is really melancholia (in Freud’s sense), and productive for the future of art history in Singapore. While C.J.W.-L. Wee’s bibliographic list (“Shortlist: Singapore,” for the Asia Art Archive, available at: http:// www.aaa.org.hk/Collection/Shortlists) is capacious and rigorous, one cannot tell the art-historical stakes. Whitney Davis, “Visuality and Pictoriality,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics no. 46 (Autumn 2004): 9–34;

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Jas Elsner & Katharina Lorenz, “The Genesis of Iconology,” Critical Inquiry 38, no. 3 (Spring 2012): 483–512. My essay is indebted to Nora A. Taylor, “Writing Contemporary Southeast Asian Art History,” in Southeast Asian Studies: Pacifc Perspectives, ed. Anthony Reid (Tempe, Arizona: Program for Southeast Asian Studies Monograph Series, Arizona State University, 2003), 179–92; Nora A. Taylor, “Introduction: Who Speaks for Southeast Asian Art?,” in Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art: An Anthology, eds. Nora A. Taylor & Boreth Ly (Ithaca Southeast Asia Program Publications, Cornell University, 2012), 1–13. Geeta Kapur, “When Was Modernism in Indian Art?,” in When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary

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When Was Modernism? A Historiography of Singapore Art Kevin Chua

It may not surprise anyone to know that art history, at least in Singapore, had neither a birth, nor really an afterlife.1 Its current incarnation has been chastened by easier, more accessible forms of art writing, whether the journalism that passes for art criticism, or the occasional screeds that pop up on social media—catchy, but quickly forgotten. Art writing in Singapore is often couched in the language of boosterism. One hears talk about the country “developing” in art: having more exhibitions, more spaces to display art, more hot young artists. Cue the next media darling! Dollar fgures are trotted out to justify the latest buying spree, as though market valuation were the only determinant of good art. Watch this brushstroke turn into that price point. Let me be clear that I have little confdence that art history can write against such 22

idle chatter. But in order for the discipline as it exists in Singapore to mean something, to matter, it needs to undergo rigorous selfexamination: What are its goals? What are “our” key texts?2 What constitutes the real work of art history? No doubt securing a work of art’s production and reception, as well as uncovering new objects and material evidence, should still be a fundamental task of art history. But I don’t think this is enough. Most art histories in Singapore tend to what I would call “historicist culturologies”: simple iconographical and sociocultural unravellings of a work of art within a given place and time. Yet these rarely attain what Erwin Panofsky once called “iconology”: a total understanding of a work of art in its context, including an unpacking of the cultural or collective unconscious triggered by the work.3 Art-historical writing often pays

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Cultural Practice in India (New Delhi: Tulika, 2000), 295–324; Raymond Williams, “When Was Modernism?,” New Left Review I, no. 175 (May/June 1989): 48–52. More than simply saying that modernity was “incomplete,” Kapur plumbs the specifc uptake of modernism in India. On my use of the “1300s” as a period starting point, see Leonard Y. Andaya & Barbara Watson Andaya, “Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Period; TwentyFive Years on,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 26, no. 1 (1995): 92–8. I am using this “early modern” periodisation to decentre the conventional privileging of the 19 th century in the (art) histories of Singapore. Though no art-historical writing exists for this 1300s– 1890s period, one might juxtapose artworks with vari-

insuffcient attention to form; works of art are too quickly explained—or worse, decoded. A familiar assumption is the complete translatability of image to word. Art historians and critics often struggle to catch up to what many artists already know: that investing in form introduces a time depth into the work, and can secure a work’s passage through historical time. What follows is a selective history of arthistorical writing in Singapore—a historiography—via three broad periods.4 Each poses the enduring question of modernism. If spatially situating modernism in Singapore entails assessing it within its regional context of Southeast Asia (or Asia), equally important is a consideration of temporality: How did modernism emerge out of a long span of historical time? (Modernism is treated here as both an effect of modernity, and a cultural response to it.) The challenge, as I see it, is not so much to move from national to regional-global accounts, but to decentre the national within the regionalglobal. Taking into account a spatially enclosing “what,” I will simultaneously try to grasp modernism’s time-trickling “when” (my title echoes Geeta Kapur, but also Raymond Williams).5 The 1300s–1890s, 1920s–1960s and 1970s– 2000s were, as we shall see, three moments of

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8

ous forms of indigenous writing, such as inscriptions, stories, myths, and in the 19 th century, European travel writing. The intra-regional artistic networks that Nora A. Taylor discusses (in “Art without History? Southeast Asian Artists and their Communities in the Face of Geography,” Art Journal 70, no. 2 (2011): 6–23) hark back, I think, to this early modern period in Southeast Asia. European colonialism, in other words, tended to disenable these intra-regional networks. Wong Hong Suen, “Picturing a Colonial Port City: Prints and Paintings as Visual Records of 19 th Century Singapore,” in Singapore through 19 th Century Prints & Paintings (Singapore: Editions Didier Millet & National Museum of Singapore, 2010), 30–53. Wong, ibid., 32.

modernism in Singapore: three moments in the defeat of labour and the rise of capital. 1) 1300s to 1890s 6 National Museum of Singapore curator Wong Hong Suen’s chapter “Picturing a Colonial Port City: Prints and Paintings as Visual Records of 19th Century Singapore,” in the book Singapore through 19 th Century Prints and Paintings, published in 2010, is a recent treatment of 19thcentury art in Singapore.7 An example of strong, rigorous scholarship, the essay is well-researched, and thorough with regard to the existing historiography on 19th-century landscape painting. These prints, produced by British and European artists travelling in the Malayan region and intended for consumption back home in Europe, employed the representational genre of the picturesque. While Wong is familiar with the critique of the picturesque—indeed, many of her discussions of particular prints are informed by that critique—more could have been made of why the picturesque was critiqued in the frst place, as ideology, by Marxist historians and art historians such as Raymond Williams, John Barrell, David Solkin and Ann Bermingham in the 1970s and 1980s.8 In its

When Was Modernism?

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Enclosure was the removal of land from the commons, the putting of territory into private hands, which took place in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries. See, for instance, J.M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure, and Social Change in England, 1700–1820, reprint edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Wong, op. cit., 37. “The 1823 sketch of Singapore from the sea by Jackson [...] obscured the Temenggong’s community in visual space—the impression of a few houses lying close to a beach with nothing beyond the space leading to the slope of the hill is inaccurate. The drawing conceals the fact that a large part of the area between High Street and the coconut palms on the left was occupied by the Temenggong and his followers, a

group which comprised more than 600 people living in 79 huts.” Wong, ibid., 41. 12 “It does not appear to me that the infuence of the native chiefs has in any respect been necessary or even benefcial in the formation, maintenance, or progress of this settlement, the prosperity of which has rested solely and exclusively on the character and resources of the British government.” Crawfurd to Governor General, 10 January 1824; quoted in Carl A. Trocki, Prince of Pirates: The Temenggongs and the Development of Johor and Singapore 1784–1885 (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1979), 55. 13 Ibid. 14 For sovereignty, see Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press,

call for visually pleasing landscapes, the picturesque was, in fact, an ordering of nature. It was an assertion of human agency and control. A long history preceded the picturesque, designated by the term “enclosure.”9 Such picturesque imagery had therefore a class politics, and acquired a colonial politics when brought to Southeast Asia. Many of these scenes were only superfcially interested in place, and were addressed to a European audience. It comes as no surprise that these images were often read in terms of boosterist, pro-business ideology: they were made, after all, for the commercial class in Britain who were interested in coming to the colonies to, literally, set up shop. Challenging that gaze was not part of their agenda. Though Wong is often strong on the politics of early 19th-century imagery (for example, her discussions of prints of Government Hill, presently known as Fort Canning Hill), one wonders whether her readings are decentred enough with regard to the history of Singapore.10 Take her discussion of Lieutenant Philip Jackson’s 5 June 1823 sketch of the Singapore coastline (fg. 1.1).11 1823 was the very year the Temenggong was forced out of Singapore town, and made to move to Telok

Belanga. When the new Resident, John Crawfurd, claimed that the native chiefs had contributed nothing to the success of Singapore, this was patently ideological, a forgetting that necessarily preceded the actual displacement of the Malays.12 Only two days after Jackson’s sketch, on 7 June 1823, another treaty was signed with the British. The chiefs gave up their rights to port duties and their share in the revenue farms—essentially giving up their authority over Singapore island. (Another treaty between the British, the Sultan and the Temenggong on 3 August 1824 gave full cession of Singapore and the adjacent islands to the East India Company in exchange for a cash settlement, while the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824, which entailed Dutch recognition of the British settlement in Singapore, made the British even less dependent on the native chiefs.13) It is uncertain whether what we are looking at, in Jackson’s drawing—the distance or “gap” between the Temenggong’s estate, below, and the smaller group of houses on Fort Canning Hill, above—is a mere visual separation (Wong says that distance is “inaccurate”), or, more deeply, an aporia that calls for a decision in order for Singapore to be founded. (Sovereignty, put

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Kevin Chua

2010) and Jens Bartelson, “On the Indivisibility of Sovereignty,” Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts no. 2 (1 June 2011): 85–94. Recent historical writing on Singapore has allowed a revaluation of art and visual-cultural history: see Derek Heng, “Situating Temasik within the Larger Regional Context: Maritime Asia and Malay State Formation in the Pre-Modern Era,” in Singapore in Global History, eds. Derek Heng & Syed Muhd Khairudin Aljunied (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011), 27–50; Derek Heng, “Casting Singapore’s History in the Longue Durée,” in Singapore from Temasek to the 21st Century: Reinventing the Global City, eds. Karl Hack, Jean-Louis Margolin, with Karine Delaye (Singapore: NUS Press, 2010), 27–50; Kwa Chong Guan, “From

Temasek to Singapore: Locating a Global City-State in the Cycles of Melaka Straits History,” in Early Singapore 1300s–1819: Evidence in Maps, Text and Artefacts, eds. John N. Miksic & Cheryl-Ann Low Mei Gek (Singapore: Singapore History Museum, 2004), 124–46. 16 See O.W. Wolters, “Southeast Asia as a Southeast Asian Field of Study,” Indonesia 58 (October 1994): 1–17; Barbara Watson Andaya, “Historicising ‘Modernity’ in Southeast Asia,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 40, no. 4 (1997): 391–409. 17 On Raffes’ reading of Malay history, see Christina Skott, “Imagined Centrality: Sir Stamford Raffes and the Birth of Modern Singapore,” in Singapore from Temasek to the 21st Century, 155–84. 18 Wong, op. cit., 42.

simply, needs to be performed.14) Such an aporia needs to be fgured or represented. Intrinsic to the British tabula rasa imagination was the forgetting and erasure of the long history of Malays in the region. Long a powerful self-governed maritime state that was able to control trade in the region, they had only recently been eclipsed by the Bugis, Dutch and British in the 1760s. Such a forgetting also took place against the broader strategic penetration of the British into Southeast Asia—culture was entwined with politics. Acknowledging this longer history decentres the conventional history of the founding of Singapore in 1819, which tends to stress the country’s necessity, rather than contingency, and tends to privilege British agency and autonomy in their ability to turn the island into a successful port and trading centre.15 A 19th-century viewer might have considered the observational freshness in Jackson’s sketch and many other picturesque scenes new, which ties into a feeling of the “modern.” But we need to heed O.W. Wolters and Barbara Andaya’s point that Southeast Asia had long been modern, in the sense of people in the region adopting and adapting to new cultural-technological forms and techniques. In many parts of

the region, long before the European advance in the 17th through 19th centuries, there was an interest in being up to date, with an emphasis on the present, the now.16 The forgetting “in” the image, I argue, mobilised by a 19th-century viewer, was tied to the British attempt to claim the centre—of Singapore, in Southeast Asia. Such a centrality did not pre-exist—it needed to be imagined, performed.17 And one effect of that performative view was to locate newness and modernity as belonging exclusively to the West. The Jackson sketch may be called “modernist,” if we understand modernism in the early modern period as tied to a disruption of alienating perspectival realism. Jackson may have been replicating a British colonialist gaze, but his drawing unravels the more one looks at it. Wong persuasively argues that the picturesque became internalised from the mid-19th century onward.18 But I would argue that this internalisation was not just a change in representational form; it was also an effect of a shift in capital. The opening of the Suez Canal and increased use of steam shipping from the 1860s, and the greater intervention into the Malay states from the 1870s (for the intensi-

15

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19 Ibid. 20 Wong’s remark that many of these pictures “left out

21 22

dissonant elements”—in other words, politics—is, I think, only partly true. Ibid., 50. Reproduced in ibid; see fg. 1.2. For “amok,” see “Amok,” The British Medical Journal 1, no. 2112 (1901): 1569–70; John C. Spores, Running Amok: An Historical Inquiry, Monographs in International Studies, Southeast Asia Studies, no. 82 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1988). A similar phenomenon is the refex gesture called “latah,” common to Malays. For latah, see Ambrose B. Rathbone, Camping and Tramping in Malaya (Oxford: John Beaufoy Publishing, 2011), 36; John D. Gimlette, “Remarks on the Etiology, Symptoms, and Treatment of Latah, with a Report of

fed extraction of primary products like tin) increased the fow of goods and people into the colony, and changed the very nature—the very basis—of representation. Concomitant with this internalisation of the picturesque in the last four decades of the 19th century was, as Wong points out, a greater exclusion of racial others, both in society and in representation (native residences, for instance, were newly described as “slums”). These views, she justifably says, “precluded any engagement with this population.”19 Yet, I would argue, there continued to be encounters with the native population in the second half of the 19th century. It is, rather, the nature of the encounter that changed.20 Though locals are shown doing manual labour in many of these images, there are also subtler or obscure instances of contact: for example, the print reproduced in the book has one vignette showing a Malay man moving forward hysterically, a kris in each hand (fg. 1.2).21 The caption for the vignette reads “Running amok.” “Amok” has a complicated history in Southeast Asia; European colonisers misrecognised a condition that was intrinsically religious and could not be tamed by their medical-anthropological categories.22 Such ineffable phenomena had an ability to unsettle and undermine the colonial 26

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Two Cases,” The British Medical Journal 2, no. 1912 (1897): 455–7; Robert Winzeler, “The Study of Malayan Latah,” Indonesia no. 37 (April 1984): 77–104. Similar to the “Running Amok” print in its precarious content is Heinrich Leutemann’s Unterbrochene Straßenmessung auf Singapore (Interrupted Road Surveying in Singapore). Though Wong dates this print to 1835, it was likely made substantially later. Leipzig-born artist and book illustrator Leutemann lived between 1824 and 1905, and it is unlikely that he did the drawing for the print when he was 11 years old. Though Coleman was attacked by a tiger in 1835, the print, I would argue, belongs to the late-19 th century—probably after John Cameron’s description of the event in 1865. It is from the 1860s that such a

artist-viewer. These images may quite possibly be the strongest instances of the refusal of Western epistemology we have. (There is something precarious about the vertically upright man in the image, as though on the verge of falling to the horizontal.)23 It comes as no surprise when the one “modernist” writer we do have from the period, Joseph Conrad, centred his Southeast Asian stories on such moments of radical unknowing (suicide, betrayal, trauma). If the word “folly” in the title of Conrad’s frst major book, Almayer’s Folly (written between 1889–1894), refers, on one level, to the Dutch trader Almayer’s extravagant house—a playful mistake—the French derivation of the word, “folie,” suggests something deeper—madness, a condition that Almayer sunk into once his daughter, Nina, departed.24 The 1890s, when Conrad was writing his frst stories, was a crucial decade in the history of colonial capitalism.25 Again, think of capital as conditioning representation. To focus on the post-production afterlife or reception of a picturesque print or painting, as Wong does, does not adequately address the contingencies of history. We should instead ask: why did this particular work appear when it did, and not at another time?

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consciousness of the Other—an existential anxiety of something outside that is in fact something within—became possible. For more on the print, see my essay, “The Tiger and the Theodolite: George Coleman’s Dream of Extinction,” FOCAS: Forum on Contemporary Art & Society 6 (August 2007): 124–49. 24 Ian Watt, “Almayer’s Folly: Introduction,” in Essays on Conrad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 57. For Conrad and Southeast Asia, see James Warren, “Joseph Conrad’s Fiction as Southeast Asian History: Trade and Politics in East Borneo in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Pirates, Prostitutes and Pullers: Explorations in the Ethno- and Social History of Southeast Asia (Crawley, Western Australia: University of Western Australia Press, 2008), 33–46.

25 “[D]uring the 1890s the business of empire, once

2) 1920s to 1960s

that it did indeed have art, as well as a long cultural tradition, one senses a last-gasp desperation and anxiety. 1963 saw the beginnings of a political merger between Singapore and Malaya (along with Sarawak and North Borneo) which, as it turned out, would only last for two years. The two countries would split in 1965. Of course Hsu, along with so many of his generation, had no idea that that union would not, maybe could not, last, and maybe the trick to reading Hsu’s book is to peer through the art, to detect the burgeoning cracks and fssures in the bedrock of society. National University of Singapore Museum curator Chang Yueh Siang has pointed out that Hsu seems to have gotten the idea of a “cultural desert” from the generalised public discourse of his time, specifcally a series of newspaper articles published in 1949 that questioned the existence of culture in Singapore. Hsu changed his mind between the 1930s and 1960s with regard to the value of art in the Malayan region.27 Early on he had believed that Singapore was a place that was only good for trade, but gradually he gained a greater understanding of the art and culture in the region, and wrote books on Malay culture as well. Hsu’s affrmative answer to the question of a “cultural desert” in Singapore isn’t satisfy-

One seminal piece of art writing produced between the 1920s and 1960s—a period often thought of as the beginning of modern art in Singapore—is Marco Hsu’s A Brief History of Malayan Art. Initially published as a series of articles for the Nanfang Evening Post between 1961 and 1963, Hsu’s writing was compiled into a book in Chinese in 1963, and translated into English in 1999 by architectural historian Lai Chee Kien.26 Hsu was perhaps doing the frst real history of art in Singapore and Malaysia: the region then known as “Malaya.” I admit to being a little bit unimpressed when I frst read the English translation around 2000: it seemed like a familiar story of racial harmony in Singapore, only told through the arts. But the book became interesting to me, several years later, when I realised that beneath the surface story of racial harmony lay a more complicated narrative of internecine political struggle, racial antagonism and anti-colonial sentiment. There is notably no mention of the student activism of the 1950s that informed so many paintings of the Equator Art Society; Hsu might have had to repress a lot of these tensions. When Hsu argued that Malaya was not a “cultural desert,”

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an adventurous and often individualistic enterprise, had become the empire of business.” Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 23. Marco Hsu, A Brief History of Malayan Art, trans. Lai Chee Kien (Singapore: Millenium Books, 1999). Marco Hsu (or Ma Ge in Chinese) was the pseudonym of Koh Cheng Foo. See Ma Ge, Malai Xiya jianshi (Singapore: Nanyang chuban youxian gongsi, 1963). Between Here and Nanyang: Marco Hsu’s Brief History of Malayan Art, an exhibition held at the National University of Singapore Museum, Singapore, 21 August 2013–3 September 2016, curated by Chang Yueh Siang and Lai Chee Kien.

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28

See also Karl Hack, “The Malayan Trajectory in Singapore’s History,” in Singapore from Temasek to the 21st Century, 243–91. 29 Hsu, op. cit., 63. 30 On the post-1950s differences between Singapore and Malaysia, see Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh’s excellent travel history Floating on a Malayan Breeze: Travels in Malaysia and Singapore (Singapore: NUS Press, 2012). 31 In Eye of the Beholder: Reception, Audience, and Practice of Modern Asian Art, eds. John Clark, Maurizio Peleggi & T.K. Sabapathy (Sydney: Wild Peony, 2006), 72–93. The published essay was a developed version of a paper presented at the Our Modernities: Positioning Asian Art Now conference, organised by the Asia Research Institute and the History Department of the National University of Singapore, held

ing, as the term contains a colonialist tabula rasa understanding of history that rhetorically erases the already established culture and history on the island, and compares only by way of further normalising the standard of Western art and culture. The East–West comparison was stacked in the West’s favour to begin with. This is why the appearance of the word “Malaya” in Hsu’s text is loaded—for it tracks a more contradictory relation to place. If, in his early writing, Hsu had referred to the geographical region as “Nanyang,” by the early 1960s, he began to use the word “Malaya.” This coincided with a broad shift in the orientation of the cultural group that identifed with the name “Nanyang”: if the earlier Nanyang was more Chinese-oriented (with most of these immigrant Chinese still yearning for home); by the 1940s, the Nanyang became more multicultural (after 1949, there was a greater sense of being cut off from then-Communist China). By 1955–1956, there was a general use of the word “Malaya” in newspapers, with the word “Malayanisation” even being used as a verb. In the late 1950s, “Malaya” was promoted—one could say co-opted—by the colonial authorities as the cultural corollary of political merger.28 28

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at the Asian Civilizations Museum in Singapore on 19–22 February 2004. T.K. Sabapathy, “The Nanyang Artists: Some General Remarks,” in Pameran Retrospektif Pelukis-Pelukis Nanyang (Kuala Lumpur: Muzium Seni Negara, 1979), 44–5. Art historians have pointed out that the methodological complexities of that frst and second generation of practitioners of form, style, and iconography in Europe and America (which began with Aloïs Riegl and was extended by several Vienna School art historians) did not always extend to their successors. See Whitney Davis, A General Theory of Visual Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). T.K. Sabapathy, “Bali, Almost Re-Visited,” in Reminiscence of Singapore’s Pioneer Art Masters, exh. cat.

So the stakes of the word are high. There are moments when the word “Malaya” sits uneasily within Hsu’s text. In chapter ten, for example, he opens an early paragraph with the declarative “Malaya has no painting traditions.”29 Given the sentences that follow, he seems to have meant “Malay races,” but somehow uses the more encompassing geographical term (the Chinese term he uses is for Malaya, and this can clearly be distinguished from the Chinese word for Malay races, which he uses elsewhere in the text). The elision here is telling: the push toward cultural unity literally occludes the Malay races. Think back to the 19th-century British colonial forgetting of the Malay. The contradiction would bedevil both Singapore and Malaysia in the decades to come.30 My 2004–2006 essay “Painting the Nanyang’s Public: Notes toward a Reassessment” was an attempt to resituate Nanyang painting with regard to the problem of “Malaya,” as both cultural idea and political reality.31 The “Malayan” was something that had been mostly forgotten, but I would argue had been repressed, in the decades of economic growth and cultural nationalism in Singapore between the late 1960s and 1990s. It was left implicit

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(Singapore: The Singapore Mint, 1994), unpaginated. Such formalism continues, e.g.: “The common thread that runs through all the artworks commonly referred to as ‘Nanyang Style’ is actually the eclectic approach of mixing and matching different techniques, media, compositional formats or modes of representation within a single painting, coupled with the use of local subject matter.” Emelia Ong, “The Nanyang Artists: Eclectic Expressions of the South Seas,” in Imagining Identities: Narratives in Malaysian Art, Volume 1, eds. Nur Hanim Khairuddin & Beverly Yong, with T.K. Sabapathy (Kuala Lumpur: RogueArt, 2012), 64. For me, it is the lack of synthesis, the incompletion and “unstudiedness” of these paintings that is compelling. There seems, in Ong, an anxiety to defne the Nanyang style—as though pinning it down was the problem. A

simple notion of pluralism operates here that shuns any kind of defnition. 36 For the “New International Division of Labour,” see Garry Rodan, The Political Economy of Singapore’s Industrialisation: National, State, and International Capital (London: Palgrave Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989). 37 I drew from the writings of T.J. Clark, who was a product of the Marxist New Left, formed out of the ruins of the political struggle of 1968 in Europe and America. Instead of orthodox Marxism’s view of culture as secondary to politics and economics—i.e. culture as the superstructure to the base of economics—the New Left thought of culture as primary, and drew from the rich theoretical well of fgures such as Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School.

in art historian T.K. Sabapathy’s writing, even though he had lived through the period. Here is Sabapathy, writing in the catalogue for the seminal exhibition Pameran Retrospektif PelukisPelukis Nanyang (1979):

and iconography that was being disseminated in Euro-American universities in the 1950s and 1960s.33 Reading Sabapathy’s writing of the 1980s and 1990s, one feels like he was simply taking these Nanyang paintings at face value, or taking these artists—many of whom he had interviewed—at their word.34 Though there was generous praise of their art, there was very little attempt to read the paintings apart from the artists’ own manifest discourse on them. If the Nanyang artists had a “clearly defned ideology” and were in fight from politics, Sabapathy’s methodological formalism did not call them out for it. To me, in 2004, these paintings needed to be wrested from their formalist (pastoral) seclusion—all that nonsense about Bali being a “paradise”—and read in the light of the social throng, the din and buzz of the city.35 Sabapathy’s take on Nanyang painting, to be fair, was perhaps the narrative we needed to believe in the 1980s and 1990s, when Singapore moved into a New International Division of Labour, a global economic and political system that emphasised capital over labour.36 My essay tried to reconnect the painting to its social world via the methodology of dialectical Marxism.37 Instead of stylistic develop-

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In addition to proposing an attitude towards art activity that readily identifed it as being modern, the School of Paris provided for the Nanyang artists a variety of pictorial schemas in which the obligations of traditional iconography were either minimised or neutralised by formal and technical considerations. The absence of such an iconography released the need to root the art object in a clearly defned ideology or value system. Consequently, artists were free to select from the available schemas features which were suitable to their own aspirations, without having to adopt any supporting ideology. The selection was governed primarily by formal (stylistic) requirements.32 (emphasis mine) The formalism here may belong less to the painting, than to Sabapathy’s methodology itself, one rooted in an understanding of style

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38 My essay was not without mistakes. For instance, the bourgeoisie “[moving] out into the suburbs” was vague (Chua, op. cit., 80.). The squatter problem has since been thoroughly analysed by Loh Kah Seng, Squatters into Citizens: The 1961 Bukit Ho Swee Fire and the Making of Modern Singapore (Singapore: NUS Press, 2013). 39 Loh Kah Seng et al., The University Socialist Club and the Contest for Malaya: Tangled Strands of Modernity (Singapore: NUS Press, 2012). See also T.N. Harper, The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 40 Despite some solid new research on the 1950s

ment, I was interested in the specifc trajectories of art, their rise and fall, and how social contradiction became manifest “in” aesthetic form. Form was tracked alongside certain developments that were taking place in the modern city (the crisis in housing, the building of the frst skyscraper, etc.).38 Modernism, it seemed to me, grew out of modernity, forming some kind of resistance against it. The best paintings of the period—Cheong Soo Pieng’s Malayan Life (1957), Chua Mia Tee’s National Language Class (1959), among a few others—were, I felt, in tense contradiction. What continues to be so interesting about National Language Class, to me, is the way its tensions and contradictions are left unresolved. In the painting, the cross-race, cross-class political idea—or better, dream—of Malaya was still alive. We can see the dream quite literally in the pastoral painting on the wall in the background—which recalls the more prosaic “dreams” of the Bali group of artists. It is as though the second generation had worked through the alienation of the frst, and made the dream more tangible and real—but simultaneously precious and delicate, prone to rupture and collapse. Hence my notion of “failure,” which was both aesthetic and political, and was pitted against a bourgeois understand30

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exhibitions of the Equator Art Society group, Seng Yu Jin’s exhibition From Words to Pictures: Art during the Emergency (Singapore Art Museum, 2007) tended to paint the artworks on display with a broad political brush. The problem of aesthetic form dropped out of the picture. Patrick D. Flores, in his Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (Singapore: NUS Museum, 2008), made the valuable point that sometimes exhibitions do contribute to art history. I would say that the Between Here and Nanyang exhibition at the NUS Museum was one such art-historically important exhibition. My discussion of the works in this exhibition draws from Chang and Lai’s research.

ing of art. Chua seems to have been burned: after the late-1950s, his painting—so stellar at the outset—quickly descended into a morass of saccharine depictions of the Singapore River. To see “failure” in a painting by Cheong (say, Malayan Life) is perhaps to push it a bit too far, forcing it—but this was still, I think, a legitimate move. In the interstices of the essay was the understanding that modernism always meant revolution. Historians such as Loh Kah Seng and T.N. Harper have also uncovered a short-lived Malayan moment, a diversity of social and political possibilities, which became narrowed as the option of merger was put on the table.39 Art-historical writing of this period needs to work away from the double trap that 1940s– 1950s Nanyang painting was free from ideology and that the work of the Equator Art Society was fully ideological.40 Ideology should be treated as enabling, yet not necessarily all-encompassing. The key is not to presume that aesthetic autonomy will always result in ideological rigidifcation. In this light, one recent exhibition that opened up the art of this Nanyang period was the 2013–2016 NUS Museum exhibition Between Here and Nanyang.41 (To my mind, the second version of

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42

43

Yao Souchou, “Books from Heaven: Literary Pleasure, Chinese Cultural Text and the ‘Struggle against Forgetting,’” Australian Journal of Anthropology 8, no. 2 (1997): 204–5. Sunil S. Amrith, “Internationalism and Political Pluralism in Singapore, 1950–1963,” in Paths Not Taken: Political Pluralism in Post-War Singapore, eds. Michael D. Barr & Carl A. Trocki (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2008), 37–57. “The Singapore state has tried particularly hard to forget the paths not taken of the 1950s, investing much into ‘naturalising’ the offcial story. A good part of this effort depended on crushing the ‘subversive’ sense of vernacular cosmopolitanism [...], in favour of a man-

the exhibition in 2015 was especially laudable, because it gave the paintings room to breathe.) One excellent comparison had Lai Kui Fang’s War and Peace (1959, fg. 1.3) hung across from another very similar still life by him, Still Life (1959), on an opposite wall. At frst, the former painting, hung next to Nanyang paintings of Bali, came across as “apolitical,” while the latter, hung alongside other Equator Art Society works, looked “political.” But, more than simply showcasing the diversity of work by Equator Art Society members, the comparison problematised the politics of interpreting painting of this period as such. One could certainly read War and Peace in a political light: the date “1 January 1959,” on the depicted calendar, may have referred to a new, perhaps more hopeful, year in the Malayan “Emergency” (for the Malayan Communist Party, a war of liberation). Or one could read it apolitically or formally, as a mere painting exercise: Lai remarked how the props used for this work were circulated in a number of other paintings. No doubt such a polyvalent work would have been attractive for members of the Society, many of whom were under governmental surveillance in the 1950s. Were these paintings aimed at the general public, or at those who were on

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aged, state-directed production of ‘multiculturalism.’” (Ibid., 51.) Cheo Chai-Hiang Thoughts and Processes: Rethinking the Singapore River, eds. T.K. Sabapathy & Cecily Briggs (Singapore: Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts & Singapore Art Museum, 2000); Ho Tzu Nyen, 4 x 4 Episodes of Singapore Art (video, 2005); Russell Storer, “Making Space: Historical Contexts of Contemporary Art in Singapore,” in Contemporary Art in Singapore, eds. Gunalan Nadarajan, Russell Storer & Eugene Tan (Singapore: Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, Lasalle-SIA College of the Arts, 2007), 9–18.

the “right” side of history? The Tolstoy reference may have resonated with the vernacular cosmopolitanism prevalent in Singapore and Malaya after the Asian-African conference in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955. Chinese high school students were avidly reading works of Russian literature.42 Reading Lai’s painting in this light decentres the conventional, national interpretation, towards a consideration of the work within a broader relational feld of political actors in Southeast Asia.43 The strength of the exhibition lay in the way the viewer was allowed to test these interpretations, as a means of accessing—or better, inhabiting—history. I would say that contesting the interpretation of these paintings keeps the question of the politics of Nanyang and Equator art alive. Let “modernism” remain as a barely uttered, fugitive demand. 3) 1970s to 2000s Art history in Singapore, as it turns out, may have been built on a tangle of myth. One instance is the reception of Cheo Chai-Hiang’s 5′ x 5′ (Singapore River) (1972). Since 2005, if not slightly earlier, the work has been held up as the origin of contemporary art in Singapore.44

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Yet recent research by curator Seng Yu Jin has shown how the reception of that artwork— Cheo famously submitted the work, from England, as an entry into an exhibition organised by the Modern Art Society in Singapore, and was rejected—was in fact more complicated.45 In fact, Cheo’s submission was never really rejected; Seng thinks it was ultimately an administrative error. But a lingering question is why we needed that myth of rejection in the frst place. For several years, Cheo became our Duchamp (recall the brouhaha surrounding his Fountain [1917]). It is as though, to get its art history going, Singapore needed to call up these mirrors of Western modern and contemporary art.46 One recent essay that mentions 5′ x 5′ is Sabapathy’s catalogue essay for the exhibition Intersecting Histories: Contemporary Turns in Southeast Asian Art, held at the School of Art, Design and Media Gallery at the Nanyang Technological University in 2012.47 Sabapathy’s argument, at least for the section on Cheo, is that “the modern, the contemporary, and the seventies may be nudged into forming historically infected intersections.”48 An incontrovertible statement, as it is. But when, taking up Cheo’s call to artists and the public to actively deal with and give shape to their times, he writes that the artworks that were to be produced “may no longer be embalmed by purely aesthetic values but had to resonate with living experience,” we get a sense of the limitations of his approach.49 Cheo’s proposal was laudable for wanting to break free from the conservatism of so much of modern art then being produced in Singapore, but when the art historian simply repeats the artist’s statement, it becomes a token heteronomy. Heteronomy refers to the blurring of art and life—a move made by many contemporary artists after what was perceived as the dead end of modernism.50 But heteronomy is never total; art never fully blurs with life. The blurring of art and life has become an empty utopianism of contemporary art. Cheo’s 32

artwork, read via his manifesto-like statements, should be treated as aiming for, but not necessarily reaching, heteronomy (as Adorno knew, there is a necessary opacity at the heart of society). How do we write of an artwork’s unpredictable contact with its public, instead of assuming an easy relation between artistic intention and reception? Heteronomy more properly grasps an artwork’s non-relation with the social world; it is the obverse of autonomy. Another way of putting this is that Sabapathy’s writing stays within the acceptable boundaries of the art world, within art discourse. So even as the essay claims some larger social and political purpose for the art that he discusses, methodologically, this art historian’s approach ironically closes itself off from the world. An instructive counter to Sabapathy’s essay is Lee Weng Choy’s “Coincidence and Relation: Art Criticism and Heartbreak” (2006).51 Normally Lee’s writing gets slotted under “art criticism” rather than “art history”—which is unfortunate. Art criticism and art history are necessary siblings; one cannot exist without the other. “Good” art history always has a component of art criticism, and the most compelling art criticism gains historical value and specifcity from careful attention to visual particulars. In Lee’s case, specifcity comes through the regard, the gaze, the address to, not about, a work of art. He begins with an analogy between art criticism and falling in love, but instead of the expected idea of “falling in love with a work of art”—mere subjective taste, one could say— Lee does something altogether more interesting, that hinges on unpredictability and contingency: “A declaration is made in the absence of a relation. The actual relationship is entirely a matter of coincidence—or, some might say, of chance, of luck.”52 Similarly, the judgment of a work of art is based on risk. What follows is a meandering, one might say digressive, discussion of Richard Linklater’s flm Before Sunset (2004), and the third part of Ho Tzu Nyen’s 4 x 4 Episodes of Singapore Art (broadcast on the

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45 Seng Yu Jin, “Rejection-Proof: Contestations of the ‘New’ in the Modern Art Society Exhibition of 1972,” in Modern Art Society Singapore 50 th Anniversary, ed. Lim Choon Jin (Singapore: Modern Art Society Singapore, 2014), 36–45. This builds on an earlier essay: Seng Yu Jin, “Re-Reading the Rejected: Contestations of the ‘New’ in the Modern Art Society Exhibition of 1972,” in Iconoclast Series: Cheo Chai Hiang, 5′ x 5′ (Singapore River) (1972) (Singapore: Sculpture Square, 2013), 12–23. 46 I do not think that the work’s non-rejection takes away from Cheo’s achievement; 5′ x 5′ has a formal and conceptual complexity that will ensure its survival. As Louis Ho has well written (in “Voids, Riverine and Otherwise,” in Iconoclast Series: Cheo Chai Hiang, 5′ x 5′ (Singapore River) (1972) (Singapore: Sculpture Square, 2013), 4–11), more than a simple undermining of a tradition of paintings of the Singapore River, the work is about uncertainty, alienation and loss. Instead of a naïve tabula rasa forgetting, Cheo was remembering a more tangled history of Singapore in and through the work.

television channel, Arts Central, in Singapore in 2005). And yet the essay’s very digressiveness is, paradoxically, its strength. Of course the heart of Ho’s flm, Tang Da Wu’s (non-)contact with the President of Singapore at an art opening, bears on this point, of Lee’s Lacanian call to “not give up on one’s desires.” “Episode three,” Lee concludes, “while ostensibly a documentary on art, is less about an artwork than a performance of regard, a speaking to art, both in the singular (Tang’s work) and in the universal, to Art with the capital A. [...] What Ho teaches me is how the tension, the seductive interplay between irony and sincerity is central to the declaration of love [...]. One cannot say everything, one cannot be entirely sincere and sometimes the best use of irony is, paradoxically, not as a means of protecting oneself, of distancing, of undermining the full presence of an encounter, but of maintaining and making possible a

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T.K. Sabapathy, “Intersecting Histories: Thoughts on the Contemporary and History in Southeast Asian Art,” in Intersecting Histories: Contemporary Turns in Southeast Asian Art (Singapore: School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University, 2012), 36–82. 48 Ibid., 39. 49 Ibid., 37. 50 For a similar use of “heteronomy,” see Claire Bishop, Artifcial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London and New York: Verso, 2012), 27. 51 In Broadsheet 35, no. 1 (2006): 36–41. 52 Ibid., 36. 53 Ibid., 41. 54 Space does not permit me to discuss another excellent example of specifcity in writing: Ho Rui An’s “Making Live Again: Between Josef Ng’s Brother Cane (1994) and Loo Zihan’s Cane (2012),” in Archiving Cane (Singapore: The Substation, 2012), 73–85. The essay is a good example of what a non-linear visualcultural or art history might be.

greater intimacy.”53 For my purposes, Lee’s essay discloses—eloquently and precisely—the non-relation at the heart of the social world.54 Art history is conventionally understood to document. It tells a story, and fxes an object in time. But the strongest forms of art history do much more: in looking deeply into a work of art, a viewer-writer is given an opportunity to grasp a historical moment, in all its stunning complexity. When we as writers do that, the yawning chasm of the past opens up before us, leaving traces, in turn, for the future.

Thanks to Chang Yueh Siang, Lai Chee Kien, Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, Seng Yu Jin, Jason Wee, Lee Weng Choy and Nora A. Taylor for conversations that led to this essay. All judgments and assessments in this essay are, however, my own.

When Was Modernism?

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Philip Jackson A View of Singapore from the Sea 1823 Graphite on paper 28 x 43.6 cm Collection of the British Library © The British Library Board WD 2971

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Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), xix, 12. Mildred Archer, Natural History Drawings in the India Offce Library (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Offce, 1962), 88. In 2007 the British Library acquired the Raffes Family Collection, including the natural history collection, see H.J. Noltie, Raffes’ Ark Redrawn; Natural History Drawings from the Collection of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffes (London: British Library; Edinburgh: Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, 2009). A facsimile reproduction of 138 of the 477 paint-

ings are published in John Bastin, Ivan Polunin & Kwa Chong Guan, The William Farquhar Collection of Natural History Drawings (Singapore: Goh Geok Khim, 1999). Dr Polunin provided the annotations to these 138 selected drawings and identifcation for the rest of the collection. The entire collection of 477 drawings in reduced size is reproduced in John Bastin & Kwa Chong Guan, Natural History Drawings; The Complete William Farquhar Collection, Malay Peninsula 1803–1818 (Singapore: Editions Didier Millet & National Museum of Singapore, 2010) with annotations by Morten Strange and Hassan Ibrahim.

(2)

The 19th-Century “Origins” of Singapore Art Kwa Chong Guan

If art in modern Singapore began with the founding of the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA) in 1938, then how are the 19thcentury genres of natural history drawings, landscape sketching and painting, photography and portraiture related and relevant to the beginnings of modern art in Singapore? Edward W. Said has argued in his ruminations of the beginnings of the novel in Western literary culture, that it was somewhere in the 18th and 19th centuries that the novel was acknowledged as an authorised, institutional and distinct experience in Western culture. It is in Said’s understanding of “beginning” as the “frst step in the intentional production of meaning and the production of difference from pre-existing traditions. It authorizes subsequent texts—it both enables them and limits what is acceptable” that the establishment of the NAFA was the beginning of art in Singapore.1 34

Were these 19th-century practices of art an earlier “beginning” of modern art in Singapore? If they were, then where was the agency that institutionalised and authorised these practices of art? Or were they perhaps more the “origins,” as Said has defned it, of modern art in Singapore? Said juxtaposes this notion of beginning to that of origin, “the latter divine, mythical and privileged, the former secular, humanly produced, and ceaselessly re-examined.” In making this distinction between origins and beginnings, Said is pointing to the restructuring and animation of knowledge, not as something already achieved, but as a continual self-examination of methodology and practice. This essay is an attempt to probe possible 19th-century origins of art in Singapore, and how these possible origins may have informed the beginnings of art in Singapore in 1938, its subsequent practices and its effects on our understanding of Singapore’s history.

Charting Thoughts

William Farquhar’s Legacy of Drawing Nature William Farquhar (1774–1839) is remembered as the frst Resident and Commandant who nurtured the East India Company settlement of Singapore that Sir Stamford Raffes is credited with establishing and was the absent father of. But Farquhar is today, with Raffes, acknowledged for having established the practice of drawing nature. Like others of his generation, Farquhar had a deep interest in the fora and fauna of Melaka where he served from 1795 to 1819. For Farquhar and other men of the East India Company posted to Sumatra and the Straits of Melaka from the late 18th century, it was not only the physical landscapes, but also the human and natural landscapes that were unfamiliar and fascinating. Like their peers in India, they set about documenting in drawings the fora and fauna of the world they found themselves in. Raffes, through his various assignments in the region, beginning in Pinang in 1805 to his fnal departure for home in 1824, also maintained a strong interest in the region’s natural history, amassing a huge collection of specimens and commissioned drawings of plants and animals. To a lesser extent, he also collected historical and ethnographic artefacts. Unfortunately these collections were lost when the ship, the Fame, transporting them back to London, caught fre shortly after departing Bengkulu and sank in 1824. Today we have several drawings and one bound volume of 129 watercolours of birds from Sumatra in the India Offce Library.2 Farquhar, like Raffes, also commissioned drawings of the fora and fauna of Melaka during the years he was posted there. He evidently brought this collection of 477 natural history drawings to Singapore in 1819, and then back home to Scotland. He did not commission any further drawings while he was in Singapore. In 1827 he donated this collection to

the Royal Asiatic Society, where they remained until 1937, when six of the eight volumes of drawings were loaned to the Natural History Department of the British Museum. In 1991 the Society recalled the loan for valuation and sale, as it needed funds to purchase new premises. The drawings were auctioned by Sotheby’s in London in their 20 October 1993 auction, where Goh Geok Khim successfully bid for them, and donated them to the National Heritage Board in 1996, where they are now on rotating display at the National Museum of Singapore.3 Curatorial examination of Farquhar’s collection reveal that the drawings were—like those commissioned by Raffes, and their predecessor, by William Marsden for his book The History of Sumatra published in 1783—done by Chinese artists. These artists were probably recruited from Guangzhou, where there were studios producing artworks for European traders. It must have been a struggle for these Chinese artists, who were trained in Chinese techniques of drawing “fowers and birds” (huaniao) to adapt their artistic practice to the norms and techniques of European natural history drawings. Their training had not prepared them to conform to the rigours of taxonomic detail demanded in European botanical drawings or to render their subjects within the linear perspective of Western art. As a result, the trees they drew often appeared fat, like a fan, as evident in the drawing of a sea almond or ketapang tree (fg. 2.1). This “fatness” and “stiffness” which Raffes and others complained about is today seen as charming and perspicacious. Today, Farquhar’s collection of natural history drawings can be perceived as the origins of the practice of late 19th-century natural history drawing practised by the Botanic Gardens of Singapore (established in 1888). The standards and detail of drawing demanded by Farquhar and Raffes of their Chinese artists and, more importantly, the East India Company of their Indian draughtsmen producing natural history

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4

The Singapore Botanic Gardens have been exhibiting some of their collections of drawings by James and Charles de Alwis painted between 1890 and 1908 in their annual calendar for 2007 and 2014. Eng’s paintings of fowers were the theme of the National Parks Board calendar for 2003. Mildred Archer discussed the circumstances surrounding the development of these company drawings and paintings and catalogued the Library’s collection in Company Drawings in the India Office

Library (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1972). For a catalogue and description of some of the Southeast Asia prints see John Bastin & Pauline Rohatgi, Prints of Southeast Asia in the India Office Library (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1979). Bastin and Bea Brommer have also described the 19 th Century Prints and Illustrated Books of Indonesia with Particular Reference to the Print Collection of the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam: A Descriptive Bibliography (Antwerpen: Het Spectrum Utrecht, 1979).

drawings, is now known as the “Company style.” This style remained in use long after the Company’s dissolution. This continuity of Western natural history drawings in India ensured that Henry Nicholas Ridley, the frst Director of the Singapore Botanic Gardens, could engage a Ceylonese artist named James de Alwis in 1890 to illustrate his fve-volume Flora of the Malay Peninsula. James and his brother, Charles, who succeeded him in 1900, came from a family of eminent natural history painters form the Botanic Gardens in Ceylon (fg. 2.2).4 Today this tradition of natural history drawing continues more as an aesthetic practice than the scientifc documentation of nature. Eng Siak Loy is probably the last artist engaged by the Botanic Gardens in Singapore.5 More critical is that the origins of looking scientifcally at our natural environment is embedded in these natural history drawings. The aesthetics of huaniao painting were transformed to conform to the Western norms of clinical drawings of nature for scientifc documentation. This documentation extended to appropriation of the local knowledge of the fora and fauna inscribed in the margins of each painting. This is evident in the pencilled notes correcting and commenting on the Jawi name of the plant or animal inscribed on each drawing. The common English and Latin

names of the plant or animal according to the Linnaean system of classifcation, where they were known, were also pencilled in the margins. These marginal notes, which Ivan Polunin has collated, is testimony to the imperative of Western science in understanding and appropriating Malay knowledge of their world.

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The Rhetoric of Painting Landscapes Singapore’s rapid and unexpected development as a colonial port city in the frst half of the 19th century is documented in not only its trade statistics, but also visually represented in drawings and paintings of its evolving landscape. Singapore in this respect, was no different from other colonial port cities in being visually documented by its residents and visitors and offcials as part of their duties in an expanding British empire. The East India Company engaged a variety of Indian artists during the 18th and 19th centuries to visually document the territories they were slowly taking over. These artists produced thousands of works. Some 3,000 examples of these “Company Drawings/Paintings,” including a collection of prints of Southeast Asia, are today deposited in the India Offce Library.6 For Singapore, there are a larger number of sketches and paintings by its visitors and

Kwa Chong Guan

7

8

John Hall-Jones, The Thomson Paintings: MidNineteenth Century Paintings of the Straits Settlements and Malaya (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1983); Irene Lim, Sketches in the Straits: 19 thCentury Watercolours and Manuscripts of Singapore, Malacca, Penang and Batavia by Charles Dyce (Singapore: NUS Museums, National University of Singapore, 2003). Marianne Teo, Yu-Chee Chong & Julia Oh, Nineteenth Century Prints of Singapore (Singapore: National Museum, 1987).

residents than drawings by Company offcials. Notable among the former are the paintings of the surveyor John Turnbull Thomson and Charles Dyce.7 A major focus of their visual documentation of Singapore’s development is understandably its maritime economy. Views of the shoreline with a variety of European and Asian ships anchored offshore, and an emerging townscape and Government Hill in the background, are found in a large number of paintings. The bustling mouth of the Singapore River is another focus of this visual documentation of Singapore’s growth (fg. 2.3). From the 1850s, there is a new series of drawings and paintings of the “New Harbour,” which was developed to replace the overcrowded Singapore River. Another popular vantage point from which to paint Singapore’s development was Government Hill, before it became an artillery fort in 1857. From here the preferred view was down to the Singapore River to view the lighters anchored there, and then outwards towards the sea to capture the forest of sails offshore. Occasionally the view turns west, looking towards an emerging Chinatown. Other vantage points from which to view the port city were Princeps Hill (or Mount Sophia as it is known today) and Mount Wallich. The 1856 panorama in oil by Percy Carpenter of the View of Singapore

9

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Wong Hong Suen, ed., Singapore through 19 th Century Prints & Paintings (Singapore: National Museum of Singapore & Editions Didier Millet, 2010). See in particular, Oral History Department, Singapore Lifeline: The River and its People (Singapore: Times Books International & Oral History Department, 1986), which draws on an exhibition curated by the Oral History Department based on its recordings focusing on the Singapore River.

from Mount Wallich, showing the town from Pearl’s Hill on the left to Tanjong Rhu and beyond, is probably the best known of this category of landscape paintings of Singapore. From these vantage points, the artists descended to record streetscapes and followed the extension of the settlement to its suburbs, rural towns and surrounding jungles. Sketches of Singapore are also found in collections of paintings of the other two Straits Settlements. The National Museum of Singapore published a selection of 52 of its collection in Nineteenth Century Prints of Singapore on the occasion of its centenary in 1987.8 Two decades later, on the opening of a new History Gallery, the National Museum published a new edition of its collection of these 19th-century prints of Singapore.9 What is the signifcance of these 19thcentury paintings and prints to the origins of modern art in Singapore? Did these 19thcentury paintings and sketches prefgure what later artists would focus on when portraying the landscape? For example, the Singapore River captured the attention of a distinguished series of artists from the 1950s and continues to preoccupy us.10 Could these 19th-century drawings have established the Singapore River as a site of Singapore’s social memories? Can we also see in these 19th-century paintings a precursor of our desire to provide

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11 Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as

38

Historical Evidence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001) and earlier, the major study, Francis Haskell, History and its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), for the ways historians have turned to images to visualise and understand the past. 12 For comments on this oil by Thomson, see HallJones, op. cit., 38; also Wong, op. cit., 112. All the

buildings visible in the background of this painting were designed by G.D. Coleman, the first trained architect in Singapore. For details on Coleman and the identification of the buildings in the painting, see T.H.H. Hancock, Coleman’s Singapore (Kuala Lumpur: Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society in association with Pelanduk Publications, 1986), 30–1. 13 See especially the monograph by Sophia McAlpin,

a visual component to the textual record of Singapore’s historical development? In curating these 19th-century prints and paintings, we match them with texts that authenticate them as accurate and reliable representations of Singapore’s past—a fundamental function of art history. The hope is that these 19th-century images could then be archival records for a more visual understanding of our past.11 This appears to be the intent of the National Museum’s 1987 Nineteenth Century Prints of Singapore. However, as with any other archival record, these prints can be read on a number of levels. At the most basic level, they can be read for what they show—most prints show grass or shrubs and pebbles in the foreground, which form the platform for human activity or construction in the middle ground, which then merges into a background of virgin jungle. But at another level, this picturesque framing of a landscape suggests the imposition of order and progress on the land under the East India Company; this is evident in J.T. Thomson’s bestknown painting, The Esplanade from Scandal Point, completed in 1851 (fg. 2.4).12 As with other archival records, a close and critical reading of these paintings and sketches reveals gaps, absences and silences in what is depicted.13 The fgures and activity represented in the middle ground of these paintings are invari-

ably of Europeans taking in and enjoying the landscape. The landscape is a background to highlight the Europeans. The Asians servicing the landscape in these pictures are subservient to the Europeans. More critically, the location of these landscapes were centres of European activity and power: Government Hill or the Padang or the seafront dominated by European vessels. Absent is the Kallang River estuary which was clearly marked by Sir Stamford Raffes’ hydrographers on their sketch of the waterfront of Singapore as a “Ryat [sic] Village.” A “ra’yat village” in the 19th century referred to an aboriginal settlement, which in the context of the Kallang River estuary, meant the sea nomad communities who inhabited the estuary.14 Sultan Hussein’s decision to establish his Istana at Kampong Glam was part of a wider plan to re-claim the allegiance of these sea-nomad communities. This could help him develop the Kallang River estuary into an alternative harbour to the Singapore River and its waterfront, which were controlled by the British. The absence of any 19th-century painting of the Kallang River estuary is therefore notable, but perhaps not surprising. Also notable is the absence of any painting of Telok Blangar, where Temenggong ‘Abdu’r-Rahman parked himself, until it became the site of the “New Harbour.”

Kwa Chong Guan

The Landscape Palimpsest: Reading Early 19 th Century British Representations of Malaya (Clayton, Victoria: Monash Asia Institute, 1997). 14 Marcus Langdon & Kwa Chong Guan, “Notes on ‘Sketch of the Land round Singapore Harbour, 7 February 1819’,” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 83, 1 (June 2010): 6. 15 Charles Harrison, “The Effects of Landscape,” in Landscape and Power, ed. W.J.T. Michell, 2nd ed.

16 17 18

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 203. Harrison and his co-authors in this volume argue “to change ‘landscape’ from a noun to a verb. It asks that we think of landscape, not as an object to be seen or a text to be read, but as a process by which social and subjective identities are formed.” Wong, op. cit., 50. Irene Lim, op. cit., 21. McAlpin, op. cit., 41.

We have in these painting what Charles Harrison, in a striking phrase, says is the “picturing of power.”15 Wong Hong Suen recognises this “picturing of power” in the paintings she is curating when she writes:

Jakarta in the mid-nineteenth century. […] Secondly, the works yield invaluable insights into the mind of the European traveller-artist and more broadly, the British colonial empire in Asia.17

The predominance of certain depictions refects how Europeans made sense of the Singapore landscape from a position of power. Views of the bustling harbour […] and a lively Singapore River, refect how the raison d’être for the establishment and development [of Singapore] as a British settlement was founded upon trade and commerce […]. Views of the town rendered from high vantage points presented a panoramic view of the topography but, more importantly, convinced stakeholders that Singapore was a proftable colony; while scenes of the jungles refected their ambivalent views of nature as being endearingly wild and underdeveloped but also economically valuable.16

We can see in these early 19th-century sketches and paintings constructions of British colonialism and domination of the Singapore landscape. Sophia McAlpin has commented:

Irene Lim similarly points out that the Charles Dyce collection is signifcant for two reasons. Firstly, it provides information on the historical landscapes of Singapore, Malacca, Penang and

Unlike India, the Malayan landscape was, to the European mind, relatively devoid of signs of a pre-existing civilisation, at least in the areas of British settlement to which these depictions were confned. Thus, the freedom to “imagine” the land according to their own needs. The type of images they produced were of a reassuringly familiar landscape, one that appeared to comfortably accommodate the cultural values and aesthetic tastes of their aristocratic patrons. They refect a bond (however real or imagined) between these early British colonialists and the Malayan landscape evidenced not only in the obvious European presence but also in their civilising infuence over the land and the manner in which it was transformed.18

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19 Daphne Ang, “Portraiture and Photography in Colo-

21 Jason Toh, Singapore through 19 th Century Photo-

nial Singapore,” in Peter Lee et al., Inherited & Salvaged: Family Portraits from the NUS Museum Straits Chinese Collection (Singapore: NUS Baba House, 2015), 76–81. John Falconer, A Vision of the Past: A History of Early Photography in Singapore and Malaya: The Photographs of G.R. Lambert & Co., 1880–1910 (Singapore: Times Editions, 1987).

graphs (Singapore: Editions Didier Millet, 2009) for a selection of some 130 photographs presenting a “picturesque medley” of 19 th-century Singapore. 22 Gretchen Liu, Singapore: A Pictorial History 1819– 2000 (Singapore: Archipelago Press & National Heritage Board, 1999). 23 John Urry & Jonas Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0, 3rd ed. (London: Sage Publications Ltd, 2012).

One reading of this power of picturing the landscape as background for European actions is that it shaped perceptions of what 19th-century Singapore was about: a creation of British colonialism. The native was marginalised and written out of the painting. He appears to have lost any power to resist colonial domination, and the silences and absences of these paintings do not conceal any subaltern resistance to power. The legacy of this power of picturing Singapore is British colonialism that moulded Singapore’s historical development into the 20th century.

tially offered their services as portrait photographers and painters, but soon realised there was a greater demand for topographical prints of Singapore and the region from an increasing number of tourists. Photographers started travelling around the region to develop a collection of photographs of not only landscape views, but also streetscapes with a focus on its “native” inhabitants. The studios of G.R. Lambert & Co. began in 1867 by undertaking commissioned portraits, but in the next 35 years grew to become the largest purveyor of topographic prints, not only of the Straits Settlement and Thailand, but also of China and Borneo.20 These topographical prints with the imprint of G.R. Lambert and others continue to be in demand today as they are perceived to provide an objective perspective of the landscape. As with the earlier sketches and paintings, the photographic landscape also looks at Singapore’s coastline from the deck of the ship before moving inland to survey the landscape from its vantage points and then descending to capture the streetscape.21 As with paintings, the Singapore River also attracted much attention as the photographs of G.R. Lambert suggest (fg. 2.5). The mechanical ease of making a photographic image compared to producing a drawing enabled a much more detailed and

20

The Vistas of the Photograph The arrival of photography in Singapore— when Gason Dutronquoy established his studio at Coleman Street in 1843—would have provided residents of and visitors to Singapore with new vistas to view and shape the landscape. People no longer needed to commission an artist to sketch a view of the landscape for them. Anyone could engage the growing number of photographers establishing themselves in the High Street and Coleman Street core of European activity to make a mechanically objective and photographically true image of the Singapore they were seeing.19 These early European photographers ini40

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extensive visualisation of the late 19th-century landscape of Singapore than in the paintings and drawings of the early 19th century. What has been the effect of these photographic images on our visualisation and understanding of Singapore’s past, captured in pictorial histories of not only Singapore, but also Malaya?22 Compared to the painter mentally visualising a streetscape for a drawing, the camera provides the photographer a more intrusive and intimidating gaze of the streetscape and its people. Despite its mechanical objectivity, the photographic image of any Lambert or Thomson photograph is about as authentic as a painting or sketch in its careful composition of subjects portrayed to convey narratives that speak of the uniqueness of the history, culture and performative practices of the subject. For Lambert or Thomson, their photographs had to capture what John Urry has termed the “tourist gaze,” catering to the emerging tourism market.23 These photographs capture the tourist expectations of Singapore and their gaze of its residents and exotic performative practices, as in Lambert’s photographs of Chinese barbers cleaning the ears of their clients. The step from the tourist gaze to the voyeuristic gaze, that say looks upon the nude Asian female form, is a small one (fg. 2.6). Can Lambert and his colleagues claim to be ethnographers visually documenting the peoples they were observing? Or, were they more view-makers and entrepreneurs? In reproducing, displaying and exhibiting these 19th-century photographs, we are identifying ourselves with a landscape we have lost and are today nostalgic about. But in appropriating these images, have we also adopted and unconsciously internalised the tourist gaze embedded in these 19th-century photographs? It raises perplexing issues of what then is the real and authentic in these photographs. The Status of Portraits Photography also opened up new vistas for the

making of portraits in not only painting but sculpture as well. Lady Raffes’ presentation of a copy of Sir Francis Legatt Chantrey’s (1781– 1841) plaster bust of Sir Stamford Raffes to the Singapore Institution (later the Raffes Institution) in the 1830s is probably the beginning of a tradition of monumentalising signifcant personalities in civic portraits. Dutronquoy frst established himself as a portrait painter and miniaturist when he arrived in Singapore in 1839, four years before he established the frst photography studio in Singapore. Many, if not most, of the other photographic studios offered portraiture as a service, thus liberalising the production of portraits for clients wanting to commemorate others, especially ancestors, or celebrate themselves. The visual representation of persons in painting, drawing or sculpture has a venerable genealogy in both Asian and European art history. But portraiture as a distinct genre of modern art, with the conventions, meanings and values we recognise in a portrait today, emerged in the 15th century and bloomed in the 18th century when it became part of the academy system for training, accrediting and exhibiting works of aspiring artists. 19thcentury Singapore society followed this European tradition of portrait painting as an honorifc process to commemorate and celebrate powerful, wealthy or symbolically signifcant persons. When Hoo Ah Kay (Whampoa) was awarded the Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George, he commissioned a portrait by John Edmund Taylor. Earlier, Whampoa had his portrait painted by the Prussian artist known by his surname Beyerhaus when he visited Singapore in 1845. Beyerhaus also executed the portrait of John Turnbull Thomson. The portraits of Tan Kim Seng (1805– 1864) and his circle tell of the evolution of portraiture in Singapore. Peter Lee’s close examination of these portraits suggests that the oldest work is a watercolour done by possibly a European artist working with European wa-

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tercolour techniques and perspectives.24 The later portraits of Tan are copies by Chinese painters trained in export painting techniques in Guangzhou and Shanghai. Daphne Ang sees infuences of the aesthetic traditions of the Shanghai Jesuit painting school in two of the later portraits of Tan.25 Lee has also documented the contribution of these Chinese artists and their studios to the development of portraiture in Singapore, especially portraits for the veneration of ancestors. For this purpose, the photograph presented a new medium for capturing an exact likeness of the ancestor and re-presenting the dead. The one hundred-plus photographs and paintings that prominent Chinese Song Ong Siang collated for his One Hundred Years’ History of the Chinese in Singapore is a venerable gallery of portraiture.26 The National University of Singapore’s Baba House collects these portraits of Straits Chinese as part of its visual documentation of Singapore’s past. Pioneered by Lee, who serves as its honorary curator, this is a very recent museum venture. Lee donated his collection of early 19th-century oil and photographic portraits of Straits Chinese to the Baba House, which has been the subject of two exhibitions.27 The Asian Civilisations Museum’s Peranakan Museum in Singapore has also been collecting portraits of Straits Chinese as part of their collection policy. These portraits formed a signifcant component of the artefacts for their exhibition, Great Peranakans: Fifty Remarkable Lives (May 2015–April 2016).28 These portraits are, as Baba House curator Foo Su Ling points out, “social markers” of those portrayed.29 They are more than mirror images or candid photos of the sitters. The postures and gestures of the sitters, their costumes and the accessories or objects surrounding them are not of the moment the camera shutter is opened. The artist or photographer has colluded with the sitter to produce an image which is a “presentation of the self ” of the sitter. Both Whampoa and Tan Beng Wan chose 42

to portray themselves with their foreign awards and titles, one conferred by the British and the other by the Qing court, to claim a measure of status in their respective communities. More signifcant is that the format of these portraits is European. The sitter is expected to be formally dressed and standing or sitting stiffy on a heavy chair, with a side table on which carefully selected objects projecting the sitter’s persona are displayed. The choice of costume and dress is, as Foo points out, especially signifcant.30 Much can be read into the fact that female sitters are always portrayed in formal Asian dress, while male sitters’ costumes have evolved from the long Chinese gown, such as the one Tan Kim Seng chose to be portrayed in, to formal European black-tie evening suit, as worn by Song Ong Siang in his 1936 portrait. This 1936 Julius Wentscher portrait of Song, wearing his medals and awards, seated on a solid and heavy Straits Chinese-style blackwood chair next to a side table on which are displayed Song’s One Hundred Years’ History of the Chinese in Singapore, and a row of leather-bound books, including a copy of the Bible, projects Song’s persona as a “King’s Chinese” and, more signifcantly, how completely this genre of portraiture has appropriated European conventions, techniques and styles of visually representing persons (fg. 2.7). Should this portrait of Song have been given a place in Victoria Memorial Hall, along with portraits of former Governors and other notables who had contributed to Singapore? A number of these portraits of former Governors were commissioned by local community elites and leaders as a form of civic patronage. The earliest of these civic portraits was of Governor William Butterworth, commissioned in 1855 by a group of prominent residents led by Tan Kim Seng, Seah Eu Chin, Tan Kim Ching, Abraham Solomon and Syed Ali bin Mohammed Aljunied among others. Others followed in the remainder of the 19th century. These include a portrait of Governor Harry Ord which

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24 Peter Lee, “Modern Pictures for Ancient Rites: Chi-

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nese Portrait Painters in Nineteenth-Century Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia,” in Lee et al., Inherited & Salvaged, 43–7. Daphne Ang, “The Straits Chinese and Civic Portraiture in Singapore, 1819–1959,” in Great Peranakans: Fifty Remarkable Lives, ed. Alan Chong, exh. cat. (Singapore: Asian Civilisations Museum, 2015), 34. Song Ong Siang, One Hundred Years’ History of the Chinese in Singapore (Singapore: University Malaya Press, 1967).

Whampoa led the commissioning of in 1875. In all, 22 life-size portraits hung on the walls of the Victoria Memorial Hall, leaving no space for Song’s portrait in 1936 (a space was eventually made for it). As Ang notes, the space of the Victoria Memorial Hall “can be regarded as the frst national gallery of Singapore.”31 Conclusion The 19th-century drawing of nature, landscapes and persons in portraits prefgures in a way 20th-century artistic concerns of picturing a perpetually changing landscape. In contrast to the early 19th-century paintings and drawings

27

Peter Lee et al., Inherited & Salvaged is a catalogue of the core 60 portraits in the collection. 28 Chong, ed., op. cit. is the write-up of the exhibition. 29 Foo Su Ling, “Introduction: Surveying the Straits Chinese Portraits Collection,” in Lee et al., Inherited & Salvaged, 22. 30 Foo, “Dressing the Baba: Portraits, Fashion and Modernity,” in ibid., 109–15. 31 Ang, “The Straits Chinese and Civic Portraiture in Singapore,” 49.

of the landscape in which the native is absent, the later 19th-century photographs and paintings focus on the natives as the exotic other and an underlying narrative of the civilising infuence of colonialism. Today these images shape our social memories of imagined spaces and nostalgia of a bygone world as captured in a new generation of paintings of the Singapore River (fg. 2.8) and rural scenes. Also embedded in these 19thcentury practices is a tension between Eastern and Western artistic practices, of Asian mimicking of European artistic practice and conventions to produce hybrid forms of art which we live with today.

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Artist unknown Sea-Almond (K’tapang, Terminalia Moluccana) William Farquhar’s Collection of Natural History Drawings 1803–1818 Watercolour on paper 54.2 x 37.6 cm Gift of G.K. Goh Collection of National Museum of Singapore Image courtesy of National Museum of Singapore, National Heritage Board James de Alwis Red Sealing Wax Palm (Cyrtostachys lakka) c. 1891 Watercolour on paper 44 x 29 cm Collection of Singapore Botanic Gardens, National Parks Board

François-Edmond Pâris; Sigismond Himeley, engraver Sincapour (Singapore) c. 1835 Aquatint 30.5 x 40 cm Collection of National Museum of Singapore Image courtesy of National Museum of Singapore, National Heritage Board 2.3

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J.T. Thomson The Esplanade from Scandal Point 1851 Oil on canvas 59 x 89 cm Gift of Dr John Hall-Jones Collection of National Museum of Singapore Image courtesy of National Museum of Singapore, National Heritage Board G.R. Lambert & Co. View of Singapore River Early 1880s Albumen print 14.6 x 22.3 cm Collection of National Museum of Singapore Image courtesy of National Museum of Singapore, National Heritage Board G.R. Lambert & Co. Untitled (Karayuki-san in Singapore) Late 19th century Albumen print 23.8 x 28.5 cm Collection of Mr & Mrs Lee Kip Lee

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Julius Wentscher Portrait of Song Ong Siang 1936 Oil on canvas 214 x 142 cm Collection of National Museum of Singapore Image courtesy of National Museum of Singapore, National Heritage Board

2.8 Lim Tze Peng Singapore River (Elgin Bridge) 1979 Chinese ink and colour on paper 68 x 139 cm Collection of National Gallery Singapore

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3

This essay reprises parts of arguments and text found in Chapters Two and Three of my book The Asian Modern, Volume One, fnal draft 2016. Sanento Yuliman Hadiwardoyo, “Genèse de la Peinture Indonésienne Contemporaine: Le rôle de S. Sudjojono” [The Genesis of Contemporary Indonesian Painting: The Role of S. Sudjojono] (PhD diss. 3rd cycle, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1981), 14. Sanento here refers to W.P. Groeneveldt, Historical Notes on Indonesia and Malaya Compiled from Chinese Sources (Jakarta: C.V. Bhratara, 1960), 53. John Crawfurd, History of the Indian Archipelago: Containing an Account of the Manners, Arts, Languages, Religions, Institutions and Commerce of its Inhabitants (Edinburgh: Constable, 1820). “Indian” here re-

4

5

fers to the Indies, or parts of present-day Indonesia. Attributed to Faiz Ali Khan, A Group of Dancing-Girls and Musicians, c. 1815, opaque watercolour on paper, Gift of Miss M. Letitia Harford, OBE, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. The surviving temple murals from the Ayutthaya period (14th to 18th centuries) include: Early Ayutthaya [15th century] Lampang P., Wat Phra That Lampang Luang, after 1450, Wihaan Nam Taem, after 1500 Middle Ayutthaya [King Narai, r. 1654–1688] Ayutthaya P., Nakhon Luang, Wat Mai Phrachumphon, c. 1625–c. 1650 Bangkok, Khet Yannawa, Wat Chong Nonsi, c. 1650–c. 1688 [MB, 1982]

(3)

Colonial Art as a Space of the Asian Modern1 John Clark

Antecedents to a Modern Southeast Asian Art The apparent and fruitful “re-discovery” of early or pre-modern art in different parts of Southeast Asia by contemporary artists such as Heri Dono and FX Harsono, should not obscure the historical presence of references to large-scale narrative representations which are no longer extant but for which there are reliable records. These sources were excavated by Sanento Yuliman Hadiwardoyo, among others, and reinforce that there were physically large paintings in Southeast Asia as early as the 15th century. Hadiwardoyo cites an apparent description of a wayang-bèbèr, or pictorial narrative scrolls, from Ma Huan’s 1416 Yingyai shenglan (The Overall Survey of Ocean Shores).2 Literary references therefore indicate the presence of paintings 44

in Java with secular subjects from at least the 1400s, including picture-tales for oral narration. Paintings or tapestries with fguration were brought to the Indonesian archipelago by the Portuguese in the 16th century, who also found there were long painting scrolls, sometimes of recent historical events, made for local rulers. The Dutch brought paintings and many prints, and several Dutch painters were active in Batavia from at least the 17th century. At the turn of the 18th century, illustrations were also done for a variety of British publications including Marsden’s 1811 History of Sumatra and Raffes’ 1817 History of Java, some of which were done for Raffes in 1811–1816 by Javanese and Anglo-Indian artists. Unfortunately, most of these drawings were lost in the fre of Raffes’ ship Fame in 1824 at Bengkulu (Bencoolen), Sumatra. However an extant contemporary

Charting Thoughts

Petchaburi, Wat Yai Suwannaram, c. 1702–c. 1708 Nonthaburi, Wat Chompuweg [MB, 1987] Late Ayutthaya [1690s–1767] Angthong, Amphoe Wiset Chai Chan, Wat Khian [MB, 1999] Ayutthaya, Wat Phutthaisawan, Patriarch’s Pavilion, c. 1732–c. 1758 Ayutthaya, Wat Thom (destroyed, copies in Thai national library) Bangkok, Bang Khunnon, Wat Chaiyathid [MB, 1991] Petchaburi, Wat Ko Kaeo Suttharam, after 1743 [MB, 1986] Nakhon Chaisri, Wat Pakklongbangkaew Nonthaburi, Wat Prasat [MB, 1987] Samut Prakan, Wat Klangworawihaan

illustration by a Javanese artist, in another book by John Crawfurd, shows the mode and level of illustrative skills among some Javanese before 1820.3 These show recession with perhaps some knowledge of Chinese orthogonal or parallel perspective drawing, but with keen interest in shading and overall modelling via light and shade. No major paintings survived into the 19th century but there does exist from after the 1820s a set of fve paintings of Five Javanese Court Offcials (fg. 3.1), which could originally have been a screen. This early large-scale painting has intriguing similarities to the painting of the standing, vertical fgures in a painting done in Delhi around 1815.4 Hence it may be deduced that Raffes’ entourage included an Anglo-Indian painter, so one of the earliest surviving links with European art in Southeast Asia should also be seen through stylistic and compositional resemblances vis-à-vis Indian so-called “Company Painting.” How all these different visual techniques were communicated to 19th-century Javanese artisans remains open to speculation. That the Five Offcials does survive indicates a high level of copying competence (probably associated with textile decoration skills), and elsewhere, a rapid ability to master European representation

6

Thonburi, Bang Chak, Thanon Rachavithi, Wat Mai Thepnimit [MB, 1983] [MB: indicates a volume of a series published by Muang Boran in Bangkok in the year given.] See Alexandra Green, “From Gold Leaf to Buddhist Hagiographies: Contacts with Regions in the East seen in Late Burmese murals,” The Journal of Burma Studies 15, no. 2 (2011): 305–58; Soe Thuzar Myint, The Portrayal of the Battle of Ayutthaya in Mynamar Literature (Bangkok: Institute of Asian Studies, Chulalongkorn University, 2011), 99; Prince Damrong Rajanubhab, Our Wars with the Burmese: Hostilities between Siamese and Burmese when Ayutthaya was the Capital of Siam (Bangkok: White Lotus, 2001), 356.

of the natural world. These issues suggest that European modes of representation in a modern Asian art were neither culturally alien nor technically unmasterable. Even if done under the sway of a broadened colonial hegemony, they were still capable of modifcation for local expression and potentially, local counterappropriation. The other major surviving pre-modern pictorial form is Buddhist mural painting which can be found throughout the Theravadin countries, especially Siam. In present-day Thailand, mural painting has remarkably few surviving works from before the 18th century, and almost none from the capital of Ayutthaya which was sacked by the Burmese in 1767.5 We can guess what some of the painting conventions were from a paucity of surviving temples and some manuscripts, as well as inferences made from paintings which survive in Burma where many painting artisans were among the upwards of 30,000 Siamese taken captive.6 Thai mural painting as we now know it is almost entirely the surviving reconstruction and development of artists in Bangkok starting from the late 1780s, with most work being done in the 1830s. The Siamese art world was one hierarchically governed by royal, aristocratic and sometimes merchant patronage for mural

Colonial Art as a Space of the Asian Modern

45

7

8

See Saran Thongpaan, “Chiwit thang sangkhom khong chaang nay sangkhom Thay phaak klaang samay ratanakosin koon p. s. 2448” [The social life of craftsmen in central Thai society of the Ratanakosin Era before 1905] (master’s thesis, Thammasat University, 1991). For a general overview of status organisation, see M.R. Akin Rabibhadana, The Organization of Thai Society in the Early Bangkok Period, 1782–1873, republished by (Bangkok: Wisdom of the Land Foundation & Thai Association of Qualitative Researchers, 1996). See No Na Pak Nam, Phra Acharn Nak: The Foremost Muralist of the Reign of King Rama I (Bangkok: Muang

decorative schemes in temples and palaces.7 There were four nameable painters before the 1850s: Pra Ajaarn Nak who worked for Rama I (r. 1782–1809), Khong Pae and Thong Yu who similarly did murals for Wat Suwannaram, Thonburi (now Bangkok Noi) circa 1831, under Rama III (r. 1824–1851), and Khrua In Khong, active from the 1850s to 1868, who could well have personally known the artists at Wat Suwannaram.8 Much may also be deduced from works by Khrua In Khong, or those attributed to him. He was nameable and well-regarded; despite his position as the subordinate painter of a king, his reputation could not have been earned solely by virtue of his social standing. Indeed there are anecdotes which indicate Khrua In Khong was quite sure of his own métier, and this changed self-consciousness of the artist as a professional by the 1850s or slightly earlier, is certainly one index of modernity in art.9 He would also have known of Wat Ratchaorot which was built late in the reign of Rama II in the 1830s, where there were defnitely experiments with European perspective. These seem to have begun with the importation of mirrors by the Portuguese ambassador in 1818, followed by an order from Rama II for his own mirrors shortly thereafter. 46

9

Boran, 1987); See No Na Pak Nam, Khru Khongpae & Khru Thongyu (Bangkok: Muang Boran, 1987); On Wat Suwannaram, see No Na Pak Nam, Wat Suwannaram, 2nd ed. (Bangkok: Muang Boran, 1997). Other temples with murals by Khong Pae include Wat Bang Yikhan and Wat Dawaduengsaran, Thonburi. One anecdote related by Prince Naris is that Khrua In Khong would lock himself up in his monk’s residence to prevent people from breaking his concentration when planning the murals for an ubosot. See Wiyada Thongmitr, Khrua In Khong’s Westernized School of Thai Painting (Bangkok: Thai Cultural Data Centre, 1979), 110, quoting Saan somdet [The Princes’ cor-

Siamese visual discourses changed markedly in the 1820s and 1830s. The use of the mirror or symmetrical mirror refections produced a kind of doubled image rather akin to one-point perspective. Some portraits from life began to be made of famous lay people and some monks, and the notion of a portrait sent as an index of a person appeared in contemporary literature. The visualisation of common people changed from elegant visual stereotypes at Wat Pho to quasi-realistic and individuated people in views of street activities in Wat Suthat. Almost certainly, the wider availability of full-size European mirrors from the 1820s in Bangkok must have altered personal perceptions of physique and its pictorial representation.10 Finally, one must mention the increased use of allegorical manifestation of life-cycle scenes or other chosen elements to exemplify Buddhist values. These are quasi-abstract and analytical removals of the narrative scheme from habitual Buddhist visual discourse through the Jātakas, or moral narratives about Buddha’s previous incarnations (fg. 3.2). Interestingly, two examples of these are by Khrua In Khong himself—the frst at the ubosot of Wat Borom Niwat, possibly from the later 1850s, and the second from the scenes of

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respondence] vols. III and XII (Bangkok: Khurusapha, 1962). 10 See the stimulating studies on the role of mirrors in changes in visual representation of mural painting between Rama II and Rama III in Phanunphong Lawhasom & Chaiyot Isawonpan, Plian phun, plaeng phaaph: Prap ruup, pbrung laay [Vary the ground, vary the picture; make ready the form, vary the lines] (Bangkok: Muang Boran, BE 2549 [2006]). 11 Reports that Rama IV’s palace contained paintings painted on its walls were mentioned by Coffman and Vincent, as cited in Michael Smythies, Early Accounts of Petchaburi (Bangkok: The Siam Society, 1987),

a single individual’s life at Wat Mahasamanaram in Phetchaburi, close to Mongkut’s summer retreat of Phra Nakhon Kiri after 1859.11 This obvious visualisation of allegory suggests they may have been painted based on a monkish text that felt secure enough to step away from conventional representations, and whose author one expects could have been Rama IV himself or someone close to him. Khrua In Khong’s work is very largely the application of drawing and painting techniques, pictorial composition and spatial construction which, considering the apparent explicitness of his use of Euramerican cityscapes for Jātakas, was derived from the illustrated books given to Rama IV by several foreign visitors. Khrua In Khong may also have had access to China trade paintings, given that there also exist in the royal collections, late Chinese portrait paintings of Rama IV and his crown prince, the future Rama V, which may have been commissioned from photographs brought to Canton in the 1860s. Khrua In Khong’s use of Euramerican imagery was underpinned by changes in Siamese thought of his time, particularly given the contemporary royal interest in European scientifc ideas that must have allowed a more distanced, rationally constructed notion of the self and by

12

34–5, 28–9 respectively. However, none of these paintings are visible today. Whether they were so visible in Rama IV’s time is not known to me, but the walls of the King’s private apartments in Petchaburi were in 2012 decorated with French prints of the 1830s conquest of Algeria. Perhaps Rama V kept them there during the many conficts with France in the late 19 th century, the better to allow visitors to perceive what he knew about Siam’s foreign enemies. Dan Beach Bradley, Kamphi khantha raksa [Treatise on midwifery] (Bangkok: A.B.C.F.M. Press, 1842). A copy of this manual from the National Library, Bangkok, is in the National Library of Australia.

extension, the visualising subject. Ideas about Buddhism changed in the period of Rama IV and his son Rama V, with more use of Western scholarship to understand them. Indeed, Rama V and his offcials realised the Buddha birth stories encapsulated many notions of kingship that were not compatible with, and could present challenges to, the national state. These were bureaucratised via models borrowed from colonial administration. The tendency to allegorise stages of individual monk stories, as seen in some schemes by Khrua In Khong at Wat Mahasamanaram and the abstracted moral allegories using Western imagery seen at Wat Borom Niwat, has been unaffected by the propensity towards moral rationalism in decorative narrative. American protestant missionaries were also active in Bangkok before 1851 and there was one American diplomatic mission in 1832–1834. These may very well have provided American townscape prints seen by Khrua In Khong. I should also note that in 1843, the American missionary Dr Bradley published the frst Thai newspaper, Bangkok Recorder, and in the same year also published a treatise on midwifery “with illustrations by a Siamese artist,” as well as one on vaccination in 1844.12 Thus, local Siamese appropriations of Euramerican

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13

14

See Somsak Daengphan & Wirachay Wirasukhsawat, “Faay anurak chitrakaam faa phanang le pratimaakaam tit thii” [Painting and sculpture preservation onsite section], in Chitrakam faaphanang nay pratheet Thay [Mural painting in Thailand] (Bangkok: Kong boraankhati, Krom Silpakon [Archaeology Section, Ministry of Fine Arts], BE 2533 [1990]), series 1, vol. 3. In English, a general guide is Gerhard Jaiser, Thai Mural Painting, Vol. 1: Iconography, Analysis & Guide; Vol. 2: Society, Preservation and Subjects (Bangkok: White Lotus, 2010). Ibid., 1990, 5.

images in Bangkok antedate Khrua In Khong by around 25 years. The habitual Western art reservation about the Euramerican “inadequate copy” interpretive position does not mean that Khrua In Khong did not beneft from knowing how to generate his own images more accurately within the Euramerican tendencies he chose. Buildings were now depicted at Wat Bowonniwet and Wat Borom Niwat in Bangkok and Wat Mahasamanaram in Petchburi as larger than people, whereas previously, human fgures, especially of persons particularly endowed with aura, were often shown to be too big to ft into buildings.13 His compositions are distinguished by broad expanses of sky and outlines sketched in black (unlike the red used even as late as the 1830s) and then flled with colour, with space marked out and left within the whole for buildings.14 A further set of antecedents should be mentioned but is barely visible today, and as little studied. The circulation of various kinds of China trade paintings, including those on glass, accompanied the vessels of the Euramerican traders as well as the colonial navies. Remarkably early, by the 1780s, Chinese glass painters were producing works for distant Surat on the Indian side of the Persian Gulf, and one 48

15 For more on Chinese glass painters, see Susan S.

16

Bean, Yankee India: American Commercial and Cultural Encounters with India in the Age of Sail, 1784– 1860 (Salem: Peabody Essex Museum; Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing, 2001), fg. 4., 22, 84. The principal scholar to date in this feld was the late Sasaki Seiichi. See Sasaki Seiichi et al., “Yooroppa Yûsaiga no Nihon dotchaku katei no kenkyû—Doroe, Garasu-e kenkyû” [The settling-down process of European coloured painting in Japan—Research on gouache, glass painting], in Tama Bijutsu Daigaku Zairyôgaku Kenkyûshitsu Kiyô [Tama Fine Arts Uni-

must assume that the glass paintings, originally commissioned in Chinese treaty ports, were soon followed by itinerant Chinese paintercraftsmen.15 These paintings on glass are also found prominently displayed in many Siamese temples from the 1830s and decorations of Thai subjects soon appeared in these locations, indicating that painters and their techniques must have moved from China.16 Early Transfer of European Discourses The Philippines, which had been “discovered” by Magellan in 1521, was ruled from Mexico until 1822, when different Roman Catholic religious orders were allocated their own geographical areas to administer. By the 1730s some teaching of drawing was taking place via a military engineer, and priests were being taught engraving. There was an art school founded by local worthies from 1821 to 1834 under Damián Domingo (1796–1834), and an art academy was authorised in 1845, regulated in 1848 and opened from 1850 to 1898. It was followed by the School of Fine Arts of the University of the Philippines from 1908 to the present day. The Spanish arrived in the Philippines with their very specifc use of icons for the

John Clark

versity research proceedings on materials science] 1 (1976), 2 (1978), 3 (1982), 4 (1985). 17 See Santiago Albano Pilar, A Harvest of Saints (Makati City: Ayala Museum, 2005). 18 See Luciano P.R. Santiago, “Damian Domingo and the First Philippine Art Academy (1821–1834),” Philippines Quarterly of Culture and Society 19, no. 4 (1991): 264– 80. The most recent monograph on Damián Domingo is Luciano P.R. Santiago, The Life, Art, and Times of Damián Domingo (Manila: Vibal Foundation, 2010). 19 See Santiago Albano Pilar, “Philippine Painting: The Early Chinese Heritage,” Arts of Asia Nov–Dec

propagation of faith, and found quite a vivid and widespread discourse of anitos or ancestor fgures, for which there are a number of observations by early Spanish writers.17 It is on this base of familiarity with icons, accompanied by a substrate of non-Catholic spiritual beliefs and practices as well as technical facility with their production, that the vitality and continuity of later Philippine folk art rests. A second element in the formation of visual discourses was the direct result of Catholic proselytisation—not only did the use and systematic articulation of images spread, there was from at least the early 18th century an increasingly educated class of elite native Filipinos to deploy it. The University of Santo Tomas in Manila was founded in 1645 and by 1690, the surnames of its graduates indicated two probable natives.18 A third element was the involvement of Chinese craftsmen as painters and printers from the 1580s. Chinese were trained as reproducers of Catholic imagery, and their talent was widely recognised by Catholic priests. There were many incentives for the Chinese to become Catholic: By doing so they could have property rights, be recognised in a profession and form a guild, as they did in Binondo in 1687. By 1734, “about 380 families of Chinese

(1994): 62–70.

20 On glass painting in Asia, see Sasaki, op. cit. 21 On tipos del pais, see Francisco de Santos Moro, La Vida en papel de arroz [Life on rice paper] (Madrid: Museo Nacional de Antropología, 2007). On Damián Domingo’s works see Jose-Maria Cariño & Sonia Pinto Ner, Álbum Islas Filipinas 1663–1888 [Album of the Philippine Islands 1663–1888] (Manila: Ars Mundi, Philippinae, 2004); Nick Joaquin & Luciano P.R. Santiago, The World of Damian Domingo (Manila: Metropolitan Museum of Manila, 1990); Stephen Ongpin, Filipino Master: Damian Domingo (Manila: Intramuros Administration, 1983).

meztizos were engaged in painting, sculpture, carpentry, and smithing.”19 The Chinese relationship with Philippines’ art is deep and longstanding, particularly via paintings and glass paintings done in the treaty ports which spread to the Philippines, and via tipos del pais, or sets of images of typical occupations.20 The latter had reached Manila from Canton in the 1790s and were a staple element in the production of Damián Domingo and some of his students from the late 1820s.21 A fourth element was natural history research and drawing. This was evident from the 1690s and reached its culmination in the 1792–1793 Malaspina Expedition, whose report was only published in 1885. In addition, there was the unillustrated publication in 1845 of Flora de Filipinas, which was republished with luxury prints in 1879. Whilst there is often some delay between the drawings done during the research and their subsequent publication as illustrations, nevertheless one can see, as elsewhere in the colonial world, a widespread visual discourse of natural history illustration which in most cases employed metropolitan as well as local artists for its production. The frst signifcant Philippines’ academy painter was Simon Flores (1839–1902). His visual world can mainly be seen as a series of

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22 23

24

25

See Cariño & Ner, op. cit., 114. See Luciano P.R. Santiago, “At the End of the Rainbow: The Last Will and Testament of Damián Domingo,” Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society 28 (2000): 78–89 and Luciano P.R. Santiago, “Damian Domingo and the First Philippine Art Academy (1821–1834).” Many of these artists are recorded in Leo Haks & Guus Maris, Lexicon of Foreign Artists Who Visualised Indonesia (1600–1950): Surveying Painters, Watercolourists, Draughtsmen, Sculptors, Illustrators, Graphic and Industrial Artists (Utrecht: Gert Jan Bestebreurje, 1995). Werner Kraus has studied the teaching models for drawing in schools produced by Raden Saleh, see the “teekenvoorbeelden” of 1863 and 1864, in Wer-

pictorial types derived from this background by the time of his entry to the Academia de Dibujo y Pintura in Manila at the age of 18 in 1857. This brought him to a high level of formation, enabling him to set up his own studio in about 1861 where he accepted commissions for portraits, religious works and trompe l’oeil paintings. His uncle included a decorator of the ceiling in the governor’s Malacañang Palace, where two Italians were also active. There is speculation that another uncle might have been an artist who continued Damián Domingo’s studio after his death.22 If that were the case, Flores may have had direct links to Domingo, who as a Chinese mestizo constitutes a link to the whole discourse of Chinese craftsmen painters and printers which goes back to the 1590s. It had also been Domingo who, “by declaring painting as an object of formal instruction, raised [it] from the level of the mechanical to the plane of the noble arts. As a result, Filipino artists ascended in social standing.”23 This possibility, as much a feature of Flores’ own genealogy as of the whole class of Filipino artists who entered the Academy in Manila (where the policy of racial segregation seems to have been abandoned around 1870), 50

26

ner Kraus, Raden Saleh: Der Beginn der modernene indonesischen Malerei [Raden Saleh: The beginning of modern Indonesian painting], eds. Werner Kraus & Irina Vogelsang, trans. Chris Cave & Werner Kraus (Jakarta: Goethe Institut, 2012), 244–9. Kraus has examined reports in the Dutch Indies’ newspapers on drawing education in various elite teacher training institutions; there having been no formal art school in the Indies at the time. See Werner Kraus, “Artists, Art Education and Exhibition of Art in 19 th Century Java: The Evidence,” a lecture given at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in November 2013. On Payen, see Marie-Odette Scalliet, “Antoine Payen, peintre des Indes orientales: vie et écrits d’un artiste du

points to a recurrent phenomenon of modern Asian art. Whatever the contemporary social origin of the artist, whatever the genealogy of sensibilities and beliefs which links them to discourses other than those of the colonial authorities, many have worked almost entirely within, from, and not infrequently against those discourses. We look for their modernity in what they emphasise in their work that relates to their situation, and in their ability to relativise styles from the past with their own contemporary absorption and re-deployment of the real in some 19th-century cases, or of abstract déformation in later 20th-century cases. The Transfer of European Salon Style: Raden Saleh The transfer of European salon style was carried out in Java by a large number of overseas artists.24 The advent of aristocrats who became artists like Raden Saleh (c. 1811–1880), however, raised the social status of matriculated or certifcated craftsmen. The later process of professionalisation of artists was drawn out in Java until after 1949 due to the lack of professional training except through the technical services

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XIXe siècle (1792–1853)” [Antoine Payen, painter of the Eastern Indies: Life and writings of a 19 th-century artist (1792–1853)] (PhD diss., Leiden University, The School of Asian, African, and Amerindian Studies, CNWS, 1995). I am also grateful for the opportunity to see and photograph Payen’s in situ oil sketches held at the Ethnology Museum in Leiden. 27 C.C.P. Marius, Dutch Painters of the 19th Century (London: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1973), 17. First translated into English in 1908. 28 For further exposition, see Annemiek Ouwerkerk, “‘Hoe kan het schoone geprezen, het middelmatige erkend en het slechte gelaakt worden?’: Nederlandse kunstkritiek in de eerste helft van de 19de eeuw” [How can

that which is beautiful be praised, that which is mediocre be recognised, and that which is bad be strongly disapproved? Dutch art criticism during the frst half of the 19 th century. trans. T. Berghuis] in Op zoek naar de Gouden Eeuw: Nederlandse schilderkunst 1800–1850 [In search of the Golden Age: Dutch painting, 1800– 1850], eds. Louis Van Tilborgh & Guido Janzen, trans. Thomas Berghuis (Zwolle: Waanders Uitgevers, 1986), 65. Ouwerkerk notes: “Before the 1830s, criticism was innocent, but there was a narrowing of the position of the artists after 1830 when there was an economic recession and also one in art when the artist hardly got any subsidy and the government did not buy from public exhibitions.”

of the bureaucracy, and except some teachertraining curricula, for which Saleh did model drawings for use as pedagogical and copy aids. These have now begun to be investigated, and some works survive to permit analysis of the works of Saleh’s very few Javanese students.25 The few artists trained before 1949 in the technical services of the Dutch, such as the archaeological draftsmen, were self-taught then trained on the job, or had suffcient social status and resources to go to Europe. Unlike late 19th-century India, Japan or the Philippines, there was no art school in Batavia despite an extensive circle of expatriate art activities and some signifcant exhibitions. This created a situation wherein the Javanese lacked the technical certifcation through art school or workshop training the colonial artists had, with the exception of Raden Saleh in the 1860s and one or two others. It is clear from surviving drawings that Saleh’s visual discourse was from the outset European; he received early training in drawing from 1819 to 1820 by the then Dutch (later Belgian) artist Antoine Payen.26 Saleh must also have been present when Payen did some of his in situ oil sketches of natural scenes which

were later to be worked up by him in Europe into formal compositions. In fact the early in situ oil sketches of Payen should really be seen as the originator of landscape painting in Java, before Saleh in the 1860s or the Mooi Indië school of the 1910s to 1930s. In Holland, Saleh was exposed to the studio training he received between 1830 and 1831 from Cornelis Kruseman (1797–1857), who had settled in The Hague. Kruseman had been in Italy from 1821 to 1824 and his works showed “the infuence of Raphael fltered through that of Overbeck and Nazarene painting.”27 Kruseman taught Saleh drawing and painting for six months and Saleh had access to his earlier drawings from 1821 to 1825, including those from his two years in Rome which displayed his affection for warm Raphaelesque tones. Dutch art of the 1830s—the world of Kruseman, and of Saleh’s other teacher from 1832 to 1833, Andreas Schelfhout (1787– 1870)—was a diffdent national representation of middle-class values which lacked clear defnition or stylistic articulation, but manifested what might be called an amalgam of “soft critique” and “soft (un-named) romanticism.”28

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29

Ibid., 70–1. Ouwerkerk notes that the critics “indeed realized that their criticisms could be crucial, but often startled from the consequences. In their articles they asked for the frst time in so many words on who could accurately be able to distinguish good artworks from bad artworks. Subsequently, they resorted to extensive commentaries on organisation of the exhibi-

Art criticism was in fact rather undeveloped in Holland, and there was also general avoidance of calling Romanticism by its name.29 From the late 1830s, Saleh had the great advantage of dealing with a series of culturally rich but politically small German states before the Prussian steamroller of unifcation ran over them all from the 1840s to 1870s. These German states presented an acquirable culture. Indeed, Saleh himself at times thought he had become German, and in his lost but partially reconstructed memoirs of 1849 expressed his dilemma thus: Two sides, opposite to each other and yet both light and friendly, put their magic spell over my soul. There the paradise of my childhood in the bright sunshine, washed by the Indian Ocean, where my beloved one lives and where the ashes of my ancestors rest. Here Europe’s luckiest countries, where the arts, sciences and educational values shine like diamond jewellery, to where the yearning of my youth fnally brought me; where I was lucky enough to fnd friends within the noblest circles, friends who replaced father, mother, brothers and sisters. Between these two worlds my heart is split. And I feel urged to offer both sides my loving thanks. I believe that I can do that best by portraying for my friends in Europe, the simple, in52

30

tions, the selection committee, the overall impression of that which was exhibited, the state of the art, and on the public taste. [...] Compared to the sometimes devastating comments that were made on the subject [of the behaviour of exhibition visitors], the discussion of individual works were actually really mild.” Werner Kraus, “Raden Saleh (1811–1880). Ein Indo-

nocent life and happiness of my people at home, and by outlining for my countrymen a picture of the wonders of Europe and the nobility of the human spirit.30 We encounter here an artist–aristocrat who identifed with two worlds, a Javanese one under Dutch colonial hegemony, and a European/German cosmopolitanism one under small dukedoms. By the time Raden Saleh went to Paris in January 1845 he had been moving around in circles for 15 years (since his arrival in Holland and Germany) where French was commonly spoken or writings in this language circulated. Interestingly, a late 1860s visitor to Java mentions Saleh’s fuency in French and ability in German and English. His cultural and artistic hybridity was thus a linguistically constructed one that is perplexing for Euramerican art history. This has positioned salon painting as one style which needed to be overturned in his journey of artistic self-perception from the Romantic self, a choice not truly available to Saleh. The mannerisms of one salon painter Horace Vernet (1789–1863) were important for Saleh. They evinced the soft compromise that Saleh himself followed in his success at establishing the transfer of a particular subject matter: The fght “with” animals or fght “between” wild and civilised animals (fg. 4.2).

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nesischer Maler in Deutschland” [Raden Saleh 1811– 1880, an Indonesian painter in Germany], Orientierungen 1 (1996): 29–62. 31 From the unpublished biography of Dozon (who had been to the same lycée as Baudelaire), cited by Claude Guillot & Pierre Labrousse, “Raden Saleh, un artiste-prince à Paris” [Raden Saleh, an artist-prince

in Paris], Archipel 54 (1997): 135. For a list of works painted or remaining in France, see ibid., 152. 32 William Barrington d’Almeida, Life in Java: Vol. 2 (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1864), 288–9. 33 See, inter alia, Kraus, The Beginning of Modern Indonesian Painting, 348–9. 34 Ibid., 128–30.

This was to become an open if allegorical expression of his own ambivalence about the Dutch domination of Javanese culture. Just as Saleh moved in more advanced intellectual and artistic circles in Paris, as he already had in Dresden and Coburg, he was shifted back into the stylistic ambivalences much beloved by both the new bourgeois in the France of Louis-Phillipe, and the increasingly shaky dukedoms and petty monarchies of the German federation so put to the test by the 1848 revolutions. At this juncture in 1845 he encountered the young linguist of Malay, Louis Auguste Dozon, accompanied by the poet Charles Baudelaire. They saw in his studio a Chasse au Tigre painting (attack of a tiger on horsemen in the forest or huntsmen on horses while they are stalking a deer or banteng), which was intended to be exposed in the Salon of 1846.31 It is not known how much Saleh knew of Baudelaire’s later vituperative critiques of Vernet and his mannerisms at the Salon. By 1850, Saleh’s European demeanours were being criticised at a distance among the colonial class in the Dutch Indies, something of which Saleh was to become only too aware after his return to Batavia in 1853. In 1864, W.B. d’Almeida’s Life in Java records:

ciency in the art, and he replied, not that he was aware of, adding humorously:“Café et sucre, sucre et café, sont tout-ce qu’on parle ici. C’est vraiment un air triste pour un artiste.” [Coffee and sugar, sugar and coffee, that’s all one talks about here. It is truly sad-looking for an artist.]32

I asked him whether there were any other Javanese artists who had obtained prof-

Saleh displayed a certain duality upon his return to Java where, apart from one visit to Europe from 1875 to 1878, he lived until his death in 1880. He painted the famous arrest of Prince Diponegoro, whose defeat in 1829 ended effective aristocratic resistance to the Dutch in most of Java. This much-discussed painting, now restored, shows the proud defance of the ugly Dutch by the beautiful, well-formed Javanese, among other allegorical references (fg. 3.3).33 Simultaneously however, he served the government as the King’s Painter in various capacities, including a natural science expedition in 1865 on which he painted the live volcano Merapi (fgs. 3.4 and 3.5). The freedom with which Saleh had moved in many social circles in Europe was not matched in Java where he was subject to various kinds of prejudice in his personal life from both Dutch and Javanese, and treated as a suspect in a rebellion in 1869. This prominence but relative isolation may have accounted for the lack of many followers save one Sundanese student he took in 1873.34 Much of Raden Saleh’s oeuvre

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35

See for example, Carlos González y Ayzelá Montserrat Marti, Pintores Españoles en Roma (1850–1900) [Spanish painters in Rome (1850–1900)] (Barcelona: Tusquets Editores, 1987); Edoardo Dizy Caso, Les Orientalistses de l’École Espagnole [The Orientalists: The Spanish School] (Courbevoie [Paris]: ACR Edition Internationale, 1997); José Luis Díez García, La Pintura de Historia del siglo XIX en España [History painting of the 19 th century in Spain] (Madrid: Museo del Prado, 1992).

was not seen in Java—his reputation there was not one of artistic renown through circulation of works in exhibitions but rather, the social repute he had gained by recognition from his European contemporaries. Academy Mastery The second fgure in the transfer of European salon styles to his Asian homeland is Juan Luna (1857–1899) from the Philippines, who was trained by Spanish painters during the last stages of his adolescence from 1873 to 1876 during the sunset of the Spanish domination of the Philippines. Luna went to Europe from 1877 to 1894 for further training and participation in the art world where he was highly successful, and through his brother Antonio, was an active supporter of Philippines’ independence struggles to overthrow the domination of Spain from 1896 to 1897. He died very shortly after, while active as a diplomat for the nascent Philippines’ Republic about to be bloodily overthrown by the United States of America between 1899 and 1902. Something of the ironical and pictorial position of Luna is shown by his commissioned allegories of the union of Spain and the Philippines, such as España y Filipinas (1884), which was envisaged as two women in sisterly embrace advancing up the well-regulated stairs 54

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37 38

See “The School and the Academy” in Santiago’s updating of his earlier articles in Luciano P.R. Santiago, The Life, Art, and Times of Damián Domingo, 69–84. From Ambeth R. Ocampo, Rizal without the Overcoat (Pasig City: Anvil Publishing, Inc., 2008), 148. Rome au siècle d’Auguste, ou Voyage d’un Gaulois à Rome à l’époque du règne d’Auguste et pendant une partie du règne de Tibèr [Rome in the time of Augustus, adventures of a Gaul in Rome and during a part of the reign of Tiberius] (Paris: Librairie classique et

of progress. These works refect the desire for an assimilationist absorption into Spain with a parallel privileging of the Philippine elite ilustrado class, and perhaps the diffusion of Spanish as a lingua franca away from its hitherto monopolisation in the Philippines by the friars. The complexity of Luna’s oeuvre and the ambivalence of his reaction to colonialism, is found by these paintings being done at almost the same time as an indisputably anti-colonial masterwork, Spoliarium (1884, fg. 3.6). Over a long artistic life during which Luna was active in Manila, Madrid, Rome and Paris, Luna was exposed to many different stylistics. These include the mannerisms seen in the loose scintillating texture effects in the bottom part of España y Filipinas, which came from then famous but now neglected artists such as the Barcelona painter Mariano Fortuny (1838– 1874), and the history painter Alejo Vera (1834–1923). Luna became Vera’s studio pupil in Madrid and followed him to Rome where Luna lived for six years. Rome had an important sub-society of Filipino writers and painters at the time, including the contemporary of both Simon Flores and Juan Luna, Félix Resurrección Hidalgo (1855–1913). Art in Rome was a nexus for certain types of salon art in the mid-19th century which had escaped art historical attention outside the Spanish-speaking world due to the focus on Paris.35

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élémentaire de L. Hachette, 1835). See Patrick D. Flores, “Sanguinary,” in Suri Sining: The Art Studies Anthology (Manila: The Art Studies Foundation, 2011), 2. Thanks for his kindly supplied typescript and notes on the allegory, implied by Spoliarium, that, “Luna’s opus fnds affnity with Filipino Francisco Baltazar’s metrical romance Florante at Laura (1838; 1875) in which its hero laments a failed homeland, in the guise of Albania, that is suffused with and surrounded by a regime of deceit: All over the country/Treach-

ery reigns,/While merit and goodness are prostrate,/ entombed alive in suffering and grief.” Flores cites from eds. Patricia Melendrez-Cruz & Apolonio Chua, Himalay: Kalipunan ng mga Pag-aaral Kay Bagatas [Gleanings: A collection of studies on the Bagatas] (Manila: Cultural Center of the Philippines, 1988); John D. Morris, “José Rizal and the Challenge Of Philippines Independence,” The Schiller Institute, http:// www.schillerinstitute.org/educ/hist/rizal.html (accessed 16 March 2016).

The teaching staff of the Academia de Dibujo y Pintura in Manila where Luna studied from 1874 were Spanish; Luna fell out with the Spanish director Augustín Sáez and was dismissed. This was indicative of the longstanding dissatisfaction in ilustrado or broadly liberal classes with Spanish art pedagogy and codes of valuation. Philippine artists had since the time of Damián Domingo in the 1820s been interested in competent art teaching, at least from a craftsman base.36 Some portraitists and painters of church subjects like Justiano Asuncion y Molo de San Agustin (1816–1896) attained a very high level of competency just before and during the period in which Luna was studying. By the 1870s, even young artists felt themselves able to criticise the competence, technical teaching methods and subjects passed on by their Spanish teachers, aware that there was a fairly long series of very competent and sometimes distinguished works which had been produced since the 1790s by mostly sangley, or specifcally Chinese-Filipino artists. But the comparison between Spanish colonial teaching and that in Madrid was not always unfavourable, and in an 1879 letter to José Rizal about studying in Madrid, Hidalgo writes: “They are all very good professors, but you can be very sure that what you can study [in Manila] under Sr. Augustin Saez is exactly the same as what is taught here.” 37

The move to art school in Manila and later to Madrid privileged Juan Luna in being able to both acquire and critically assess mid19th century Spanish academic technique and its training. It also provided him with a notion of academy style from which he would deviate in 2 ways over the next 20 years: towards dramatic, almost histrionic romantic-historical tableaux, and towards more intimate brighttoned pictures, sometimes with the scintillation effects of Mariano Fortuny (1838–1874), sometimes with a proto-Impressionist touch. Around 1888 to 1895, Luna also moved towards expression of a socialist humanist sympathy with urban working classes in Paris of largely Italian origin, and with whom it is thought he could converse freely due to his own lengthy residence in Rome (fg. 3.7). When Luna’s Spoliarium (fg. 3.6) won a gold medal in 1884 at the Madrid Fine Arts Exposition, Filipino nationalists saw this as national triumph. The painting’s theme was taken from Charles Louis Dezobry, Rome in the Time of Augustus, Adventures of a Gaul in Rome, and in a speech at a later celebratory banquet, Rizal saw Spoliarium as a refection of “the spirit of our social, moral and spiritual life, humanity subjected to trials unredeemed, and reason in open fght with prejudice, fanaticism and injustice.”38 The celebrated orator Graciano López Jaena said: “The Philippines is more than a

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39

Santiago Albano Pilar, Juan Luna: The Filipino as Painter (Manila: Eugenio López Foundation, Inc., 1980), 59. 40 Vincente L. Rafael, The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005; Pasig City: Anvil Publishing, Inc., 2006), xvii. 41 Raquel A.S. Reyes carefully analyses Luna’s “tenacious” treatment of female fgures and the function of this exploration for an ilustrado imaginary in the chapter “Encountering La Parisienne: Juan Luna and the Challenge of Modern Femininity,” in Love, Passion, and Patriotism: Sexuality and the Philippine Propaganda

veritable Spoliarium with all its horrors! There lie the mangled fragments, humanity massacred, the rights of man perverted! There is no semblance of justice for the common man, and liberty is cinders, ashes, dust!”39 The intellectual historian Rafael calls translation “the double process of appropriating and replacing the foreign while keeping its foreignness in view;” a technique used by the friars to make Spanish codes acceptable to those who could not know Castilian, while simultaneously broadcasting the friars’ domination over the Spanish by the insertion of certain “untranslatable” Castilian words in local languages.40 The counter-demonstration of Filipino control over other metropolitan codes such as cuisine, dress and art, might all be regarded as analogues of the acquired translation techniques used by, and which were previously the exclusive prerogative of, the Catholic friars. Thus the prize-awarding in 1884 to Spoliarium had a subversive import even as one must presume the awarding judges thought they were privileging assimilation. Rizal’s second novel El Filibusterismo (1891), translated as “The Sub56

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Movement (Singapore: NUS Press; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), 39–83. An early sign of his populist sentiments sympathetic to nationalist aspirations was his reported marching as the banner bearer for an art association in the funeral cortège of Garibaldi in 1882. See John N. Schumacher S.J., The Propaganda Movement 1880–1895: The Creation of a Filipino Consciousness, the Making of the Revolution (Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1997), 296. He concludes that “even if all these reforms were to be attributed to the propaganda carried on by the Filipino reformists, the

versive” by contemporaries, was part of the ideological background which led to Rizal’s execution in 1896, the year when both Luna and his brother Antonio (later a revolutionary General) were also arrested. If there is one change in Luna’s subject matter it is in portraiture. He is certainly one of the frst Filipino artists to look seriously at the urban working class rather than just assemble picaresque types by occupation. Whether within the urban working class we are also to place his numerous studies of urban women, including poor fower sellers, stall holders and prostitutes, together with his erotic studies in the Roman idyll idiom of his time, including those of his wife, is questionable.41 These seem to be far more part of the male studio artist’s conventional repertory of the times. Beftting someone trained by the Spanish academicism against which he so often reacted, we do not habitually see social situations pivoted against religious fgures or elite historical subjects. Luna had, one can deduce, a very frm idea of what his elite public would accept, but from the late 1880s he was certainly engaged with

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reform campaign must still be deemed a substantial failure. For the principle behind most of the reforms actually implemented was paternalistic colonialism, not assimilation. Reforms professedly assimilationist in intent, like the extension of the civil and penal codes of the Peninsula to the Philippines, were often emasculated.” Part of the history of the work’s return to the Philippines is given in Butch Dalisay, “Restoring the Spoliarium,” The Philippine Star, 17 July 2006, http://www. philstar.com/arts-and-culture/347865/restoring%C2%91spoliarium%C2%92 (accessed 10 February

depicting the urban working class who lived around him in Paris (fg. 3.7).42 The art historical signifcance of Juan Luna’s oeuvre remains cut off from his own country until after World War II. He can be seen as a colonial artist who successfully managed counter-appropriation and to a degree, achieved metropolitan assimilation, but as part of a reform movement which ultimately failed.43 This served briefy in the 1880s and 1890s as a model for other cultural transformations but only for a miniscule group, affecting educated elite competent in Castilian. The political situation in the Philippines did not allow the foundation of a new national art, and indeed after many vicissitudes in Spain the work Spoliarium only entered the Philippines in 1958.44 As Flores has indicated, Spoliarium signifcantly anticipates the novel of Rizal, Noli me Tangere (Touch me Not, 1887).45 But after Luna’s commission for the Batalla de Lepanto (1887), Rizal criticised Luna for being a “Hispanophile, so […] he was never willing to paint anything against the Spaniards.”46 Ac-

45 46 47

2016). The work was subject to repair and re-assemblage on its return, and was frst shown in 1962. See Carlos E. Da Silva, “History of the Spoliarium,” in Spoliarium: Unveiling Souvenir Program, exh. cat. (Manila: Juan Luna Centennial Commission, 7 December 1962), extracts of which I am grateful to Patrick D. Flores for supplying. Flores, op. cit. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 8. Translated by Flores, citing José Bantung, Epistolario del pintor Juan Luna [Collected letters of the painter Juan Luna] (Madrid: Circulo Filipino, 1955), 34.

cusation of cultural treason is very easy with an establishment painter like Luna who had already completed the Pacto de Sangre in 1886 (commemorating a blood oath in 1565 between the Spanish invader of the Philippines, Miguel López de Legazpi, and the Muslim ruler, Rajah Sikatuna of Bohol) which was publicly unveiled in November 1887, nine months after Noli Me Tangere was published. It was perhaps enough for Luna to show himself an assimilado equal of the metropolitan painters. Patriotic counter-appropriation of a metropolitan discourse is a diffcult and necessarily complex position for a colonial, one which meets with cynical self-appraisal by the artist. Later on Luna saw himself as a member of the dissident salon Société Nationale des Beaux Arts and had a cool eye for bourgeois history painting, commenting: “All paintings depicting History are false, beginning with what is essential, which is the conception, and those that believe that a good composition, correct drawing, brilliant colour and a lot of period attire suffce for a fne painting are mistaken.”47

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But one may ask what range of imagery and technical expression was founded by Juan Luna and then carried on, perhaps with different intentions, by others. The 1896 Katipunan Rising seems to have surprised the ilustrado class which took part in it semi-autonomously.48 It created the frst of two breaks with the 19thcentury tendency towards assimilated acceptance of Spanish “colonial enlightenment” which one can see in Luna, and indeed Rizal, who died proclaiming his loyalty to Spain. It was the friars, with their anti-enlightenment cultural restriction of Castilian as well as their local manipulation and oppression of Filipino congregations, who were their main enemy. Perhaps the American conquest in 1898 came too quickly for a social space to be opened in the new Philippine Republic—one that could be openly critical of the friars, and for which one would expect to see extensive satirical imagery that Luna might well have provided. What was passed on, probably determinatively, as a former Spanish painter became the frst head of the art school at the new University of the Philippines (Rafael Enriquez, director 1909–1925), was a re-assertion of national types and a kind of (male-centred) erotics of self-determination seen above all in the work of Fernando C. Amorsolo (1892–1972), depicting beautiful female peasants engaged in noble agricultural toil. Portraits from Life The code of verisimilitude can bewitch, and there appear to be several cross-regional comparisons in portraiture possible despite the fragmentation of Southeast Asia in the 19th century by Euramerican colonial powers. The commanding local ruler depicted in 1879 by Raden Saleh’s pupil, Raden Kusumadibrata, appears to be there in reality, looking at us as we dare to observe him (fg. 3.8). The hierarchically superior position of the Regent is fgured in photographic lighting: We think this 58

personage is truly embodied with power, or elegance, or a certain ferce resolve, because the image is linked indexically to that of whom it is also a representation. Here perhaps, is the frst of a long series of portraits of powerful persons which continues into the postcolonial period in many parts of Asia. But let us set this aristocratic portrait alongside the depiction of bourgeois delights in a settled, comfortable and secure family life, a colonial world which encloses by its comfort and allegorises security (fg. 3.9). There had been some antecedence for this display of colonial safety in Saleh’s 1832 depiction of the family in Holland of his Dutch colonial sponsor The Baud Family in their Voorburg Country House, but these predecessors were only implicitly present in pictorial discourse by the 1870s to 1890s. If in a way, the cross-regional antecedent for representing a national, incipiently anticolonial hero is Saleh’s quiet, dignifed image of Diponegoro (fg. 3.3), Fabian de la Rosa’s portrait of the national hero (fg. 3.10) who had been executed six years earlier on 30 December 1896 is of someone intellectually earnest and emotionally ferce in his rejection of colonial hypocrisy, showing a secular honesty as opposed to the false religiosity of the friars which Rizal’s books ridiculed. De la Rosa’s Rizal portrait looks back at an only recently dead martyr in anticipation of a future where the values he embodied might serve as both a national reference and a template for future behaviour. The past here becomes a personifed allegory about a time in the future, one where the individual is completely Asian, having mastered the West in so many ways. In a mode of portraiture much followed later elsewhere in Asia, it is a modern Asian allegory about what sort of person should come to be.49 A local meaning has thus been made implicit within an art expression that was once borrowed—and afterwards utterly transformed by the new subjects it is mobilised to show.

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48

Reynaldo Clemeña Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840–1910 (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1979), 79. Ileto opines that “a serious obstacle to contemporary understanding of the Katipunan is the established view that the rise of nationalism culminating in the revolution of 1896–1900 was purely a consequence of heightened Westernization in the nineteenth century.” However, he considers that despite the injustices perceived by ilustrados after their education abroad, the real ideological construction of Philippines’ independence comes from within and below the class of the ilustrados, and the turning of Catholic theology to notions of redemptive revolt by the very large bulk of the population who did not know Castilian, let alone went abroad. He continues his analysis of the conventional view of nationalism due to the

Philippines being understood by ilustrados from outside: “It was only during their stay abroad that these young, educated Filipinos, called ‘ilustrados’ realized what freedom meant, heightened consciousness led to the dissolution of the ‘aura of authority and the halo of grace’ that has bound Filipinos to the colonial order. Realizing such injustices done to them, as forced labor, taxes, and inequality before the law, the ilustrados began to wage a propaganda campaign aimed to make Filipinos and Spaniards equal before the existing colonial framework; they wanted reforms not independence. In spite of their limited aims, however, the ilustrados are credited with having frst conceived of a Filipino national community.” 49 This anticipates the manipulation of fctitious images of the young Chairman Mao as the model personality for youth in 1960s China.

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Anonymous Five Javanese Court Offcials (detail of one painting) c. 1820–1870 Cotton (textile), oil and gold paint (gilding) on paper 196.8 x 74.3 cm Collection of Rijksmuseum Image courtesy of Rijksmuseum Khrua In Khong Allegory of Dharma showing horse racing c. 1850s–1860s Mural in Wat Borom Niwat, Bangkok. Photograph by Khun Pairin, with the kind permission of Wat Borom Niwat.

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Raden Saleh The Arrest of Diponegoro 1857 Oil on canvas 112 x 179 cm Koleksi Istana Presiden, Jakarta Photographer: Susanne Erhards Photo © Goethe-Institut Indonesien

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Raden Saleh Merapi, Eruption by Day 1865 Oil on canvas 59.5 x 92 cm Collection of the Tan Family Raden Saleh Merapi, Eruption by Night 1865 Oil on canvas 58.6 x 91 cm Collection of the Tan Family

3.6 Juan Luna Spoliarium 1884 Oil on canvas 422 x 766 cm Collection of National Museum of the Philippines, Manila

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3.7 Juan Luna Unknown Heroes 1891 Oil on canvas 195 x 258 cm Collection of Biblioteca Museu Víctor Balaguer. Vilanova i la Geltrú Image courtesy of Biblioteca Museu Víctor Balaguer

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Raden Kusumadibrata Raden Adipati Kusumadiningrat, Regent of Galuh 1879 Oil on canvas 196 x 128 cm Collection of Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen, coll.no. TM-A-5752 3.8



3.9 Jan Daniel Beynon A Lazy Afternoon 1859 Oil on canvas 43 x 53 cm Collection of National Gallery Singapore 3.10 Fabian de la Rosa Rizal 1902 Oil on canvas 64.6 x 48.8 cm Collection of National Gallery Singapore

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In Amsterdam. Raden Saleh showed Een mans Portrait (Portrait of a Man). See Lijst der kunstwerken van nog in leven zijnde Nederlandsche Meesters, welke zijn toegelaten tot de Tentoonstelling van den Jare 1834 [List of artworks of living Dutch Masters, which are admitted to the Exhibition in the year 1834] (Amsterdam: s.n., 1834), 14, no. 377. Agus Dermawan & Mikke Sutanto, Maestro seni rupa modern Indonesia [Maestro of Indonesian modern painting] trans. Landung P. Simatupang (Jakarta: Kementrian Pariwisata & Ekonomi Kreatief Republik Indonesia, 2013), 14. The other two paintings in the collection of National

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Gallery Singapore are Wounded Lion (c. 1839) and Ship in Distress (1842). It is not until 1898 that a second Indonesian artist (Javanese-born like Saleh) received professional training in Europe, specifcally Leiden and Amsterdam in the Netherlands. It was the young “Mas Abdullah” alias Abdullah Suriosubroto (1878–1941), who became a prominent landscape painter. Also known as “Abdullah Senior,” he was the father of the painters Sudjono Abdullah (1911–1991) and Basoeki Abdullah (1915–1993). Saleh’s father, Sayyid Husen bin Alwi bin Awal, his mother, Raden Ayu Syarif Husen bin Alwi bin Awal, and Sura Adimanggala were cousins. They shared the

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The Javanese Painter Raden Saleh (c. 1811–1880): A Star in the Firmament of Indonesian Modern Visual Art Marie-Odette Scalliet

In 19th-century history of Southeast Asian fne arts, the Javanese painter Raden Saleh Syarif Bustaman (c. 1811–1880, fg. 4.1) occupies a singular position. After having been introduced to Western academic painting techniques in his homeland, he was the frst artist of Asian origin to receive professional training in Europe. As early as 1834, he was the frst to have shown a painting at a European Exhibition of Living Masters.1 In the context of Indonesian art history, Raden Saleh is regarded as the perintis (precursor) of seni lukis modern Indonesia (modern Indonesian painting), and Dermawan and Sutanto opine that “the modernity of his art obviously has connection with the painter’s journey through life.”2 In the 21st century, no fewer than three of his paintings were the frst to have been 60

acquired by an Asian public museum, National Gallery Singapore, outside of Indonesia. One of them counts among the masterpieces of this museum; it has passed into posterity under the title Boschbrand (Forest Fire) (fg. 4.2), and is the most spectacular and intriguing the artist ever painted.3 Raden Saleh’s fame is largely due to his numerous dramatic compositions depicting big cats and other wild animals like deers, bantengs and rhinoceroses. By the subject of its composition depicting tigers, bantengs, leopards and a stag feeing the inferno of a burning Javanese forest, and its monumental size, Forest Fire is unique in Saleh’s artistic creation. The painting was conceived and completed in Paris between 1847 and 1849. Saleh’s remarkable destiny—the twists and

Charting Thoughts

same grandfather, Kyai Ngabehi Kertabasa Bustam. On Raden Saleh’s ancestry, see Raden Adipati Aria Kartadiningrat & Boepati Madjalengka, “Silsilah Bestaman” [Genealogy Bestaman], Tijdschrift voor Indische Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde [Journal of linguistics, geography and ethnography of the East Indies] XLII, nos. 2–3 (1900): 135–43; H.J. de Graaf, “Het Semarangse geslacht Bustam in de 18e en de 19e eeuw: afkomst en jeugd van Radèn Salèh” [The Semarang family Bustam in the 18th and 19 th centuries: Origin and youth of Raden Saleh], Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde [Journal of the humanities and social sciences of Southeast Asia] 135 (1979): 252–81. It was in Europe that Saleh (sometimes)

turns of his cosmopolitan life, his encounters with the intellectual and artistic elite, his relations at princely and royal courts over more than two decades in Europe (1829–1851), as well as his achievements—defes imagination. The singularity of his case is not comparable with that of other younger Southeast Asian artists such as, for instance, the Filipinos Juan Luna (1857–1899) and Félix Resurrección Hidalgo (1855–1913), who also experienced Europe.4 Encouraged by Antoine Auguste Joseph Payen (1792–1853), his frst teacher and lifelong companion during his many years in Java, Saleh was not just a budding artist who became aware of a true vocation and succeeded in fulflling his ambition on the threshold of adult life. Born in Central Java, he was not the free citizen of a sovereign nation. Like his countrymen, Saleh was subjected to a colonial regime imposed by a foreign nation: the kingdom of the Netherlands. As a protagonist and spectator of diverging and converging (if not fundamentally opposing) sociocultural and political entities, from a young age, Saleh developed an amazing gift for the acquisition of new knowledge and a remarkable adaptability. Despite the necessary compromises made under Dutch rule, he acclimatised to the regime without ever

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added “Syarif Bustaman” to his name to stress his family origin and identity. In his writings, Saleh never mentions his father, who probably died when he was still an infant. His mother was still alive in 1853. No other source corroborates this information; Saleh himself is inconsistent. In November 1836, he asserted being 27 years old (this implies 1809 as his year of birth, which is more plausible than 1811), and in a letter dated December 1865, he writes that he was 16 when he arrived in the Netherlands (in 1829); he would thus have been born in 1813, which is less plausible. However for a Javanese, a date of birth Anno Domini was then irrelevant.

losing his own sense of identity or Islamic faith. In situations made up of paradoxes and ambiguities, Saleh’s personal and artistic accomplishments, in his homeland and in Europe, should therefore be regarded from both Eastern and Western perspectives. It is imperative, though challenging, to keep a balance between objectivity and subjectivity within diametrically opposed colonial and postcolonial discourses and manifold interpretations. Born under an Auspicious Star Saleh, the painter who would include in his thematic repertoire, seascapes depicting ships in distress slamming into raging seas, like the one in the National Gallery Singapore, saw the light close by the shores of the Java Sea, in the residential area of Terboyo (Torbaya) situated north-east of Semarang (Central Java), along the road to Demak. His parents were part of the extended household of their common frst cousin Kyai Adipati Sura Adimanggala (c. 1760–1827), the regent of Semarang.5 According to Saleh’s autographed inscription on a small portrait of him drawn by C.C. Vogel von Vogelstein in Dresden, 1839, he was born in May 1811, in the year of the British invasion of Java.6 If the month and year are accurate,

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Napoleon set up the kingdom of Holland in 1806, placing his brother Louis Bonaparte on its throne. In 1810, Napoleon annexed Holland. Undated drawings (no later than 1825) held at Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, and the Collection Payen in Museum Volkenkunde, Leiden, bear the signature “Sarib Saleh.” The letter from 1820 is signed “Saleh” (see note 22, infra). In his writings Payen refers to “Saleh.” “Raden” is a predicate. Peter Carey, The Power of Prophecy: Prince Diponegoro and the End of the Old Order in Java, 1785–1855 (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2007), 351.

10 “Bengal Extracts. Durrumtollah Academy, Classical,

the infant Saleh was subjected to the French colonial empire shortly before the Franco-Dutch administration was handed over to LieutenantGovernor Thomas Stamford Raffes (1781– 1826).7 From the very beginning, the little Sarib Saleh was exposed to the paradoxes and ambiguities of colonial rule as experienced by his family.8 He was at the same time immersed in a learned, literate environment. Adimanggala was a scholar with deep knowledge of Javanese literature, customary law, religion and civilisation in its different aspects. He was openminded, and is known to have been one of the few key informants for scholar administrators like Raffes and John Crawfurd (1783–1868). His expertise enabled them to draw on local sources for their respective studies and encyclopaedic publications: Raffes’ History of Java (1817) and Crawfurd’s History of the Indian Archipelago (1820).9 Encouraged by Raffes, the enlightened regent was the frst Javanese found willing to send two of his children abroad for a Western scholarly education. A precedent was thus set, though Adimanggala’s sons Raden Mas Saleh (c.1800–n.d.) and Raden Sukur (c.1802–n.d.) were not sent to Europe but instead, to Durrumtollah Academy, Calcutta, in 1812. Three years later, after having successfully passed the “annual examination,”

“Denmas Saleh [Raden Mas Saleh], the young Javanese Nobleman” returned to Semarang with “honorary rewards for his profciency in Geometry, Algebra, and Drawing.”10 It is tempting to imagine the elder cousin encouraging the child’s natural talent and guiding him in his frst steps in the art of drawing.

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Commercial and Mathematical,” Java Government Gazette, 11 March 1815, 3; Carey, op. cit., 364. R.M. Said’s presence in Buitenzorg is attested by an 1821 letter addressed to Reinwardt from the regent signed off as “Adimangolo.” Years later in 1842, R.M. Said reminded Reinwardt in another letter that he was Reinwardt’s “anak piara di [adopted child in] Buitenzorg.” Letters held in Leiden University Library, Reinwardt Archives, BPL 2922. Saleh reveals his family relationship with R.M. Said in a letter in Malay, using the word kaponakan (nephew, not cousin). See details of this in Marie-Odette Scalliet, “Raden Saleh et les

First Steps towards an Unpredictable Destiny Saleh’s life took a turn with far-reaching consequences probably in late 1819, and certainly no later than mid-1820. He left Semarang and his family, and was taken to Buitenzorg (Bogor), where the governor-general’s palace and the administrative offces were situated. A clarifcation must be made regarding one point: Saleh was not left alone to face a different life in West Java; Raden Mas Said, a nephew of his, shared his fate.11 In the meantime, the so-called British interregnum in Java had come to an end: “In 1816 Java and other Indonesian posts were returned to Dutch authority as part of the general reconstruction of European affairs after the Napoleonic wars.”12 Napoleon’s geographical and political empire belonged to the past. New boundaries outlined the monarchies and principalities of Europe as settled by the Con-

Marie-Odette Scalliet

Hollandais: Artiste protégé ou otage politique?” [Raden Saleh and the Dutch: Protected artist or political hostage?], Archipel 69 (2005): 151–258. 12 M.C. Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c. 1200, 3rd ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 143. 13 The United Kingdom of the Netherlands equate, grosso modo, to the modern kingdoms of the Netherlands and Belgium, whose bounderies were drawn in 1843. Dutch kings and queens are not crowned but “inaugurated.” 14 On Reinwardt and in particular his mission in the Dutch East Indies, see Andreas Weber, Hybrid Ambi-

gress of Vienna. The former Dutch Republic of the Seven Provinces (Northern Low Countries) was not restored but merged with the former Austrian Netherlands (Southern Low Countries). William I (1772–1843), Prince of Orange-Nassau and Sovereign Prince in 1813, became in 1815 the frst King of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, and ruler of the Grand-Duchy of Luxemburg.13 There are no sources to shed light on the circumstances in which the decision to send Saleh to Buitenzorg was taken, or the exact duration of time Saleh spent there. We do know that contact with Saleh’s family was made when governor-general G.A.G.P. van der Capellen (1778–1848) undertook two offcial journeys across Java in 1817 and 1819, and was received by Adimanggala in Terboyo. Professor C.G.C. Reinwardt (1773–1854), director of the Department of Agriculture, Arts and Sciences of Java and the neighbouring islands, and the draughtsman Adrianus Johannes (Jan) Bik (1790 –1872) were included in the governor-general’s 1817 retinue.14 Rather than speculate on the reasons for this “adoption” by the governor-general, which suggests he wished to ensure the fdelity of Adimanggala and his family or wanted to use the young Saleh and Raden Mas Said as examples of his ability to “civilise” the natives, we must emphasise Saleh’s

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tions: Science, Governance, and Empire in the Career of Caspar G.C. Reinwardt (1773–1854) (Amsterdam: Leiden University Press, 2012; originally PhD diss., Leiden University) https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/ handle/1887/18924 (accessed 15 October 2015); Andreas Weber, “Bitter Fruits of Accumulation: The Case of Caspar Georg Carl Reinwardt (1773–1854),” History of Science 52, no. 3 (2014): 297–318, http:// hos.sagepub.com/content/52/3/297 (accessed 15 October 2015). Note 3 and Scalliet, “Raden Saleh et les Hollandais,” 152.

recognised artistic talent. Maybe it was Reinwardt who was solely responsible for the mutual agreement with the boys’ family. It is also known that Reinwardt renewed contact with Saleh’s family when he stayed in Semarang in 1818 and late 1819.15 Raden Mas Said could assist him as a translator of Malay and Javanese, and Saleh could be trained to make botanical drawings of specimens of fora growing in the Kebun Raya (Botanical Garden) Reinwardt had started to lay out in 1817 or collected during his scientifc explorations. In any case, three potential teachers were then based in Buitenzorg as artists attached to Reinwardt’s “department”: the aforementioned Jan Bik, his young brother Jannes Theodoor Bik (1796– 1875), and the landscape painter and architect Antoine Payen. It has been mentioned that the younger Bik was Saleh’s frst teacher, though no contemporary archival source corroborates this presumption. However it was Payen who took Saleh under his wing, and this decision resulted for the major part in a then unpredictable outcome. It resulted also in a relationship lasting far beyond the mentor’s departure to Europe in early 1826. Many years later on the occasion of a reunion in 1847, the former pupil and companion, who had since become a celebrated painter in Europe, offered to the 55-year-old Payen a signifcant and sensitive token of their

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16 Marie-Odette Scalliet, “‘Back to the Nature’ in the East Indies,” in Pictures from the Tropics: Paintings by Western Artists during the Dutch Colonial Period in Indonesia (Amsterdam: Royal Tropical Institute; Wijk en Aalburg: Pictures Publishers, 1999), 58. 17 Ibid., 48–9. 18 Payen was born in Brussels. His family was from Tournai city in the province of Hainaut, Belgium. 19 As a matter of fact, in the absence of a colonial government-appointed architect Van der Capellen created for Payen the additional post of “governorgeneral’s architect.” Many projects took up a great deal of Payen’s time to the detriment of his painter’s mission, from designing an English garden at the rear of the Buitenzorg palace and seeing to its res-

mutual attachment in the form of a fne and sober portrait (fg. 4.3) depicting the amiable face of, according to his youngest daughter, a “true scholar and conscientious artist.”16 According to Van der Capellen, Payen was “a very pleasant and sociable man besides a highly gifted one. To know him is to like him, and he is a great favourite with my guests.”17 Payen was indeed a highly educated man. After solid classical schooling, he studied architecture at the academy of Tournai like his father and uncle, and landscape painting in the studio of Henri Van Assche (1774–1841) in Brussels.18 In Java since 1817, Payen had already explored the region of Bogor and parts of the Priangan (Parayangan), the volcanic heart of the Sunda lands, before Saleh was entrusted to him. As a landscapist appointed by King William I, his primary mission was to execute faithful views of Java—of its fora and fauna, of daily life in kampungs and the felds, and also of antiquities in Java and other islands of the archipelago he visited.19 For this purpose, Payen made hundreds of sketches, more elaborate drawings and watercolours, oil studies and several topographic maps he used for the compositions in oil on canvas he painted in his studio.20 64

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tauration, to planning the construction of a prison in Banyuwangi in the far eastern part of Java, and also designing a funeral monument for Rumphius in Amboina. With the exception of a few items, Payen’s collection, including his paintings and diaries, is held at Museum Volkenkunde, Leiden. For details pertaining to the catalogue, biography and edition of Payen’s diaries and letters, see Marie-Odette Scalliet, Antoine Payen peintre des Indes orientales: Vie et écrits d’un artiste du XIXe siècle (1792–1853) [Antoine Payen, painter of the East Indies: The life and writings of a 19 th-century artist (1792–1853)] (Leiden: Onderzoekschool CNWS, 1995; originally PhD diss., Leiden University).

While reading Payen’s frst diary which covers the years 1817–1819, one can trace his itineraries, learn about the manners, customs, folk tales and legends of the Sundanese kampung inhabitants, and pinpoint with precision many picturesque spots that showcased the river Citarum (Tjitaroem) and its rocky, wooded banks at its best (during sunrise or sunset). It enables us to localise and date the painting The River Citarum, Priangan (West Java), with Figures on a Tree-Trunk Raft held at National Gallery Singapore (fg. 4.4). This view depicted in oil on paper is taken upstream of the cave Sanghyang Tikoro situated northeast of Bandung where a branch of the river fows, nowadays a popular tourist attraction.21 Observations of Nature and Life Lessons: Birth of a Vocation Saleh’s sedentary life in Buitenzorg would not last for long. The boy would soon share Payen’s vie errante (or wandering life), as the latter called it, and experience the hardship of long journeys on horseback or foot, and of makeshift camps. It is hard to imagine that their frst expedition together lasted about six months, an expedition in the best tradition of early

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Payen set up camp in the vicinity of the river and the cave between 23 May and 10 June 1819. He made several drawings and studies in oil; see Payen’s diary entries in Scalliet, ibid., 303–11. 22 Scalliet, “Raden Saleh et les Hollandais,” 157–9. Saleh (as he signed) addressed a letter to Reinwardt dated 30 September 1820 during this expedition. It is the only extant letter written by Saleh before he left Java in 1829. 23 It is hard to believe that Saleh was then only nine years old, if he was indeed born in 1811. 24 By a fortunate coincidence, an anonymous draughtsman drew a map of Bandung (c. 1825) with indication of Payen’s house, reproduced in: L. van der Pijl et al., Bandoeng en haar hoogvlakte [Bandung and its

19th-century inland explorations that included bearers, servants, and the assistance of the local authorities, guides and informants. They travelled all the way down to the shores of the Indian Ocean across a sparsely inhabited and inhospitable part of West Java.22 If Saleh had not enjoyed this trying experience, rich in discoveries and life lessons, one can safely assume that he would have made clear his preference to either live permanently in Buitenzorg or return to his family.23 Instead, he stayed with Payen and in early 1822 followed him to Bandung, which was to be their home base over the next four years.24 Rather than the representatives of colonial society in Buitenzorg, Payen preferred the company of the local population from whom he could learn so much, hence his choice to reside in Bandung, situated in the heart of the Priangan. In light of the insatiable hunger for studying Saleh showed in Europe, as well as his unfagging desire to become as accomplished as possible an artist (an ambition repeatedly formulated like a mantra in his letters), it is not superfuous to emphasise the long and enriching years spent in West Java, and in particular in the Priangan where he lived until 1829, as formative and foundational to his artistic practice.

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plateau], ed. L. van der Pijl (Bandoeng: N.V. Visser & Co., 1950), 11. Unfortunately, the source of the original map is not mentioned. Bandung was then a mere village. The most devastating 19 th-century volcanic eruption in Java, with the exception of the explosion of the volcanic island Krakatoa (Krakatau) in 1883. This event created a tsunami, resulting in mass casualties. H.J.C. Hoogeveen, Togten naar den Merapi, in midden Java, tijdens zijn eruptie in November en December 1865 [Expeditions to the Merapi in central Java, during its eruption in November and December 1865] (s.l.: s.n., 1866), 8. Author’s translation. Two paintings depicting the erupting Merapi by day and night, both dated 1865, are on loan at National Gallery Singapore (fgs. 3.4 and 3.5).

Payen shared with Saleh his fascination for the sweeping natural landscape and topography of the region. He was also a devoted amateur naturalist, surveyor, and collector of minerals and specimens of the fauna, in particular birds, insects and butterfies. “Observations of nature” were indeed keywords Saleh made his own for the rest of his life: nature in all its forms and manifestations, animate and inanimate, desolate and inhabited, peaceful and frightening like the catastrophic eruption of the Gunung Galunggung in October 1822.25 This dramatic and tragic event leads us to the explosive eruption of the Gunung Merapi Saleh witnessed when he stayed in Yogyakarta in 1865. He participated in a expedition, and, from a rather safe distance, observed “the Merapi transformed in a true Pandaemonium. The spectacle was terrible, horrifying, frightening, made you shiver, but was at the same time beautiful, splendid, marvellous, and incredibly attractive.”26 Saleh must have made sketches after nature as back in his studio, he depicted several realistic views of the volcano spewing ash clouds, glowing lava fows running down its fank by day and night.27 It is more than likely that Saleh’s self-consciousness as an artist “who would be painter”

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28 Ready-to-use tubes of oil paint had not yet been 29

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invented. As detailed in a letter sent from J.F.C. Gericke to the Directors Board of the Dutch Bible Society, dated 4 September 1827, Semarang. Letter held in: Het Utrechts Archief, Archives Nederlands Bijbelgenootschap, inv. no. 888. In a letter sent to the King (23 January 1834, The Hague), Saleh confrms that he had learned to paint in oil in Java. Letter held in: Nationaal Archief, The Hague, access no. 2.10.01, Ministerie van Koloniën 1814­–1849, inv. no. 931 (verbaal [minutes], 26 July 1834, no. 17). Saleh disembarked on 20 July 1829 in Antwerp, home

was awakened in the company of Payen, listening to him, observing him at work and possibly helping him make oil paint by crushing pigments and mixing them with linseed oil.28 Although there is no explicit mention that Payen instructed his protégé in oil painting techniques, Saleh did try his hand so well that a traveller who called at Cianjur in 1827 noted that he had met “Raden Saleh, a young man who paints remarkably well.”29 Unfortunately this visitor does not give any precise details as to the subject of the painting(s) he saw, and there are no surviving works from Saleh’s West Javanese years until 1829. However, Saleh had found his vocation and proceeded to follow his frst teacher’s footsteps. A stroke of luck provided him with the opportunity to travel to Europe in the company of the civil servant J.B. De Linge, who offered him passage in exchange for lessons in Malay and Javanese.30 Saleh was not meant to stay more than a few months in Antwerp but, as we know, he did indeed stay in the Netherlands, come under the protection of the Dutch king and move to The Hague where he spent ten years.31 After The Hague, Saleh lived and worked in Germany (Dresden and Coburg), settled in Paris, which became his home base from 1845 to 1850, travelled several times to Germany for short and long stays, 66

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city of the Flemish family De Linge. One wonders what Saleh did in the city of Rubens for six months, before he moved to The Hague. Saleh came under royal protection through the intermediary of J.C. Baud, a protective fatherly fgure and key presence in Saleh’s career, as well as his good relationship with the three successive Dutch kings, the colonial administration, and the Netherlands in general. Baud’s numerous reports and considerations, and Saleh’s letters to him (up to 1853), contain a treasure trove of information. For a detailed account of Saleh’s years in The Hague, see Scalliet, “Raden Saleh et les Hollandais,” 167–258.

and also visited Great Britain in the summer of 1847.32 Saleh would not be back in Java before early 1852, almost 23 years after his great departure. Raden Saleh the Artist-Painter: Landscapes, Tigers and Other Wild Animals, Hunting Parties The spectacular landscapes of the Priangan dominated by volcanoes and the richness of its fauna and luxuriant fora were sources of inspiration for numerous compositions Saleh conceived of in Europe and upon his return to Java. So too the famous deer and stag hunting parties held in the wide plain of Bandung, closed in from the south by a range of hills and mountains and dominated by the Malabar volcano. A selection of paintings dated between 1840 and 1849 illustrates the quintessence of Saleh’s predilection for dramatic scenes depicting wild animals, in particular the tiger. Colloquially known as si Loreng or the “Striped one,” the tiger was at once Java’s most feared and revered animal, respected for its alleged supernatural powers. These paintings illustrate as well Saleh’s skill as a landscape painter, and bear witness to the vivid memory he had of the regions he lived in and visited when, many

Marie-Odette Scalliet

32 For an account of Saleh in Germany, see Werner Kraus, Raden Saleh: The Beginning of Modern Indonesian Painting, eds. Werner Kraus & Irina Vogelsang, trans. Chris Cave & Werner Kraus (Jakarta: GoetheInstitut Indonesien, 2012), 40–55; Werner Kraus, Raden Saleh (1811–1880): Ein Javanischer Maler in Europa [Raden Saleh (1811–1880): A Javanese painter in Europe], ed. Julia Nauhaus (Altenburg: Lindenau-Museum, 2013), 10–47. For an overview of Saleh in Paris, see Claude Guillot & Pierre Labrousse, “Raden Saleh: Un artiste-prince à Paris” [Raden Saleh: An artist-prince in Paris], Archipel 54 (1997): 123–51, http://www.persee.fr/doc/arch_0044-8613_

1997_num_54_1_3419 (accessed 15 October 2015); Marie-Odette Scalliet, “Chronique de l’année des tigres: Raden Saleh entre Paris et Dresde” [Chronicle of the year of the tigers: Raden Saleh between Paris and Dresden], Archipel 74 (2007): 206–17, http://www. persee.fr/doc/arch_0044-8613_2007_num_74_1_ 3921?h=scalliet). 33 Many 19 th-century accounts (Payen’s being one of them) mention tigers attacking people in the felds and kampungs, even breaking through the thatched roof of their houses. 34 Hence its name “talaga bodas,” or “white lake” in Sundanese.

years after his arrival in Europe, he chose his subjects in his Dresden and Paris studios. Finally, a small collection of three paintings dated 1860 give insight into his production after his return to Java, and indicate the genres that were much in demand by his well-to-do European and Indo-European relations. Forest Fire (fg. 4.2) is not only the most spectacular and astonishing picture Saleh ever conceived, it is also the largest (300 x 396 cm) among his recorded paintings. A representative selection of wild animals that once roamed over large areas of both the Javanese wilderness and inhabited countryside are driven by a wildfre.33 Carried by strong gusts of wind, the fames and glowing embers spread along trees, tree-ferns, and alang-alang (tall-bladed grass), causing the frantic fight of a stag, a spotted and a black leopard, a pair of bantengs (a darkcoated bull and a light-coated cow) and two tigers towards a cliff overhanging a lake. Caught between an engulfng inferno and a precipice, these seven animals are united by the artist in a common, desperate struggle for their improbable survival. The depicted scene is one of great violence, and the sense of panic and lurking lethal danger is almost palpable. The action is integrated into the West Javanese mountainous landscape that is devoid of human presence

and shows similarities to the topography of the Talagabodas volcano near Garut, southwest of Bandung. The crater contains a large sulphursaturated lake, its steep rim covered with thick primeval vegetation bar several barren rocky walls on one side.34 If the situation of the Talagabodas indeed inspired Saleh, the animals are irremediably doomed. Might an animal survive the vertiginous fall, no salvation is conceivable in the lake. There is no spark of hope. Having fed from one hell, that of consuming fames, the animals are about to be engulfed by another hell, that of corrosive, deadly waters. A strong contrast in the composition of the painting wherein the land animals occupy its major part, attracting the spectator’s attention, is created by the scene simultaneously unfolding in a sky partly obscured by dark billows of smoke. Birds are gliding away with the exception of one majestic Brahminy kite (Haliastur indus), depicted in the upper-right corner of the picture, seeming to hold its fight while observing the dramatic scene on earth. Whatever allegorical meaning Saleh intended to convey, it is no coincidence that he added an extra dimension to the subject of his composition by including in it this Brahminy kite. The bird is highly symbolic in Javanese (and Indonesian) culture due to its association with the mythical

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35 The Brahminy kite (elang bondol in Indonesian, lang merah in Malay) became the offcial mascot of Jakarta in 1986. The Garuda of the Indonesian national emblem, Garuda Pancasila, was designed based on the Javan hawk-eagle (elang jawa). 36 As discerned from letters by Saleh to a sobat J.P. Cornets de Groot, General Secretary of Colonial Affairs at the Ministry of Colonies dated 17 June and 3 November 1847, Paris. Letters held in: Nationaal Archief, The Hague, access no. 2.10.01, Ministerie van Koloniën 1814–1849, inv. no. 4358, (verbaal [minutes], 11 December 1849, no. 440, Geheim [Secret]). 37 No doubt Saleh saw its impressive ruins when he visited London in July 1847. 38 The sense of the sublime and its concepts as defned by Edmund Burke in his treatise on aesthetics, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1857).

semi-divine Garuda, one of the main characters of the Mahābhārata.35 Forest Fire occupies a prominent position among Saleh’s works depicting wild animals. In point of fact, the main subject of fre makes the painting even more intriguing and fascinating. Saleh revealed this subject in two letters in Malay addressed to a correspondent at the Dutch Ministry of the Colonies, without giving any clue as to his motivation or source of inspiration.36 Fire is a reccuring theme in the art of painting, from the representation of hellfre (also prevalent in Islamic art) and the biblical burning bush to “simple” depictions of daily life, such as villagers sitting around a campfre or dancing around a bonfre. In paintings depicting historical events, fres can be caused by natural disasters (like the eruption of a volcano), warfare on land and at sea or accidents. A striking example of a historical accidental fre that took place in 1834, when Saleh was in Europe, is the fre that destroyed a large part of the old Westminster palace: home of the British Parliament.37 In art history, this event is linked to William Turner (1775–1851), the artist who sought the sublime in nature and 68

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In the Museums of Art of Philadelphia and Cleveland; see http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/103831.html and http://www.clevelandart.org/ art/1942.647 respectively. 40 As far as I can judge after queries and extensive research in catalogues and on the web. 41 The painting was acquired in 1933 by the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaelogy, Oxford; see: http://www.ashmolean.org/ash/objects/mak edetail.php?pmu=730&mu=732>y=asea&sec=& dtn=15&sfn=Artist%20Sort,Title&cpa=1&rpos=0& cnum=&mat=&pro=&anum=&art=Piero%20di%20 Cosimo&ttl=&sou= (accessed 15 July 2014). I am grateful to Jonathan Del Mar and Annabel T. Gallop for drawing my attention to this painting. 42 It was inspired by Book 5 of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura [On the nature of things].

was fascinated by the four elements (earth, air, fre and water) as the four animating forces of nature.38 Turner’s two paintings, The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons (1835), count among the most famous 19th-century pieces of art.39 However, it is not our purpose to develop the theme of fre in art. The issue is Saleh’s representation of a burning forest, the starting point of his inspiration, the implication of the selected animals, and his choice of such a subject within the context of his studies in Europe. Surprisingly, it appears that very few of Saleh’s contemporaries or artists preceding him chose this subject.40 It might seem far-fetched to mention the Renaissance artist Piero di Cosimo (1461–1522), but the title of his painting, The Forest Fire (c. 1505), and the image conjured up is too appealing to ignore.41 In this narrative painting, a variety of frightened animals are escaping a forest fre.42 Unlike Saleh’s highly dramatic and spectacular composition, Cosimo’s realisation is completely undramatic; the fames are not threatening and the animals merely amble away. It is even more surprising that our search for paintings of

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43 Records of Wegener’s painting may be found in Verzeichniss der von 5. Juli 1846 an in der K.S. Akademie der Künste zu Dresden öffentlich ausgestellten Werke der bildenden Kunst [Catalogue of works of art publicly exhibited from 5 July 1846 at the R.S. Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden] (Dresden: s.n., 1846), 30, no. 323; Author unknown, “Ausstellungen” [Exhibitions], Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände/ Kunstblatt [Morning paper for cultivated classes/art magazine] 27, no. 47 (1846): 191. Shown again at the Dresden Salon in 1856, the painting was acquired in 1859 by the Dresden Gemäldegalerie, as detailed in Verzeichniss der Königlichen Gemälde-Gallerie zu Dresden [Catalogue of the Royal Picture Gallery in Dresden], ed. J. Hübner (Dresden: Druck von R.G. Teubner, 1880), 461, no. 2226. A smaller (120 x 171.5 cm), slightly different version

dated 1848 was auctioned on 31 May 2012 by Christie’s Kensington, lot 103, see: http://www. christies.com/lotfnder/paintings/johann-friedrichwilhelm-wegener-a-forest-fire-5566868-details. aspx (accessed 15 July 2015). 45 John Clark, “Hybridity and Discursial Placement: The Case of Raden Saleh,” 3. This paper was presented at the Raden Saleh symposium in Jakarta, 9–10 June 2012. 46 Jean Couteau, Srihadi Soedarsono: The Path of the Soul, vol. 1 (Jakarta: Lontar, 2003), 5. 47 Dorotheum Auctions, Vienna, 12 April 2011, lot 39, “Von Feuer glosender Wald” [Forest consumed by fire], see: https://www.dorotheum.com/auktionen/ aktuelle-auktionen/kataloge/list-lots-detail/ auktion/11363-gemalde-des-19-jahrhunderts/ lotID/39/lot/1916218-johan-christian-clausen-dahl. html (accessed 15 July 2015).

this subject leads us to Dresden, where Saleh settled after he left Holland. In the royal capital of Saxony where he lived and pursued his studies for more than four years, he might have met the landscape and animal painter Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Wegener (1812–1879). Wegener had been a pupil of the renowned landscape painter Johan Christian Clausen Dahl (1788–1857), who happened to become Saleh’s mentor. Is it just a fortuitous coincidence that one of Wegener’s paintings representing “a forest fre with feeing animals in the interior landscapes of North America” was shown at the Dresden Salon in 1846, and happened to be praised.43 It is evident that Wegener’s approach of the subject is totally different from Saleh’s. In Wegener’s large composition (227 x 283 cm), a wide selection of North American wild animals are integrated into a wooded, rocky landscape.44 Leaving behind the burning forest depicted in a distant background, the animals are not doomed. They fee towards safe refuge found at the opposite rocky bank of a narrow river. How interesting it would be to view both paintings side by side, Wegener’s and Saleh’s! The comparison and the discussion of the same

subject treated by two artists of about the same age who shared the same cultural and artistic environment over several years would bring to light what a diffcult and precarious task it is to interpret Saleh’s painting. It is impossible to guess the painter’s motivations, although Forest Fire could be interpreted as symbolising the forces of evil unleashed by a colonial system. As John Clark pointed out: “The internal meanings of Saleh’s work, in the absence of his own recorded opinions or those of his peers remain to be deduced from the context of his works in the discourses of the time, to and from which he moved.”45 In this context, the remark uttered by the painter Srihadi Soedarsono (b. 1931) is particularly wise: “It is never an easy task to evaluate an artist’s relative contribution in an objective manner. The task becomes even more diffcult when we place ourselves in an international, multicultural perspective, so that the evaluation might be free of any ethnocentric bias.”46 Another striking coincidence is that Dahl also treated the subject of a burning forest in 1846, in a small study in oil (20 x 25.5 cm).47 A remarkable landscapist and rightly much

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The Javanese Painter Raden Saleh (c. 1811–1880)

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Saleh to a sobat J.P. Cornets de Groot, General Secretary of Colonial Affairs at the Ministry of Colonies. Letter held in: Nationaal Archief, The Hague, access no. 2.10.01, Ministerie van Koloniën 1814–1849, inv. no. 4358, (verbaal [minutes], 11 December 1849, no. 440, Geheim [Secret]). Scalliet, “Chronique de l’année des tigres,” 216–8. Algemeen Handelsblad [General trade newspaper], no. 5839, 20 August 1850, 2. See the early description of Forest Fire in W.R van Hoëvell, “De tijger op Java” [The tiger in Java], De Gids 16 (1852): 502. The lithograph was made in Het Loo by the painter and lithographer J. van der Maaten (1820–1879), whose name is not mentioned on the plate. See testimony by Papageno (pseudonym of

S. Kalff), “Lets over Raden Saleh. II” [Something about Raden Saleh. II], Java-bode [The messenger of Java], 14 December 1892. Kalff, then a schoolboy, visited Het Loo when Van der Maaten was at work. 52 De Indische Archipel. Tafereelen uit de Natuur en het Volksleven in Indië. Uitgegeven En Gelithographieërd Ter Koninklijke Steendrukkerij Van C.W. Mieling, Te ’SGravenhage, 1865[–1876], [The Indian archipelago: Scenes from nature and people living in the East Indies. Issued and lithographed at Royal Lithographic Printing Offce by C.W. Mieling, The Hague, 1865– 1876], issues 3–4 (The Hague, 1868). 53 Guillot & Labrousse, op. cit., 138, 153. 54 Letter by Saleh to sobat J.C. Cornets de Groot, 22 February 1847, Paris. Letter held in: Nationaal

acclaimed, Dahl treated his composition—a rocky hill covered with burning bushes and scattered trees—and its light in a manner that prefgure Impressionism. It is amazing that this work shows affnities with some studies of particular spots of the Fontainebleau Forest by Théodore Rousseau (1812–1867), one of the founding members of the School of Barbizon. Saleh did not go back to Dresden after he left Saxony in 1844, and therefore could not have seen Wegener’s and Dahl’s paintings. However, he did meet Dahl in Paris a few weeks before he mentioned in his letter, dated 17 June 1847, that he was “going to start quickly a big painting [representing] a forest on fre and animals feeing in terror.”48 It is tempting to imagine that both artists discussed the subject and that the former mentor had an infuence on Saleh’s choice. Started in 1847, Forest Fire was not completed before the end of 1849, after the demise of King William II on 17 March 1849, for whom it was intended. Eventually, “the painting of extraordinary size” was delivered at the Ministry of the Colonies in The Hague in early 1850. After having viewed it, King William III, successsor of his father, gave orders to have it placed in his summer residence in Apeldoorn

(Gelderland province), Palace Het Loo. Neither description nor the transport of Forest Fire were mentioned in offcial ministerial and royal records from 1850.49 Nonetheless, its presence in Het Loo was attested by an anonymous correspondent of a Dutch newspaper who had visited the palace in the same year.50 Despite a description published in the Dutch literary magazine De Gids as early as 1852 by an author who had met Saleh in The Hague in 1851, and had seen the painting in Apeldoorn, Forest Fire remained as good as unnoticed until it was lithographed.51 In 1868, a chromolithograph Een Boschbrand (A Forest Fire) was issued by C.W. Mieling. It was included in a series of plates published between 1865 and 1876, to be compiled in an album titled De Indische Archipel.52 The plate was however reserved for subscribers who could afford a costly work of art, and its black and white reproduction was not published before the beginning of the 20th century. No photograph of the original painting had ever been published until 2015, when its image was disclosed by National Gallery Singapore. The scale and complexity of the composition Forest Fire doubtessly refects Saleh’s ambition as a painter. Saleh’s ambition was also to see his paintings enter prestigious collections, and

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Archief, The Hague, access no. 2.10.01, Ministerie van Koloniën 1816–1849, inv. no. 4358, (verbaal [minutes], 11 December 1849 no. 440, Geheim [Secret]). 55 The painting was shown in The Hague in 1847. See Lijst der Schilder–en Kunstwerken van levende Meesters welke zijn toegelaten tot de Tentoonstelling te ’s-Gravenhage van den Jare 1847 [List of artworks of living masters, which are admitted to the Exhibition in The Hague in the year 1847] (’s-Gravenhage: H.J.S. de Groot, 1847), 29, no. 371: De hertenjagt in Indië. It was auctioned by Christie’s Singapore on 31 March 1996 and in 2000, shown at an exhibition in the Singapore Art Museum, see Ahmad Mashadi et al., Visions & Enchantment: Southeast Asian Paintings, exh. cat., eds. Ahmad Mashadi & Keong Ruoh Ling

(Singapore: Singapore Art Museum in association with Christie’s International Singapore, 2000), 70–1, pl. 6. 56 Sharing of Saleh’s success by the Dutch in Paris was reported by the ambassador to J.C. Baud, then Minister of the Colonies; see Scalliet, “Chronique de l’année des tigres,” 209, 220. Examples of newspaper reports include Algemeen Handelsblad, 19 February 1848; Journal de La Haye [Journal of The Hague], 20 February 1848. 57 One should realise that 1848 is also the year of the abolition of slavery in the French colonies. 58 J.C. Baud in a report on Saleh; see Scalliet, “Raden Saleh et les Hollandais,” 255. The original quote is in French and has been translated by the author.

his wishes were amply fulflled thanks to his royal and princely protections and his relationships in high society; this fruition he owed not only to circumstances but also to talent and personality. When he announced in June 1847 that he was about to start working on a composition that would become Forest Fire, he was at the height of his fame in Paris. His painting Deer Hunt on the Island of Java (fg. 4.5) caused a sensation at the Paris Salon, held at the Louvre in the spring months. Art critics wrote eulogistic reviews, an engraving made after the painting was published in the weekly magazine L’illustration and, as a supreme reward, the painting was acquired by King Louis-Philippe.53 Before the opening of the exhibition, the painting had been fulsomely praised by Horace Vernet (1779–1863) and several other painters who had seen it in Saleh’s studio.54 We can imagine how proud Saleh must have been to receive such a token of appreciation from the great Vernet who had become his mentor and guide, and who had invited him to work in his vast studio at Versailles. In this impressive and large composition (239 x 346 cm), Saleh displays his inventiveness by chosing a beater mounted on a buffalo as the main subject of a hunting party and concentrating the attack of

a tiger on him. He inversed conventional roles and broke with his more “traditional” compositions as seen in The Deer Hunt in the East Indies he fnished in 1846 and offered to King William II: disturbed by the attack of a tiger, the group of horsemen occupy the major part of the composition while the beaters are relegated to the distant background.55 Saleh’s success in Paris was shared by the Dutch living there, and was also documented in the Dutch newspapers.56 It might not be a coincidence that Saleh was appointed as a member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam the following year, on 2 February 1848. At about the same time, the 1848 French Revolution, which lasted from 22 to 25 February, was about to break out.57 Unfortunately, there is no extant letter by Saleh to elucidate his experience of this political upheaval. The records are too summary to provide an accurate picture of the exact relationship between Vernet and Saleh in Paris. On one important point, however, we are informed: Vernet did encourage Raden Saleh to concentrate his efforts on depicting “oriental hunting parties and fghts [of animals],” and specifed that “the scenes [should be] located in Java.”58 Saleh’s fame in Dresden before moving to Paris

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59 Kraus, The Beginning of Modern Indonesian Painting, 262–9; Kraus, Raden Saleh (1811–1880), 14–5, 74–5, 78, 80–1. 60 Van Ham Kunstauktionen, Cologne, 14 November 2014, lot 530; see: https://www.van-ham.com/daten bank-archiv/datenbank/raden-saleh-ben-jaggia/ kampf-zwischen-einem-javanesischen-rhinozerosund-zwei-tigern.html (accessed 15 December 2014); Christie’s King Street, London, 29 October 2015, lot 14; see: http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/paint ings/raden-sarief-bustaman-saleh-a-lion-and-593

was largely due to his compositions depicting hunting parties with Arabs and Bedouins, attacks of lions and fghting lions, situated in a fctitious North African landscape.59 As an ambitious and enthusiastic artist, Saleh explored themes and an “Orient” completely strange to his own oriental world. The lion provided him with a formidable topic of study and practice of his art. Ironically, the landscape in the small painting representing a lion and lioness attacking a crocodile (fg. 4.6) does not evoke the habitat of those African big cats. It is almost identical to the tropical landscape in the (also small) composition depicting a Sundanese rhinoceros attacked by two tigers (fg. 4.7). The only notable difference is the horizon, in the former closed in by a range of bluish mountains, in the latter, by a group of trees. Both are dated 1840, and could be considered as two pendants if they had the same dimensions. A remarkable occurrence is that they appeared recently on the market in 2014 and 2015 respectively, and are, so far, the only extant paintings depicting a crocodile and a rhinoceros—two wild animals which can be added to Saleh’s bestiary.60 As far as I know there is no mention of a painting with a crocodile in published records, although the one with a rhinoceros might be Rhinoceros Overmastered by Tigers, which a German art writer saw in Dresden before 1955.61 Let us 72

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5367-details.aspx?pos=6&intObjectID=5935367&si d=&page=1&lid=1 (accessed 20 October 2015). Hans Geller, Curiosa. Merkwürdige Zeichnungen aus dem 19. Jahrhundert [Curiosities: Strange drawings from the 19 th century] (Leipzig: VEB E.A. Seeman Verlag, 1955), 71. Geller records: “Wir kennen […] ein von Tigern überwältigtes Nashorn” [We know … a rhinoceros overmastered by tigers]. International Exhibition 1862: Offcial Catalogue of the Fine Art Department, exh. cat. (London: Truscott, Son & Simmons, 1862), 212, no. 1300.

hope that Rhinoceros-Hunting by Saleh, which was displayed in 1862 at the International Exhibition in London, is not lost forever.62 In his memoirs, James Loudon (1824–1900) tells of hunting parties in which he took part in the 1840s in “the famous plain of Bandung […] 10 miles long and 4 miles wide, where thousands [of ] deers and wild animals like tigers and rhinoceroses were hidden in the alang-alang (long grass) and glaga (high reed).”63 It is the same Loudon who was governor-general in 1872–1875, and appreciated Saleh as a person but was not charmed by his paintings.64 After all, there is no accounting for taste. Luckily his judgement was not shared by one man in particular: the Scottish trader, consul and landowner Alexander Fraser.65 Fraser commissioned four views of Java, of which three are reproduced: Six Horsemen Chasing Deer (fg. 4.8), Javanese Jungle (fg. 4.9) and Forest and Native House (fg. 4.10). The fourth, Javanese Temple in Ruins, represents a view of Candi Mendut which Saleh visited in 1852. They are all approximately the same size, and all but one (Javanese Jungle) are dated 1860. After 33 years in Java, Fraser left the island for good in 1879 and settled in London, where he died in 1904. The collection was fortunately not dispersed and eventually donated to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in 1925.66

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Henk Boels, Janny de Jong & C.A. Tamse, Eer en fortuin: Leven in Nederland en Indië 1824–1900: Autobiografe van Gouverneur-Generaal James Loudon [Honour and fortune: Life in the Netherlands and the Indies 1824–1900: Autobiography of GovernorGeneral James Loudon] (Amsterdam: De Bataafsche Leeuw, 2003), 115–6. In the Dutch East Indies, the distance between two mileposts equalled 1506 m. 64 Ibid., 306. 65 Compiled by Alexander Dingwall Fordyce, Family Record of the Name of Dingwall Fordyce in Aberdeen-

In 1985, they were tranferred to the American Art Museum. The archives pertaining to the gift reveal a valuable detail: Fraser paid 1000 guilders for each painting. They illustrate perfectly the major part of Saleh’s production after his return to Java—his love of nature and of his country, his deep knowledge of its fora and fauna, his interest for Javanese antiquities and his sense of detail. We see here the landscape painter at work, and it reminds us of his years in the company of Payen, his studies under Andreas Schelfhout in The Hague, his discovery of the School of Dusseldorf, and his experience with Johan Dahl in Dresden. In his letters from Paris, Saleh mentions very few names of painters besides Vernet. Most of the extant paintings from his Javanese years are, besides portraits, landscapes, including the erupting Merapi. It would be unfair to consider them as simple topographic views. The contrast between Fraser’s irenic landscapes and Saleh’s European compositions overwhelmed by violence (Forest Fire being an example taken to the extreme) is remarkable. Forest Fire was a royal gift. As such, it remained for some 160 years a royal affair. It left its royal abode twice at the end of the 19th century: once in 1883 to be displayed at the International Colonial and Export Trade Exhibition in Amsterdam, the other in 1894 at the World’s

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shire, Showing the Descent of the First-Known Progenitor of Either Name—Both Direct and Collateral (Fergus: s.n., 1885), 142. Smithsonian Institution Archives, access no. 86022, record unit 305. “Graf van Raden Saleh wordt gerestaureerd” [Raden Saleh’s grave to be restored], Algemeen Indisch dagblad: De Preangerbode [General newspaper of the East Indies: The messenger of the Priangan], no. 160, 4 December 1952, 2.

Fair in Antwerp. After this last event, the painting was stowed away, never shown again and nearly forgotten. Nearly but not entirely; Saleh’s auspicious star was keeping watch over it. It is fortunate that it found its way to National Gallery Singapore and a broad public is now able to see this masterpiece. Raden Saleh: Son of the Indonesian Nation and Pioneer of Modern Indonesian Painting Raden Saleh, the Schilder des Konings (King’s Painter), passed away in Bogor on 23 April 1880. Saleh was proud of his title, but with the emergence of the Indonesian Republic it henceforth belonged to an abhorred past. In 1952, President Sukarno paid a visit to Saleh’s grave in Bogor. He was so dismayed by its dilapidated state that he subsequently gave orders to his Minister of Education and Culture Mohammad Yamin to see to its restoration.67 About a year later, the restoration was completed. On Monday 7 September 1953, an offcial ceremony took place to mark this achievement and pay renewed hormat (respect) to Raden Saleh. In his speech, Yamin insisted on the signifcance of Raden Saleh in the frst place as a painter and as an artist, then as a nationalist and fnally as an

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Yamin confuses this with the painting Fight between an African Buffalo and Two Lions (1848), also known under the title Struggle between Life and Death (Antara Hidup dan Mati). “President over Raden Saleh” [The President on Raden Saleh], Java-bode, no. 320, 8 September 1953, 2. Author’s translation. 69 “Raden Saleh, kunstenaar, nationalist en idealist, geëerd door nageslacht” [Raden Saleh, artist, nationalist and idealist honoured by posterity], Het nieuwsblad voor Sumtra [The newspaper for Sumatra], no. 1520, 15 September 1953, 2. 70 The Indonesian term “Orde Baru” was introduced by Suharto, second president of Indonesia, when he came to power in 1966. It has become synonymous

with Suharto’s regime (1966–1998), see Ricklefs, op. cit., 284. 71 Jacques Leclerc, “The Political Iconology of the Indonesian Postage Stamp (1950–1970),” trans. Nora Scott, Indonesia no. 57 (1993): 20. Originally published in French in 1973. 72 “Petisi Bersama 2015 kepada Presiden Jokowi” [Joint petition 2015 to President Jokowi] Petisi Raden Saleh 2005 [Petition Raden Saleh 2005] https:// petisiradensaleh2005.wordpress.com/2015/02/26/ petisi-bersama-2015-kepada-presiden-jokowi/ (accessed 7 July 2015). 73 Dermawan & Sutanto, op. cit., 13. To be precise, Saleh “plunged into the profession” in the early 1830s. Dermawan assigns this position to Saleh in Indonesian

idealist. He sympathised with the uprising of Diponegoro, and he expressed his feelings in three of his best-known paintings: “Boschbrand” [Forest Fire], “A Buffalo Hunt in Java” (which symbolises the struggle between the Indonesian buffalo and the Dutch lion), and the “Arrest of Diponegoro in Magelang.” 68

within a nationalist framework, particularly under the Orde Baru (New Order).70 A signifcant example is the “two stamps of ‘wild animals fghting’, by the painter Raden Saleh Sarif Bustaman (1813–1880) [that] were issued in October 1967, without any particular reason for honouring him, no anniversary being near.”71 The two stamps reproduce Forest Fire and Fight between an African Buffalo and Two Lions. It is amazing that an African animal is associated with the banteng which represents democracy, the fourth principle of the Garuda Pancasila (the national emblem of Indonesia); equally that Forest Fire, a painting nobody had ever seen in Indonesia and known only through the black and white reproduction of the chromolitograph, became an icon—a symbol of nationalist struggle and Saleh’s supposed nationalism. In 1969, Raden Saleh was again posthumously honoured when he was bestowed with the Piagam Anugerah Seni, a certificate of offcial recognition reserved for artistic contributions. The ultimate form of nationalist recompensation was bestowed by President H. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in 2011 when Saleh was awarded with the Bintang Mahaputera

President Sukarno then took the foor: I wish to point out that we are here on [the] sacred ground of our fatherland, in front of the grave of a great Indonesian. […] Not that I am such an art lover but because I speak here on behalf of the Republic of Indonesia, on behalf of the people of the whole country, I honor the memory of one of our great sons.69 The tone of nationalist appropriation was set. This appropriation might be debatable but is certainly understandable in the context of a nation that had gained its sovereignty fairly recently, after a long and painful struggle. Saleh’s life and paintings have thus been reinterpreted 74

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modern art history, versus regional “classic” and “traditional” art (seni klasik dan tradisional). Mustika and Slamet Sukirnanto describe Saleh as “pelukis legendaris dalam kurun waktu abad 19, beliau kita kenal sebagai perintis dan bapak seni lukis Indonesia Modern” [the legendary 19 th-century painter we know as the pioneer and father of Indonesian modern painting] in Seni Rupa Indonesia Modern dalam Kritik dan Esei [Criticism on modern Indonesian Art] (Jakarta: Sanggar Krida Jakarta, 1996), 15. The title of Baharudin Marasutan’s monography, Raden Saleh 1807–1880: Perintis Seni Lukis di Indonesia [Raden Saleh 1807–1880: The Precursor of Painting in Indonesia] (Jakarta: Dewan Kesenian, 1973) is likewise eloquent. Setianingsih Purmono

places Saleh as the “founder” in “The Emergence of New Indonesian Art” in Dari Mooi Indië hingga Persagi [From Mooi Indië to Persagi], ed. Museum Universitas Pelita Harapan (Kawaraci: Museum Universitas Pelita Harapan, 1998), 10. 75 See, for instance, Pemerintah DKI Jakarta, Raden Saleh: Pelukis Terkenal yang Dilupakan [Raden Saleh: The Forgotten Famous Painter], ed. Dinas Museum dan Sejarah (Jakarta: Dinas Museum dan Sejarah, 1979), 1; I Ketut Winaya, Lukisan-Lukisan Raden Saleh: Ekspresi Antikolonial [Raden Saleh’s paintings: Anticolonial expressions] (Jakarta: Galeri Nasional, 2007; originally PhD diss. Universitas Udayana), vii.

Adipradana (Star for a Great Son). This might not be the pinnacle of Saleh’s posthumous honours; the next step would be to award him the highest status of Pahlawan Nasional (National Hero), as pushed for by some of his most fervent admirers in a petition addressed to President Joko Widodo in 2015.72 Notwithstanding the exploitation and selective interpretation of Saleh’s facts of life and artistic production within a political and nationalist context, and the many misconceptions concerning his “real” personality and achievements in the context of his time, the most rewarding recompense came in Jakarta in 2012 from the National Gallery of Indonesia. For the frst time in history, a solo exhibition Raden Saleh: The Beginning of Modern Indonesian Painting (Raden Saleh: Awal Seni Lukis Modern Indonesia) was dedicated to Saleh and his works. The title of the aforementioned 2012 exhibition perfectly summarises the position assigned to Saleh in the context of Indonesian (modern) art history by Indonesian art historians and art critics like Agus Dermawan T., who in his introductory essay titled “Indonesian Art and Raden Saleh” opined:

As history has it, modern Indonesian painting begins with the painting activity of Raden Saleh […]. The painter plunged into the profession in the 1840’s. So, it can be said presently, in the early period of the third millennium, Indonesian painting is 170 years of age. And as the history of Indonesian art recognizes that Indonesian modern art of various kinds starts with painting, we can say that Indonesian modern art is also 170 years old now.73

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Saleh, “the legendary 19th century painter,” is indeed regarded as the precursor or pioneer of modern Indonesian painting and “the founder of Indonesian modern art.”74 The fact that Saleh is simultaneously seen as the bapak (father) of Indonesian modern art is merely a question of terminology.75 The “paternity” of Indonesian modern art is variously attributed to Affandi (1907–1990), S. Sudjojono (1913– 1986) and Hendra Gunawan (1918–1983) though generally with a preference for Sudjojono, co-founder in 1938 of the Association of Indonesian Drawing Masters (Persatuan Ahli-

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76 For a discussion on the paternity of Indonesian modern art, see Astri Wright, “Painting the People,” in Modern Indonesian Art: Three Generations of Tradition and Change 1945–1990, exh. cat., ed. John Fisher (Jakarta: Panitia Pameran KIAS; New York: Festival of Indonesia, 1990), 121; Trisno Sumardjo, “Sudjojono Bapak Seni Lukis Indonesia Baru” [Sudjojono father of the new Indonesian painting], in Seni Rupa Indonesia dalam Kritik dan Esai [Indonesian Art Criticism and Essays] eds. Bambang Bujono & Wicaksono Adi (Jakarta: Dewan Kesenian Jakarta, 2012), 29; Wang Zineng, “Curatorial Notes. Strategies towards the Real: S. Sudjojono and Contemporary Indonesian Art,” in Strategies towards the Real: S. Sudjojono and Contemporary Indonesian Art, exh. cat. (Singapore: National University of Singapore Museum, 2008), 8, 11, note 4; Suwarno Wisetrotomo, “Introduction. Modern Art in Indonesia” and “Raden Saleh (1807–1880),” in Modern Indonesian

Ahli Gambar Indonesia, PERSAGI, literally “picture experts”).76 It is in any case no coincidence that Saleh and Sudjojono were reunited on the image adorning the cover of the weekly magazine Tempo in 1976 (fg. 4.11). Works of both artists were shown at the inaugural exhibition 1876 –1976. 100 Years of Fine Arts in Indonesia of the Museum of Fine Arts in Jakarta.77 The irreverent but not disrespectful cartoonist paid homage to two “fathers of modern Indonesian art” sitting next to each other. They are facing the reader while their eyes are turned in each other’s direction, as if ignoring the discussion regarding their fatherhood. It is, however, undeniable that Saleh was the “solitary precursor of those now regarded as the ‘fathers’ of the present [Indonesian] modern art movement.”78 Saleh had no direct followers; he died in 1880 without having initiated a new school, but paved the way for the generation who contributed to the emergence of a distinctive Indonesian artistic identity 76

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Art: From Raden Saleh to the Present Day, eds. Koes Karnadi & Garrett Kam, 2nd ed. (Yogyakarta: Koes Artbooks, 2010), 14, 25. Three paintings by Saleh were shown: see the catalogue Pameran Se-Abad Seni Rupa Indonesia 1876– 1976, 20 Agustus 1976–28 Nopember 1976 di Balai Seni Rupa Jakarta [Centennial Indonesian Art Exhibition 1876–1976, 20 August 1976–28 November 1976 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Jakarta] (Jakarta: Pemerintah Daerah Khusus Ibukota Jakarta, 1976). Claire Holt, Art in Indonesia: Continuities and Change (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 192. Holt’s words in her pioneering study on Indonesian modern art are still accurate. Dermawan & Sutanto, op. cit., 16. John Clark, “The Worlding of the Asian Modern,” in Contemporary Asian Art and Exhibitions: Connectivities and World-Making, eds. Michelle Antoinette & Caroline Turner (Canberra: ANU Press, 2014), 71.

amidst the nation’s struggle for independence. If we consider the artist’s legacy from a purely Euro-American centric academically and stylistically art historical point of view, it would be inappropriate to classify Saleh as falling into the category of “modern painters.” In the words of Indonesian art critics, “the modernity presumed to exist in Raden Saleh’s paintings is not an appropriate term if put in the historical perspective of Western modern painting in the West. Such a viewpoint doesn’t need [to] make us feel inconvenient; doesn’t Indonesia have the right to defne the historical route of its own art amid [the] world’s art?”79 As a strong-minded individual and independent artist who took his destiny into his own hands in colonial times, the Javanese-born Saleh can assuredly be considered a modern man. Although John Clark refers to the 19thcentury Siamese muralist Khrua In Khong in this quote, one could also say of Saleh that the “self-consciousness of the artist as a professional is certainly one index of modernity in art.”80

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Raden Saleh Self-Portrait 1841 Oil on millboard 22.5 × 17.7 cm Collection of Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen, coll.no. TM-6448-1 Image courtesy of Tropenmuseum Raden Saleh Boschbrand (Forest Fire) 1849 Oil on canvas 300 × 396 cm Collection of National Gallery Singapore This work of art has been adopted by the Yong Hon Kong Foundation Raden Saleh Portrait of the Painter A.A.J. Payen 1847 Oil on canvas 73 × 61 cm Collection of Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen, coll.no. RV-5030-1 Image courtesy of Museum Volkenkunde Antoine Auguste Joseph Payen The River Citarum, Priangan (West Java), with Figures on a Tree-Trunk Raft 1819 Oil on paper laid down on panel 24 × 29.5 cm Collection of National Gallery Singapore

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Raden Saleh Deer Hunt on the Island of Java 1847 Oil on canvas 239 × 346 cm Collection of the Musée du Louvre, coll.no. 10109, on permanent loan to the Saint-Amand-Montrond town hall Image courtesy of Mrs Beatrice Bascou Photographer: Alexis Hoang Raden Saleh Fight between a Crocodile, a Lion and a Lioness 1840 Oil on canvas 28.5 × 38.5 cm Private collection Image courtesy of Yu-Chee Chong Fine Art, London Raden Saleh Fight between a Sundanese Rhinoceros and Two Tigers 1840 Oil on canvas 48 × 60 cm Private collection, Jakarta Image courtesy of Van Ham Kunstauktionen, Cologne Photographer: Saša Fuis

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Raden Saleh Forest and Native House 1860 Oil on canvas mounted on fberboard 105.1 × 187 cm Gift of Mrs Sally Burbank Swart Collection of Smithsonian American Art Museum Raden Saleh and S. Sudjojono on the front cover of Tempo magazine, 11 September 1976

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British curator John Falconer has notably contributed to studies on early photography in Burma, Singapore, Malaya and Brunei and Southeast Asia in general. The Netherlands has a strong history of bilingual publication since the 1980s on early photography in the former colonial Dutch East Indies, and the Alkazi Foundation in New Delhi has published since the 1990s on the British Raj photographers and 19 th-century Indian photographers. The Musée National des Arts Asiatiques – Guimet, Paris, has published a number of bilingual texts on photography in Indochina since the late 1980s. Ameri-

can scholarship covering Southeast Asia has been signifcant in the last decade or so, see, James L. Hevia et al., Photographies East: The Camera and its Histories in East and Southeast Asia, ed. Rosalind C. Morris (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). The online peer-reviewed journal Trans Asia Photography Review, http://tapreview.org/ by Hampshire College in collaboration with the Michigan Publishing, a division of the University of Michigan Library, provides an accessible and current path to texts and issues in Southeast Asian photography. The number of regional photohistorians in Southeast Asia remains small.

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Towards a History of the Asian Photographer at Home and Abroad: Case Studies of Southeast Asian Pioneers Francis Chit, Kassian Céphas and Yu Chong Gael Newton

Southeast Asia, a vast peninsula and insula chain of lands, peoples and cultures stretching from Myanmar (Burma) to the Philippines and on to New Guinea in the Melanesian west Pacifc, is an elusive entity for historical photography surveys. English-language “world histories” of photography published in EuroAmerica between the 1930s and 1980s largely treat the region as a minor subset of the 19thcentury global diaspora of Western technology. Their greater focus has been on colonial India, Hong Kong and the treaty ports of China and Japan. These older studies also favour careers of expatriate Euro-American photographers in Asia. Over the last two decades, foreign and regional postcolonial-era scholars have paid more attention to how photography was received in the region as a modern medium, and what role 78

locals, including Asian-born as well as foreign photographers, have played in the medium’s acclimatisation in Southeast Asia.1 Most 19th-century pioneer practitioners in Southeast Asia were European but from the mid-century onwards, immigrant overseas Chinese prevailed. From around 1900, Chinese studios were numerically dominant in British Singapore (which had a majority population of Chinese), Java and French colonial Indochina (with their substantial Chinatowns). A few Thai photographers were at work in Bangkok by the early 1860s, but Vietnamese, Malay, Burmese, Indonesian and Filipino-run studios were atypical in these lands before the mid-20th century. Japanese studios appeared in small numbers throughout Southeast Asia.2 Indian- or Muslim-named studios were

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The extent and impact of the diaspora of Chinese and Japanese photographers across mid- 19 th to 20 th century Southeast Asia and the Pacifc has yet to be studied. Japanese studios date chiefy from the early to mid-20 th century. Modern texts are inconsistent as to whether his name should be reproduced in accented form. This essay retains the accent, in part because it derives from Képhas, the Greek transliterated form, which was itself a translation of the old Syrian/Aramaic word for “rock” or “stone.” This was the name given by Jesus to the apostle Simon Peter, signifying his role

rare in Southeast Asia despite the presence of affuent Indian and Muslim merchant communities in Singapore that might have supported them. This absence is puzzling given that by the late 19th century there was a fourishing Indian-run studio culture in British India. Currently, the history of 19th-century photography in Southeast Asian lands is distinctive for the relative paucity of indigenous photographers. The two most prominent frst-generation Asian photographers in Southeast Asia combined commercial studio practice with duties as offcial court photographers. Thai Francis Chit (1830–1891) in Bangkok was court photographer to Rama IV and V, and Javanese Kassian Céphas (1845–1912) was offcial photographer to the Yogyakarta Sultanate in Java.3 Chit and Céphas had considerable regional and some international profle in their lifetimes and are exceptional as the frst native professionals in their lands. Both had sons who carried on with their businesses into the 20th century. Also considered in this essay is the Chinese miniature painter and photographer Yu Chong (studio active c. 1889–1915) in Hanoi. Yu Chong had only a modest profle in colonial Indochina but is representative of the signifcant role played by Chinese studio operators in developing commercial photography in Southeast Asian ports from the late 19th century to the early 20th century.4

as the rock of the church (John 1:42). Additionally, Céphas consistently used the accent in his professional signature, his images in the negative, his studio imprint (sometimes barely visible or left off in the capitalised form) and in signing his personal letters. 4 See Sylvie Aubenas et al., Des photographes en Indochine, Tonkin, Annam, Cochinchine, Cambodge et Laos au 19e siècle [Photographers in Indochina— Tonkin, Annam and Cochinchina, Cambodia and Laos in the 19 th century] (Paris: ed. Réunion des musées nationaux, Éditions Marval, musée Guimet, 2001), 241.

Background Soon after their public debut in Euro-America in the 1840s and 1850s, daguerreotype and glass plate photography on paper processes appeared in the busiest port cities of Southeast Asia. A number of Euro-American commercial daguerreotypists circulated between China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Java and Manila, but none seem to have reached the mainland Straits Settlements, Bangkok, Saigon or Rangoon. A few residents across Southeast Asia imported cameras and succeeded in teaching themselves. In these formative decades, the new camera professionals from abroad had to move from port to port. The tiny communities of affuent foreign and elite indigenous and immigrant Chinese customers in Southeast Asian ports buying one-off daguerreotype plates, were insuffcient to sustain permanent studios. Newspaper reports indicate that thousands of daguerreotypes were made but less than 200 examples survive. However, some lost originals can be traced as they were used as the basis for engraved illustrations in Euro-American publications in the late 1850s and 1860s. On the whole it might seem from the surviving artefacts that the new imaging medium at this frst stage of its evolution had limited quantifable impact in Southeast Asia. The potential, however, was obvious to the locals.

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At the beginning of the 19 th century, Southeast Asia had a third of the overall population of Europe. By the early 20 th century, Mandalay, Rangoon, Bangkok, Hanoi, Saigon, Cholon, Georgetown, Singapore, Batavia, Surakarta, Surabaya and Manila each had over 100,000 inhabitants. See T.G. McGee, The Southeast Asian City (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1967), 53–8. Title taken from an article by D.K. Griffth, “A Celestial Studio,” in The Photographic News: A Weekly Record of the Progress of Photography, vol. 19, ed. G. Wharton Simpson (London: Piper & Carter, 1875), 260. Confict and unstable economics in China were factors in migration, especially from Southern China to Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. Additionally, the 1860 Convention of Peking allowed Chinese to seek employment overseas. Some 20,000 Chinese, for example, settled in Indochina between the 1870s and 1890s.

Royal courts in Thailand and Java for example, were among the frst patrons to seek out photographers and to have courtiers trained in the new art (fg. 5.1). Resident studios only developed in Asia in the 1860s with the arrival of the British wet plate process on glass negatives of 1851 that provided reproducible and thus easily marketable photographs on sensitised albumen-coated paper. The wet plate was easier and cheaper than the daguerreotype, and its replication and portability facilitated more entries into the profession, as well as a wider range of products and thus customers. The multiple-print process sustained the establishment of permanent studios offering portraits and views. Affuent locals and travellers could afford to buy likenesses as well as prints of scenic views and “native types,” available singly or packaged in elaborate travel albums. One of the most widely adopted new formats in the 1860s was the miniature carte de visite (calling card-sized) portrait which was within reach of even those of modest means. A food of novelties accompanied the new process, including lockets, embossed leather family carte de visite and travel albums, and vivid three-dimensional 80

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Data on the clientele and exact economies of 19 thcentury Chinese studios have yet to be studied. American anthropologist Karen Strassler’s Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010) while concerned with a later century, provides insight into late 19 th-century Chinese studio photographers in Java. Thomson was not the frst wet plate travel photographer at work in East and Southeast Asia. His contemporaries, the Swiss professional Pierre Rossier in 1858 to 1862 and Austrian Wilhelm Burger (1844–1920) in 1868 to 1870, covered considerable territory in Southeast Asia but did not publish the lavish popular narratives that made Thomson famous. Germans August and Herman Sachtler were established in Singapore in 1862 to 1874, and Dane Kristin Feilberg in Singapore and Penang in 1863 to 1864.

stereographs. Stationers and pharmacies in large ports became emporiums of imported and local photographic goods, and the mass production of prints also found a ready market in illustrated travel magazines appearing from the 1860s onwards in Euro-America. Photography became collectible. The photographic trade in Southeast Asia was not limited to the exports to colonial heartlands and metropolises abroad; there was also a growing domestic market. European plantation, mining and mercantile development brought investors, settlers, administrative staff and labourers. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 trebled trade and brought in a constant stream of travellers, explorers and tourists, as well as set Southeast Asian countries on a path of rapid growth in terms of the number of residents able to afford or make use of photography.5 Studio numbers increased steadily over the next decades, particularly from the 1880s to the 1890s when mass-produced commercial dry plate processes and other quality refnements made photography better, easier, cheaper and more versatile for both commercial and amateur photographers. The picturing of Asia could begin.

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J. Thomson, The Straits of Malacca, Indo-China, and China or, Ten Years’ Travels, Adventures, and Residence Abroad (London: S. Low, Marston, Low & Searle, 1875), 9. 11 John Thomson, “Hong Kong Photographers,” The British Journal of Photography 29, November (1872): 569. This refrain of natives fearing photography as black magic was a favourite anecdote of early travel photographers, and while true in some cases, was probably exaggerated to play up to armchair audiences at home. Lai Afong, Kai Sack, Nam Ting, Pun Lun, Ye Chung and See Tay are known names of Chinese studios which operated in Hong Kong in the early 1870s. See Jeffrey W. Cody & Frances Terpak, Brush & Shutter: Early Photography in China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011), 37. 12 The Chinese population in Hong Kong was over

100,000 but had remained stable over the decade. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 trebled trade. Improved relations between the British colonial government and the elite Chinese merchants in the 1860s also encouraged Chinese investment and immigration, see Christopher Munn, “‘A Social Revolution’: Forming a Colonial Relationship, the 1860s and Beyond,” in Anglo-China: Chinese People and British Rule in Hong Kong, 1841–1880 (Richmond: Curzon, 2001), 69, 329–73. 13 Thomson, op. cit. Larissa N. Heinrich dissects the characterisation of Chinese as mere copyists in her essay, “Handmaids to the Gospel: Lam Qua’s Medical Portraiture,” in Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations, ed. Lydia H. Liu (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999), 239–42.

“A Celestial Studio”6

to act as my printers and assistants, the Chinese having, at that time, refused to lend themselves to such devilry as taking likenesses of objects without the touch of human hands.”10 Based in Hong Kong a decade later, Thomson found that the Chinese studios were well established:

From the mid-1860s, Chinese-operated painterphotographer studios sprouted up across Asia Pacifc port cities producing oriental and Western-style views and portraits for foreign as well as domestic clients.7 As well as photographs, these studios specialised in paintings from or over photographs that were fnished as miniatures or enlargements on card, canvas, paper and ivory. Their technical fexibility allowed for the production of quality work for the more affuent, and cheaper products for the bulk of clients. The dominance of the Chinese studios over other ethnic operators, and their successful competition with foreign operators, would seem to arise from the adoption of the centuryold model of Chinese painting studios across Asia.8 The frst to publicly comment on the phenomenal growth of Chinese photographic studios was Scottish professional John Thomson (1837–1921), who made extensive photographic sorties in East and Southeast Asia between 1862 and 1872.9 When operating one of the frst studios in Singapore in 1862 Thomson found he had to train “two Madras men […]

It may not be generally known that the Chinese in Hong-Kong and other parts of China have “taken kindly” to photography. In Queen’s-road, the principal street of Victoria, there are a score of Chinese photographers, who do better work than is produced by the herd of obscure dabblers who cast discredit on the art in this country [Britain].11 Thomson did not speculate on the causes of the rise of Chinese studios.12 For him, it was technical aptitude: “There is something about the mystery of photographic chemistry, the nicety of manipulation implied in its various processes which suits the Chinese mind.”13 However he was not impressed by the Chinese studios in Hong Kong churning out painted portraits based on photographs, worked up within a day or so for travellers.

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Lam Qua, from a family of painters whose elders had mastered Western painting, was the frst Chinese painter of the Western style to exhibit internationally in Europe and America. Lam Qua was probably the frst Chinese artist to make a realist self-portrait in 1853 but was not tempted to add photography to his studio practice. Lam Qua passed away only a few years after the frst commercial daguerreotypists arrived in Canton in 1857. Itier records Lam Qua’s interest in “Cet instrument admirable qui dessiné tout seul et dont les peintres de Canton sont fort préoccupés,” in his Journal d’un Voyage en Chine en 1843, 1844, 1845, 1846 [Journal of a Voyage to China in 1843, 1844, 1845, 1846], vol. 2 (Paris: Dauvin et Fontaine, 1848–1853), 74. As cited by Gilles Massot, “Jules Itier and the Lagrené

Mission,” History of Photography 39, no. 4 (2015): 319–47. Thanks are due to Gilles Massot, Singapore, for drawing my attention to Itier’s exchange with Lam Qua. 16 The portrait was loaned by Itier to the Exposition d’ échantillons et de modèles rapports de la Chine et de L’Inde [Exhibition of samples and models brought from China and India] mounted by the Ministry of Commerce in Paris in August 1846 displaying trade goods, gifts and souvenirs collected by the delegation of the 1843–1845 French trade mission to China. 17 Đặng Huy Trứ reputedly died in 1874 fghting against the French invasion of Hanoi. Truong Van San, who opened Vietnam’s second photo lab in Hue in 1878, evidently studied in France. See Nguyen Ðức Hiệp,

Thomson included a plate showing a typical Hong Kong painter-photographer at work in the frst of his four-volume series featuring photographs of China and the Chinese (fg. 5.2). The image was not of an actual studio but staged by Thomson in Hong Kong for one of his stereoscopic views. His text implies that the model for this type of studio-factory was that of the Cantonese painter Lam Qua (1801–1860), celebrated for his skill in making highly detailed Western-style portraits in oil, some of which had been exhibited at the Royal Academy in London.14 Thomson knew of Lam Qua only by reputation (the artist had died in 1860), but he could have seen Lam Qua’s paintings in Hong Kong or Canton. Lam Qua has the distinction of being the frst Chinese artist to be photographed. In Canton in 1842, he sought a demonstration of “the admirable apparatus that can draw by itself ” from visiting French customs inspector and amateur daguerreotypist, Jules Itier (1802– 1877), one of the heads of the Franco-Chinese trade treaty signed at Whampoa in 1842.15 Itier made a portrait of Lam Qua which he presented to the painter in a green leather case. A week later Lam Qua returned with a gift for

Itier: a miniature copy painted on ivory, set in a matching case. Both originals are lost but the image of their exchange as equals is vivid. Lam Qua’s gift was lent by Itier to an exhibition in Paris on his return, and an engraving of it appeared in L’illustration: Journal universel (fg. 5.3).16 Just as Thomson singled out Lam Qua for praise in distinction from his imitators, he unreservedly praised the quality of Chinese photographer Afong (c. 1839–1890) whose studio was in the same street as his own in Hong Kong. Thomson’s appreciation of the best Chinese painter and photographer is notable; he recognised that they, like himself, were far above the general run of artisans. Few Chinese studio photographers active in Southeast Asia had the public profle of Afong or the Pun Lun studio of Cantonese brothers Wan Chikhing and Wan Leong-hoi, established in Hong Kong from the 1860s to circa 1900 and unusual in also maintaining branches in Foochow, Singapore and Saigon. Images by the Pun Lun studio are among the earliest surviving records of Saigon. The earliest-known professional photographer in Vietnam is Đặng Huy Trứ (1825–1874), a

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“Photography in Vietnam from the End of the Nineteenth,” Trans Asia Photography Review 4, no. 2, Spring (2014), http://quod.lib.umich.edu/t/tap/797 7573.0004.204/--photography-in-vietnam-fromthe-end-of-the-nineteenth?rgn=main;view=fulltext (accessed 12 December 2014). 18 Khánh Ký is nationally regarded as the “father of photography” in Vietnam. The scale of his operations with studios in Hanoi, Guangzhou, Haiphong, Nam Định and Saigon matched those of European and Chinese frms elsewhere in Asia. See Nguyen, ibid. 19 Various names appear on or at Yu Chong’s studio addresses at 79, 88, 91 and 92 Rue des Paniers, in the form of Y-Tsung, Luong Loi Tchiou, Luong-yiou-Ky and Yu-Tchuong. One instance includes the double credit “‘Yi Tcheung’ et ‘Y. Tsung’ photographes et pei-

ntres sur ivoire à Hanoi,” suggesting at some point there may have been partners in the business. 20 For the role of this publishing house, see Marie-Hélène Degroise, “Schneider, François-Henri,” Photographes en Outre-Mer (1840–1944), http://photographesenou tremerasie.blogspot.sg/2009/11/schneider-fran cois-henri.html (accessed 9 July 2015) and http:// alain.j.schneider.free.fr/schneider_vietnam.htm (accessed 9 July 2015). 21 The prevalence of hand-coloured, photorealistic painted portraiture in Southeast Asia extending into the 20 th century warrants further study. British photohistorian Terry Bennett’s current work on photography in 19 th-century Indochina may bring more information and collections of the Yu Chong studio to light.

former mandarin in the Nguyễn Dynasty. He learnt photography in Hong Kong in 1865 and opened the first studio in Hanoi in 1869 with a camera bought from Guandong, China. The literal meaning of the name of his studio Cảm Hiếu Đườn is “the road to flial piety,” suggesting his early adoption of memorial portraiture for Chinese customers.17 Among the earliest local studios in Hanoi in the 1890s were those of Du Chương, Đông Chương and Mỹ Chương—whether these are Chinese- or Vietnamese-operated is not clear. Their clients were the French colonial community and travellers, as well as immigrant Chinese wanting portraits to send home. Vietnamese Nguyễn Văn Xuân (1884–1946), the most notable indigenous photographer in Indochina, began work in Hanoi in 1890 as a pupil of Du Chương before opening his own studio in 1892 under the name Khánh Ký. He relocated to Saigon in 1907, forming large and successful studios and branches on a par with that of the Armenian Onnes Kurkdjian (1851–1903) in Surabaya.18 Khánh Ký also bucked trends by immigrating to the West; he had a studio in Paris in the early 20th century. One successful and sophisticated Chinese

painter-photographer-run studio in Vietnam was that of Yu Chong who operated in Hanoi from circa 1889 to 1915.19 His studio was atop a shophouse in the old quarter where many Han Chinese businesses were located. Yu Chong produced the usual range of Europeanstyle portraiture but promoted his specialty of portraits on ivory, which gave a luminous softness to the portraits especially suitable for women’s complexions (fgs. 5.4 and 5.5). The shift of the Indochinese colonial capital to Hanoi in 1902 would have been a boon for Yu Chong who also worked for François-Henri Schneider, the energetic businessman, printer, photographer and publisher of the frst postcards in Indochina.20 Yu Chong appears to have been successful but had little international presence comparable with the name recognition for Chit and Céphas in publications, travel accounts and picture magazines. It appears his studio produced mostly portraits rather than having a range of views and souvenir images of local life, by which photographers in Asia became known in the West. His work may also have been uncredited in Schneider’s various publications. The few surviving examples of Yu Chong’s hand-coloured work attest to his skills.21

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22 See “Jean Baptiste François Louis Larnaudie,” and “Jean Baptiste Pallegroix,” Missions Etrangères de Paris Archives, http://archives.mepasie.org/notices/not ices-biographiques/larnaudie, http://archives.mepa sie.org/notices/notices-biographiques/Pallegroix (accessed 14 July 2015). Pallegroix’s scholarly book, Description du Royaume Thai ou Siam [Description of the Thai Kingdom or Siam] (Paris: Au proft de la mission de Siam, 1854), appears to have made use of daguerreotypes as the basis for the illustrations. Joachim K. Bautze provides evidence of Larnaudie as the maker of the royal daguerreotype portraits sent overseas in 1856 in his essay “Photography in

Majestic Pioneers in the Royal Courts: Francis Chit and Kassian Céphas The two most prominent frst-generation indigenous professionals in 19th-century Southeast Asia were from Thailand (then known as the independent Kingdom of Siam) and Indonesia (then the colonial Dutch East Indies). Francis Chit (1830–1891) was court photographer to Kings Mongkut (Rama IV, r. 1851–1868) and Chulalongkorn (Rama V, r. 1868–1910) in Bangkok from circa 1861 to 1891 and Kassian Céphas (1845–1912), royal photographer to the Yogyakarta Sultanate in Java from 1875 to circa 1908. Chit and Céphas are distinctive for their identifable oeuvres and regional profles from the 1870s to early 1900s. Their Western education and English-language skills as Catholic and Protestant Christian respectively, favoured their entrée into the business of operating commercial studios for foreign and local clients. No other Southeast Asian photographers held equivalent royal rank in the 19th or early 20th centuries. The national roles of Chit and Céphas are akin to that of their contemporary Raja Deen Dayal (1844–1905) in India, although the latter’s enterprise was on a greater scale and of higher international profle. Both Chit and Céphas are celebrated today as found84

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Siam—The Crucial Years,” in Siam through the Lens of John Thomson 1865–66 including Angkor and Coastal China (Bangkok: River Books, 2015), 12. See copy of letter “Requesting a daguerreotype operator for Chau Fa” written on 24 October 1845, from American missionary in Bangkok, Reverend Jessie Caswell to Henry Hill, Treasurer, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, held at Zimmerman Library, University of New Mexico. See also William L. Bradley, “Prince Mongkut and Jesse Caswell,” Journal of the Siam Society 54 (1966): 39, which cites this letter. Further evidence of Chau Fa’s desire for a camera comes from a report in the British Journal

ers of the photographic profession in their modern nations. In Southeast Asia, encouragement of indigenous photographers was pursued most actively in the royal court of Thailand. Daguerreotype activity was introduced to Bangkok in 1845 when Monsignor Jean-Baptiste Pallegroix (1805–1862), Vicar Apostolic of Eastern Siam for the French Société des Missions Etrangères, asked Father Jean Baptiste François Louis Larnaudie (1819–1899) to bring a daguerreotype apparatus with him from Paris. Pallegroix was a naturalist with interest in the latest scientifc advances, a linguist and scholar. He shared scientifc interests and a friendship with the young Prince Chau Fa, an heir to the throne then serving as a Buddhist priest, to whom he taught Latin. The prince became Rama IV, King Mongkut in 1851. Father Larnaudie was an expert in chemistry, watchmaking and electromagnetic devices, and instructed several young Thai men in the operation of the daguerreotype camera. The frst was Homot (Mot Amatyakun) (1821–1896), a talented metalworker who became the frst director of the Royal Mint in 1860, earning him the title of Luang Wisutyothamat. He was also the frst to work in the wet plate process and is regarded as the frst Thai photographer (fg. 5.6).

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of Photography 1 October (1861): 350, which states: “His Royal Highness the King of Siam is about to become a practical photographer, and is impatiently awaiting the arrival of a complete set of apparatus manufactured for him by Messrs. Negretti and Zambra, and has, beside, engaged the services of a gentleman to initiate him in the principles and practice of photography.” In the foreword to his book, The Kingdom and People of Siam; With a Narrative of the Mission to that Country in 1855 (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1857), treaty negotiator Sir John Bowring records that the illustrations were from photographs he had

The French clerics’ interest in importing the new photographic process was in line with their role as purveyors of Western science and technology, including printing, which was eagerly sought after by the Chakri kings and their courtiers. Pallegroix and Larnaudie succeeded in making daguerreotype portraits from 1845 until the late 1850s.22 While reigning monarch Phra Nangklao (Rama III, r. 1824–1851) refused to be photographed, his other ministers and royal princes were keen. Prince Chau Fa (who would become Rava IV, King Mongkut) was interested in Western science and technology, printing and photography, but Pallegroix was unwilling to part with his apparatus, and Chau Fa unsuccessfully sought the help of Reverend Jesse Caswell in 1845 to secure him an apparatus from America.23 This furry of imaging was accelerated by King Mongkut after his accession in 1851, when he commissioned royal portraits to be used as diplomatic gifts and granted sittings to visiting foreign photographers. This action allowed Mongkut to establish an appropriate visual equality with Western monarchs. His brother Vice-King Pinklao and several courtiers were also supporters of modern technologies including photography. The diplomatic exchanging of portraits was impelled by the British Bowring Treaty of 1855 that allowed

commissioned. The photographer is unnamed.

25 When Wisutyothamat sent examples of his photography to America in 1865, he said he had learnt how to operate the apparatus sent to Bangkok by Queen Victoria from a photographer associated with the Prussian embassy. See Patterson Dubois, “Photography in Siam,” The Philadelphia Photographer, 21 September 1865, 151. Carl Bismark was the offcial photographer of the Prussian diplomatic and commercial mission to China, Japan and Thailand led by Friedrich Albrecht zu Eulenburg, but there were other photographically adept members including the young telegraphist Auguste Sachtler.

free trade by foreigners in Bangkok, and the Treaty of Amity, Commerce, and Navigation of 1856 that opened the ports of fve Japanese cities to trade.24 King Mongkut received and reciprocated gifts of daguerreotype portraits from Pope Pius IX, French Emperor Napoleon III, Queen Victoria and the American President James Buchanan. He fnally received his own daguerreotype apparatus from Queen Victoria and possibly a stereographic apparatus from Napoleon III in 1855. When frst received, the cameras from Queen Victoria could not be operated by the King’s court photographers. Their instruction waited until 1861 and the arrival of Swiss professional photographer Pierre Rossier (1829– c. 1899). Rossier was making stereograph images in Asia for the London opticians and stereograph publishers Negretti and Zambra (fg. 5.7), and while in Bangkok undertook a commission from the French zoologist Firmin Bocourt.25 Daguerreotype portraits of Mongkut, his Queen and children sent to Queen Victoria and the American President in 1856 survive in Windsor Castle and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, variously attributed to Pallegroix, Larnaudie or Wisutyothamat, and a number of wet plate albumen prints sent to Emperor Napoleon III in France and to Pope

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26 Mongkut’s letter is quoted in Caverlee Cary, “In the Image of the King: Two Photographs from NineteenthCentury Siam,” in Southeast Asian Art: Essays in Honor of Stanley J. O’Connor, ed. Nora A. Taylor (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 125. It is unlikely he received any instruction from Thomson but may have observed the royal sittings with King Mongkut. Thomson makes no mention of Chit. In Chit’s time, Kudi Chin (now also known as Kadeejeen) was home to the small community of some 500 resident Portuguese merchants, Catholics of Portuguese descent as well as Chinese, Laotian and Cambodian immigrants. It is misleadingly named after an old Chinese temple but is not the Chinese Quarter now known as Yaowarat, located on the east

bank. Yaowarat dates back to the foundation of the new Krungthep Maha Nakhon (Bangkok) capital in 1782. Immigrants from Southern China formed a signifcant community in the old capital at Ayutthaya and by Chit’s era, were almost equal in numbers in Bangkok to the Thai. The Chinese were more integrated than in other Asian port cities, and like the Portuguese-Asian Christians, served the palace and comprised a majority of the merchant class. 29 Confrmation is sought as to the identity of Chit’s father being Teng, a Chinese Christian soldier. This theory was proposed in December 2011 in an article by Angela Camila Castelo-Branco, “‘O Império Invisível’ da fotografa Portuguesa na Tailândial” [The invisible empire of Portuguese photography in Thai-

Pius IX in 1861 are in the Vatican and Missions Etrangères de Paris collections. The latter portraits on paper can now be attributed to Luang Wisutyothamat as letters to Queen Victoria from King Mongkut state they were made by “our native photographers.”26 It is likely that Francis Chit (fg. 5.8) learnt wet plate photography from both Luang Wisutyothamat and Rossier around this time.27 Chit Chitrakani was born in 1830 in the Kudi Chin west bank district of Bangkok, near the Santa Cruz Catholic Church and adjacent to the Foreigners’ Quarter. He took the name Francis upon baptism and as part of his professional name. Kudi Chin was home to descendants of Portuguese and Catholics from the former royal capital of Ayutthaya, north of Bangkok, and Christian immigrants from Laos and Vietnam.28 Chit may have been descended from both groups as few full Thai converts were ever recruited by foreign missionaries.29 By 1863, Chit was clearly skilled enough to set up a commercial studio under his own name in a raft-house on the canal in front of his Kudi Chin residence. Foreigners, traders and visitors had arrived in great numbers as a consequence of the 1855 Bowring Treaty, and this made the English-speaking Chit’s business

viable. His advertisements in the local Englishlanguage newspapers were confdent and expertly expressed, and promised all the latest wet plate photographic specialities. Chit served everyday clients with portrait services and also sold cartes de visites of Thai royalty. The 1864 six-part panorama of Bangkok with which Chit announced his public career, is comparable with the best productions of the era.30 In 1866 King Mongkut honoured him with the title “Khoon Soondr Sadis Lacks” (Offcer for Fine Likeness Image). Chit promptly added the title and his role as “Photographer to his Majesty the King of Siam” to the back of his cartes de visites and advertisements. Chit continued the role of royal photographer under Mongkut’s heir King Chulalongkorn after his accession in 1868, and covered the king’s second coronation in 1873 (fg. 5.9) as well as various offcial events in the life of Crown Prince Vajirunhis in the 1890s (fg. 5.10). Chit accompanied King Chulalongkorn on an inland expedition to observe the Transit of Venus in 1874 and possibly on royal visits to Burma, India, Singapore and the Dutch East Indies. His role as royal photographer was not, however, exclusive. In 1874 Mongkut made German Henry Schüren (active c. 1870–1880)

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land] http://grandmonde.blogspot.com.au/2011/12/ o-imperio-invisivel-por-ocasiao-do.html (accessed 11 October 2015). Chit’s name change is referred to in his obituary by K.S.R. Kulap in the Siam Praphet, 20 January 1899, and cited by Anake Nawigamune, “Francis Chit: Portraying the Great Photographer,” http://www.sarakadee.com/feature/2002/03/francis.htm (accessed 11 October 2015). The suggestion of additional Chinese descent could have arisen from Chit’s residency in Kudi Chin. Discussed in Pipat Pongrapeeporn, The Panorama of Bangkok in the Reign of King Rama IV: A New Discovery Photographs by Francis Chit (Bangkok: Muang Boran Publishing House, 2002). Principally in Thai with English supplement.

an honoured offcial photographer, a role soon after assumed by the frm of German G.R. Lambert from Singapore. By 1880, Chit had done well enough to move from his canal boat to a shophouse in Bangkok’s Charoen Krung (New Road), a mall precinct for foreign traders built by Mongkut in the 1860s. That same year, King Chulalongkorn bestowed upon Chit the rank of Luang Akani Naruemitr. “Akani” translates as fre and the title likely relates to Chit’s role in the illuminations managed by the Gas Division for celebrations at the palace. Chit’s fellow practitioners and photographic enthusiasts in his lifetime included his own sons and both the Chakri Dynasty kings Rama IV and VI, their families, entourage and descendants down to the present day—a level of royal participation in the new medium arguably unmatched by any royal photographers. Chit & Sons was awarded a Bronze Medal at the 1893 World’s Colombian Exhibition by which time his sons were managing the business following their father’s death in 1891. Unlike their contemporaries such as G.R. Lambert & Co. in Singapore and Woodbury & Page in the Dutch East Indies, Chit & Sons did not seek to have an inventory of scenic views and images from outside the Bangkok region.

31

Maurizio Peleggi’s Lords of Things: The Fashioning of the Siamese Monarchy’s Modern Image (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002), is a good introduction to Chit and the politics of court photography. The following Thai publications with English summaries and captions, are excellent pictorial introductions: Sakda Siripant, King & Camera: Evolution of Photography in Thailand, 1845–1992 (Bangkok: Darnsutha Press, 1992), H.M. King Chulalongkorn: The Father of Thai Photography (Bangkok, Darnsutha Press, 2012). Joachim K. Bautze’s book, Unseen Siam: Early Photography 1860–1910 (Bangkok: River Books, 2016) was not available at the time of writing, but will be a major reference work.

Chit’s career over his nearly three decades of work has been covered in a number of Thai publications, but the full international appreciation of his substantial career awaits a major English-language monograph.31 Kassian Céphas Several itinerant daguerreotypists visited Java in the 1850s, of whom the most signifcant was Swedish adventurer Cesar Düben (1819– 1888). Düben’s travel memoir, published in Stockholm in 1886, included a number of lithographic plates made after his Asian daguerreotypes. Within his memoir, Düben related how after photographing the family of Sultan Hamengkubuwono VI (r. 1855–1877) at Kraton Yogyakarta in 1857, the sultan asked Düben to instruct a court member in the photographic process. The sultanate was effectively under Dutch control and managing his status as a native ruler was an ongoing challenge. Like his contemporary King Mongkut in Thailand, Hamengkubuwono saw the potential of using the new art to achieve visual parity with Western rulers. Düben found the courtier lacked aptitude but presented his camera to the sultan as a parting gift.

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32

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For an introduction to photography in colonial Indonesia, see Gael Newton, Garden of the East: Photography in Indonesia 1850s–1940s (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2014). A search of the National Gallery of Australia collection with “Céphas” in the title tab will retrieve examples of these images. Karen Strassler, “Seeing the Unseen in Indonesia’s Public Sphere: Photographic Appearances of a Spirit Queen,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 56, no.1 (2013): 98–130. A similar phenomenon can be seen in the work of Céphas’ Indian contemporary Deen Dayal, whose portraits of Indian dancers have presence and per-

There is no record of the fate or usage of Düben’s apparatus.32 Hamengkubuwono VI had to wait six more years to secure the services of an offcial court photographer from Wilhelm Camerik (1830–1897), a Dutch East Indies military sergeant major and a drawing masterturned-photographer based in Semarang on the north coast of Java. In 1864 Camerik marketed a set of cartes de visite of the principal “native grandees” of Surakarta, Yogyakarta and Magelang. This must have had offcial blessing from the sultan as Camerik continued as offcial photographer for the next few years. Possibly with encouragement from the sultan, the young Céphas, then serving in a minor administrative position at the Kraton, learnt photography from Camerik around 1867. He was Javanese but in 1860 had taken “Céphas,” the Aramaic name for “rock” given by Jesus to the apostle Simon Peter, when he was baptised into a small Christian church run by the Dutch Protestant lay teacher Mrs Christina PhillipsStevens in Purworejo, southern Central Java. After Camerik’s departure, Céphas set up his own studio in 1871 in his home in Yogyakarta, where he lived in a mixed quarter of artisans and colonial administrators. A few years later the Céphas studio card imprints proudly 88

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sonality compared to the usual “native types.” See John Clark, “The Worlding of the Asian Modern,” in Contemporary Asian Art and Exhibitions: Connectivities and World-Making, eds. Michelle Antoinette & Caroline Turner (Canberra: ANU Press, 2014), 70–3. Ebook available at http://press.anu.edu.au/wp-conte nt/uploads/2014/10/ch026.pdf. Chit belongs to the cadre of “Type I” artists who never travelled but had contact with foreign discourses and models via a patron in the 1850s–1890s, a period defned by Clark as “transitions to Modernity.” Chit’s late work merges with the succeeding period of “Academy Realism, Salon Art and the National, 1880s–1910s.”

listed his role as “Photographist to the Sultan.” As well as royal commissions, Céphas collaborated in the 1880s and 1890s with the sultan’s Dutch physician Isaac Groneman (1832–1914), an amateur archaeologist and ethnographer. Their projects included photographing the ancient Hindu temple complexes of Borobudur and Prambanan in Central Java, as well as a complete performance of classical Javanese dance dramas at Kraton Yogyakarta in 1884. In later life, when aided by his son Semuel, Céphas noticeably placed himself in some three dozen images of Javanese antiquities and sites of cultural signifcance that were sold by the Céphas studio.33 These include a self-portrait with him reverently touching the base dome encasing the Buddha sculptures on the top tier of the Borobudur complex (fg. 5.11). That Céphas was intentionally placing himself in images is supported by a quite extraordinary series of examples that have no need of a fgure for scale. In one charming image, shaded by an umbrella with his trousers rolled up, Céphas smiles towards the camera whilst paddling in the surf on the west coast (fg. 5.12). For his Javanese and more literate Dutch colonial viewers, the signifcance of the beach is apparent. This is the coast where the

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Yogyakarta sultans of the Mataram dynasty reenact a marriage ceremony with the Queen of the Southern Ocean, from whom their dynasty is legitimised.34 These images seem to mimic the informality of the new era of amateur snapshots in the 1890s. But the kinds of expensive glass plates used by Céphas, even after the introduction of the convenient dry plate in the 1880s, do not favour spontaneity. Plates are not wasted. Exposures require careful planning, timing and arrangement. The practice of placing fgures to denote scale and distance at different planes within a photograph was common in 19thcentury topographical views. The consistency of Céphas’ presence in his late images, however, is unprecedented in the work of any comparable photographer at the time in Asia. John Thomson does not appear repeatedly in his China work, nor does Isidore van Kinsbergen, the Dutch commercial photographer in Jakarta who was employed to make archaeological records for the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences in the 1860s and early 1870s. Céphas intended the images to say something by his presence: they are clearly titled, signed, dated and marketed as prints, and exist in a number of collections. The 1890s were peak years wherein Céphas’ heritage work for Groneman gained offcial recognition and reward. He was able to secure Dutch citizenship in 1891 for himself and his sons, which was symbolically signifcant but also had practical and legal benefts for the family. Céphas joined the Masons in 1892, the same year he was made an extraordinary member of the Batavian Society of the Arts and Sciences. In 1896 he was also made an honorary member of the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies in Leiden, and in 1902 received an Honorary Gold Medal of the Royal Dutch Order of Orange-Nassau from the Dutch Crown in recognition of his work on Javanese cultural heritage. Only Deen Dayal in British India re-

ceived a comparable level of offcial recognition. The honours shown to Céphas refected the new Ethical Culture policy aimed at developing a class of Indonesian leaders loyal to the Crown. An examination of his work from this period, evinced by his self-portrait series, suggests he sought a new sense of self as a Christian and as a Javanese and possibly an incipient nationalist spirit. The Céphas studio became known around 1900 for its charming series of Javanese beauties circulated as postcards. These have a relaxed charm as compared with the blank stares and soft-porn aesthetic of other publishers.35 Having a Javanese photographer must surely have affected the local models’ degree of relaxation in front of the camera and infuenced the way they were posed (fg. 5.13). One of Céphas’ images of a dancer was chosen by the founders of proto-nationalist magazine Bintang Hindia in 1905 as a promotional image. Céphas retired from the studio in 1905, and his son Semuel managed the studio until his own accidental death in 1918. Céphas’ enigmatic work, intellectual background and recognition received as an artist remain to be studied in greater depth. Céphas, like Chit, joins a handful of indigenous Southeast Asian photographic artists for whom we have personal images and basic biographies. They are the exceptions that highlight the general absence of indigenous studios in Southeast Asia outside of the as yet still poorly known history of the region’s immigrant and locally born Chinese and mixed-race photographers. Both Chit and Céphas have signifcant positions as the vanguard of transitional fgures in the “worlding” of the Asian Modern as characterised by Australian art historian John Clark.36 The current National Gallery Singapore research programme and young scholars of today will assuredly round out the picture of the photographic heritage of Southeast Asia and its photographers over the coming decades.

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Attributed to Father F-L. Larnaudie (also attributed to Bishop Pallegroix) King Mongkut and Queen Debsirindra 1855 Daguerreotype, colour dyes 10 x 7.5 cm Harris Treaty Gift, Photographic History Collection, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington 5.1

5.2

A Hong-Kong Artist (a painter-photographer) As published in John Thomson, Illustrations of China and its People: A Series of Two Hundred Photographs, with Letterpress Descriptive of the Places and People Represented, vol. 1 (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Low, and Searle, 1873), plate IV.

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Portrait of Chinese painter Lam Qua An engraving based on Lam Qua’s miniature painting after Jules Itier’s daguerreotype of Lam Qua made in Canton in 1845; as published in L’illustration: Journal universel 7, no. 182 (22 August 1846): 393. Image courtesy of HathiTrust and University of California Libraries Yu Chong (also known as Yi Tcheung and variants) (studio active c. 1889–1915, Hanoi, Vietnam) Portrait of a European Woman c. 1900 Oil on ivory plate 12.7 x 8.5 cm Private collection, Singapore

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Yu Chong (studio active c. 1889–1915, Hanoi, Vietnam) Logo of the Yu Chong Studio, Hanoi, on cabinet print (verso) c. 1900 16.7 x 10.7 cm Private collection, Singapore

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Attributed to Luang Wisutyothamat (Mot Amatyakun, Thailand) Portrait of King Mongkut and Queen Debsirindra 1861 Albumen print 20 x 15 cm Collection of Mr and Mrs Lee Kip Lee 5.6

5.7 Pierre Rossier (No. 3) Siamese Prince, Luhang Wongsa 1861 Stereograph on glass 13 x 17.4 cm Gift of Mr and Mrs Lee Kip Lee Collection of National Gallery of Australia 5.8



Francis Chit Self-Portrait with Multi-Lens Carte de Visite Camera c. 1863 Albumen silver photograph Collection of National Archives of Thailand Image courtesy of Anake Nawigamune, as published in Anake Nawigamune, Early Photography in Thailand (Bangkok: Sang Dad Publishing, 1987).

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Francis Chit His Majesty King Chulalongkorn, Rama V, on his Second Coronation, October 1873 1873 Albumen silver photograph 27 x 21.5 cm Collection of National Gallery of Australia 5.9



Francis Chit Prince Vajirunhis was Escorted to the Grand Palace for his Investiture as Crown Prince, Bangkok, 14 January 1886 1886 Albumen silver photograph 21.1 x 27.2 cm Collection of National Gallery of Australia 5.10



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Kassian Céphas, attributed to Semuel Céphas Borobudur Self-portrait of Kassian Céphas c. 1890 Albumen silver photograph 16.7 x 21.8 cm Collection of National Gallery of Australia 5.9

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5.12 A Kassian Céphas, attributed to Semuel Céphas



Kassian Céphas in the Sea in Front of the Gatehouse at Mantjingan, Parangtritis 1897 Gelatin silver photograph 16.8 x 22 cm Collection of National Gallery of Australia 5.12 B Detail of Kassian Céphas 5.13



Kassian Céphas Young Javanese Woman, Probably in Jakarta c. 1885 Albumen silver photograph 13.7 x 9.8 cm Collection of National Gallery of Australia

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2

As pointed out by Wu Hung, a renowned art historian and tenured professor at Harvard University, one of the most signifcant developments in art historical research over the last 20 to 30 years is that visual sources, such as folk murals in temples, pictures in newspapers and periodicals, illustrations for operas and novels, commercial advertisements in magazines and so on, are being covered in the newer general histories of Chinese art. See Wu Hung, Meishushi shi yi [Ten discussions on art history] (Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2008), 56, 67. My research mainly draws from newspapers: Lat Pau, Sing Po, Thien Nam Shin Pao, Chong Shing Yit Pao, Chin Nam Poh, Union Times, Morning Post, Nanyang Siang

3

Pau, Sin Chew Jit Poh and Sin Kok Min Jit Pao. When studying pre-war art, there is absolutely no way to clearly map the development of cartoons in Singapore without perusing Chong Shing Yit Pao’s supplement Fei Fei, Sin Chew Jit Poh’s pictorial supplement Xingguang [Starlight], Lat Pau’s pictorial supplement Yehui [Coconut splendour], Sin Kok Min Jit Pao’s supplement, the Union Times’ supplement, as well as Wenman Jie [The world of literature and cartoons] and Jinri Yishu [Art today], supplements of the Nanyang Siang Pau and its Sunday edition respectively. The calligrapher Zhong Dexiang arrived in Singapore in 1886—see Yeo Mang Thong, “Qiu Shuyuan yu zhanqian Xinjiapo huashe meishu—Yi Qiu Shuyuan houren

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Pre-war (1886–1941) Art Activities of the Chinese Community in Singapore through a Narrative Framework of Diasporic Bonds Yeo Mang Thong

Visual culture encapsulates the politics, economy and culture of its time, and refects the historical phenomena of different periods. In recent decades, art historians have come to include a wide variety of visual images as objects of study in their writings.1 Similarly, this essay is also diverse in its scope of inquiry, which ranges from traditional lyrical poetry exchanges among the literati, commercial advertisements, plaques of temples and Chinese guild halls, to seal carvings, allegorical illustrations in newspapers, as well as cartoons and woodcuts. However, the main sources of my research are the Chinese-language daily newspapers of pre-war Singapore, which are essential in this study.2 Through my use of diverse visual materials, I hope to broaden and deepen our exploration and understanding of the art activities of the Chinese community in pre-war Singapore. 90

The period under study herein begins in 1886, the year that the Chinese calligrapher Zhong Dexiang began selling his calligraphic pieces in Singapore, and ends in 1941.3 After that, Singapore fell under Japanese Occupation, from 15 February 1942 to 5 September 1945. During this time, all art activities were controlled behind the scenes by Japanese military and government offcials, as well as Japanese cartoonists. Instead of serving traditional visual aesthetic functions, cartoons and art exhibitions were used as propaganda tools by the Japanese to broadcast decrees and keep the local populace ignorant.4 This essay approaches its subject from the perspective of the Chinese migrants in pre-war Singapore. Living in a foreign land, these Chinese bore diasporic sentiments, longing for their homeland and maintaining frequent in-

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jiacang huawen ribao wei sucai de kaocha” [Khoo Seok Wan and the arts of the Chinese community in pre-war Singapore—An investigation based on the Khoo family’s collection and Chinese-language daily newspapers], New Century Journal (August 2014): 24–5. An announcement titled “Shufa mingjia” [Master of calligraphy], published in Lat Pau (30 October 1889), pertains to Wei Zhusheng, who had travelled to Singapore in September 1889 at the invitation of Tso Ping Lung, the Chinese Consul to Singapore. It was not long before Wei, at the suggestion of Lat Pau’s chief writer Yeap Jit Yun, advertised his calligraphy in the newspapers for proft. Since then, similar advertisements from calligraphers and painters also appeared

teractions with her. This underlies the unique character of pre-war art by the Chinese community. The art activities of the Chinese community viewed in terms of the complex emotional diasporic experience can be explicated in two ways: Firstly, the Chinese diaspora never severed their cultural connections with their country of origin. Hoping to practise and promote the culture of their motherland overseas, they introduced, in newspapers, masterpieces of Chinese calligraphy and calligraphic models. They also bolstered the rich diversity of art forms that had been developed in the course of China’s long history by engaging in activities such as poetic exchanges, composing poems of specifed subjects, inscribing plaques and exchanging paintings as gifts, and seal carving. These Chinese migrants were emotionally attached to their motherland and were concerned with the political situation and economic developments in China. This can be seen in “allegorical pictures” that were critical of current affairs in China, such as commercial advertisements with slogans that emphasised the need to “reclaim China’s rights; promote Chinese goods”; even art schools were founded with the mission to “invigorate [China’s] industries.” By the Second Sino-Japanese War follow-

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occasionally in the newspapers. See Yeo Mang Thong, “You gulao de yinzhang yanyi chuanqi: Yi Qiu Shuyuan yincun wei li” [Unfolding a legend from old seals: The case of the compilation of Khoo Seok Wan’s seal impressions], Asian Culture 36 (August 2012). Yeo Mang Thong & Wei Ailan, “Xinjiapo rizhi qijian (1942–1945) meishu huodong yanjiu” [A study of the art activities in Singapore during the Japanese Occupation (1942–1945)], Journal of Chinese Cultural Studies 1, no. 3 (June 2014), edited and published by the Taiwan Society of Nanyang Culture. “Huweisi baozheng gongwen yilüe” [An offcial governance report from the Chinese protectorate, translated in brief], Lat Pau, 6 March 1889, sheet no. 5.

ing the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, cartoons had become a tool used by the Chinese in the resistance movement against the Japanese. Art exhibitions travelled south from China to raise funds for war-relief efforts, and art activities of the Singapore Chinese community were liveliest during this period in a show of spirited support. Continuing the Many-Splendoured Legacy of the Chinese Arts Calligraphy Models and Masterpieces After the founding of Singapore in 1819, its local Chinese population grew steadily, and numbered 164,300 by 1888.5 While most of the Chinese who migrated to Singapore were uneducated labourers, some were traditional literati; regardless, they were all culturally orientated towards China. An example of this can be seen in Chinese-language newspapers Sing Po and Thien Nam Shin Pao, which were founded in 1890 and 1898 respectively. Apart from reporting news from the motherland, these newspapers also occasionally published calligraphy and paintings by renowned artists, as well as announced the sale of calligraphy couplets (ready-mounted or otherwise), paper and brushes, and templates for calligraphic

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6

7

Yeo Mang Thong, “Shijiu shiji mo (1887–1899) Xinjiapo huashe meishu huodong yanjiu” [A study on the art activities of the Singaporean Chinese community in the late 19 th century (1887–1899)], Journal of Chinese Cultural Studies 1, no. 2 (December 2013). Lü Xicun (also known as Lü Shiyi) was a Qing calligrapher famous in Fujian, China and Taiwan. He is hailed as a grandmaster of Taiwanese epigraphy. See Yeo, “Qiu Shuyuan yu zhanqian Xinjiapo huashe meishu,” 4–7.

practice. In fact, the business of mounting paintings and calligraphy was competitive, demonstrating that the traditional literati in Singapore were indeed avid supporters of these arts.6 Khoo Seok Wan (1874–1941), the founder of Thien Nam Shin Pao, was a key fgure in the cultural activities of the Chinese community in Singapore from the late 19th century to the 1920s. Not only did he highly recommend the Kuaixuetang Fatie (Model for calligraphy practice from the Court of Quick Snow) in his newspapers, he also published a selection of calligraphic masterpieces (from his own collection) by renowned Qing dynasty master Lü Xicun (fg. 6.1), for the beneft of calligraphy enthusiasts who were eager to copy the works of the eminent virtuoso.7 In addition, Khoo introduced the works of Korean calligrapher Yin Xishi (fg. 6.2), Chinese calligrapher Xu Lunting, calligrapher Pan Feisheng (who was based in Hong Kong then), and the poet Lin Qizeng (then living in Singapore) to readers in Singapore, and even set the rates for their calligraphy commissions.8 These activities helped to enhance the knowledge of and appreciation for calligraphy and painting amongst the local literati; indirectly advance the development of 92

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Yin Xishi (also known as Yun Kye-sok and Yin Qun) had been travelling in the Jiangnan region of China since 1887. Indications of his whereabouts and his calligraphy advertisements could frequently be seen in Shanghai’s Shen-Pao. The Malaya Borneo Exhibition was held to welcome the Crown Prince of Britain on his visit to Singapore. Exhibits included merchandise from various places, artworks by Chinese and foreign artists as well as traditional paintings and calligraphy by students. For

the art of calligraphy in Singapore; and foster a connection between overseas Chinese and their cultural roots. Notably, at the beginning of the 20th century, local Chinese children were given the opportunity to study calligraphy in school. At the 1922 Malaya Borneo Exhibition, even calligraphy pieces by students received commendation, as published in an article: “Both the offcial and regular scripts are written with an archaic vigour and exquisiteness, presumably the result of the habitual copying of rubbings of stone inscriptions and other calligraphic models.”9 In 1927, Li Jian from Shanghai held a fundraising exhibition at the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce. Proceeds from the sale of poetry, prose, calligraphy, paintings and seal carvings were used to establish a Confucianist university. The event was highly recommended by the Chinese in Singapore who were eager to support the educational activities of their motherland.10 Another case in point is the Nanyang Society of Calligraphy and Painting, which was founded by a group of cultured individuals with the intention of sustaining Chinese culture in the “southern wildlands,” that is, to promote and cultivate the interest in Chinese arts among Chinese immigrants. Not

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a review of the exhibition, see Lat Pau, 4 April 1922.

10 See Sin Kok Min Jit Pao, 17 January 1927. 11 “Zhanqian Xinma meishu: Cong Nanyang Shuhuashe dao Huaren Meishu Yanjiuhui” [Art in pre-war Singapore and Malaya: From the Nanyang Society of Calligraphy and Painting to the Society of Chinese Artists], in Yeo Mang Thong, Xinjiapo zhanqian huaren meishushi lunji, [Essays on the history of pre-war Chinese art in Singapore] (Singapore: Singapore Society of Asian Studies, 1992), 33–9.

only did members of the Society study Chinese calligraphy and painting, they also exhibited their works, all for the aim of popularising the traditional Chinese arts.11 Literary Exchanges between Cultured Individuals During this period, traditional literati residing in Singapore were known to have engaged in literary exchanges with their literati contemporaries in China. Fengyue qinzun tu (Painting of Zither Romance), an album in the collection of Khoo’s descendants, is most representative of this. This work which was created by a painter in China was commissioned by Khoo after the failure of the Hundred Days of Reform in 1898. The work depicts a boat at rest in a grassy cove; the man in the boat, believed to be Khoo Seok Wan, plays a zither placed atop his bent knees. A light breeze brushes across the water’s surface, and in a food of moonlight, the drinking vessels on the low table appear to wobble. The entire picture suggests Khoo’s dispiritedness; he presently yields to the pleasures of the breeze, the moon, poetry, wine and music (fg. 6.3). After the painting was completed, Khoo invited local and overseas literati to

12 Yeo, “Qiu Shuyuan yu zhanqian Xinjiapo huashe 13

meishu,” 10–2. Yan Yiyuan was a physician at the Thong Chai Medical Institution. According to “Yibang jiexiao” [A published list of individuals who passed the entrance examinations to medical school] in Sin Kok Min Jit Pao, 31 July 1923, Yan was ranked frst among all the examinees from the Hokkien community who sat for the exams at the Institution in May 1923.

write poetic responses to it, and subsequently compiled these poems into an album. Many of these poems were also published in Thien Nam Shin Pao and Chin Nam Poh. Fengyue qinzun tu is a testament to the close interaction and exchange of ideas between the local Chinese and the cultured intelligentsia in their homeland. The painting also offers us a glimpse of the artistic sophistication in calligraphy made by celebrated men of letters from the Guangdong and Fujian region. Indeed, it allows us to appreciate remarkable calligraphy produced in Singapore over a hundred years ago by traditional Chinese literati, including Lin Qizeng, Huo Chaojun, Tan Biao, Kang Fengji and Li Jichen.12 As early as the end of the 19th century, literati societies, a continuation of the tradition of literati gatherings, were emerging in Singapore. A work to consider in light of this is Shoumei tu (Plum Blossoms of Longevity) in Khoo’s collection (fg. 6.4), which was a birthday present to him from Yan Yiyuan (also known as Yan Wenhao or Yan Diyuan), a fellow member of the Singapore Tan Poetry Society (Tan She).13 According to poems inscribed on various paintings by members of the Society, Sun Peigu (1892–1945), was a literatus,

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As seen in, for example, Venerable Shi Chichan’s “Ti Sun Peigu Xingqi tu” [For Sun Peigu’s painting titled Begging], “Ti Sun Peigu jushi hua zeng molian” [For the ink painting of lotuses painted and given by Sun Peigu the lay Buddhist], and He Guanren’s “Ti Yan Yiyuan Sun Peigu zuo meihua tu” [For the painting of plum blossoms created by the respected Yan Yiyuan and Sun Peigu]. Sun Peigu was an art educator. He taught at the Tuan Mong School in 1915, and made some contributions to art education during his stay in Singapore. After returning to China in 1924, Sun taught at various schools in Jieyang, Chaoyang and Shantou, cultivating students far and wide. See Sun Shuyan, “Minguo Lingdong huatan de qizhi—Tansuo Sun Peigu” [A standard in the Lingdong art scene in

skilled in poetry, painting and seal carving, but who unfortunately has no extant works for us to admire.14 This underscores the great historical signifcance of Shoumei tu, for it speaks of the bonds of friendship between poets in Singapore in the 1920s: Here, the poet wishes a friend happy birthday in a traditional manner, by means of inscribing a painting with poetry. The receiver of the painting treasures the gift, and shows it to friends who had travelled from afar. Together they appreciate the work and he invites them to contribute additional calligraphic inscriptions. Executed in the pomo (splashed ink) technique, the aged plum bough in Shoumei tu extends horizontally to the left, bearing a spray of cold, delicate blossoms. The leading seal, the impression of which reads “shijiu pi” (poetryand-wine addict) was carved by Zhu Yugu, who came to Singapore in 1928 to sell his calligraphic works.15 The seal imprinted at the bottom corner which reads “leilei luoluo” (open and upright) was carved by Sun Peigu and gifted to Yan Diyuan in 1923. Being adept at both poetry and painting, Khoo knew very well that 94

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the Republican Period—An exploratory look at Sun Peigu], http://www.artcn.com/artblog/?uid-2328action-viewspace-itemid-9867 (accessed 12 December 2013). See the Union Times, 11 August 1928. This may be illustrated by Lin Zexu mobao ceye [A leaf from an album of Lin Zexu’s calligraphy] from the collection of Khoo Seok Wan’s family. The friends who had viewed this page, along with their dates of viewing, are as follows: Jiang Kongyin (1910), Kang Youwei (9 April 1910), Hoo Wei Yin (1914; the Republic of China’s Consul-General to Singapore), Qin Ruqin (1924; Republican China’s Vice-Consul to Singapore), Yan Wenhao, Cai Mengxiang (1925), Li Jian (December 1926), Xu Beihong (1927), Lin Zhuzhai

the placement of these two seals would be critical to the overall balance of the composition. With this in mind, he stamped the seal that reads “poetry-and-wine addict,” a gift from Zhu Yugu, on the painting. The poem on the lower left of the painting was inscribed by fellow Tan Poetry Society member Chen Yuxian, while the inscription on the far left was written by Li Jian in 1929, after a viewing of the painting. These refned traditions, of celebrating birthdays with poetry and painting, and the sharing of masterpieces in one’s art collection with fellow enthusiasts, were brought to Singapore and Malaya by the Chinese literati. To the diasporic Chinese, such masterpieces became something of an unusual medium that brought them together, and an effective balm that soothed their homesickness.16 Plaque Inscriptions and Compilations of Seals The cultural phenomenon of inviting calligraphers or illustrious people to inscribe on plaques or signboards of temples, guild halls and shops

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(1927; one of the founders of Tao Nan Primary School and at one time Vice President of the Nanyang Confucian Association in Singapore), Yang Daoji (1928; also known by his sobriquet Xiangxue, Yang was from Bing Village, Mei County, Guangdong Province, China, and was once secretary to Chen Cheng, a senior general of the Kuomintang), Ho Hsiang-ning (October 1929). 17 See Lin Xiaosheng et al., eds., History of the Chinese Clan Associations in Singapore (Singapore: Xinjiapo Xinwen yu Chuban Gongsi, 1986). 18 See Lat Pau, 24 August 1929. 19 Yu Dafu, who came to Singapore in 1938, wrote the name-bearing plaque inscription for Xingzhou Bookstore, as well as couplets to be hung on pil-

was unique to the Chinese and quite common practice in the Ming and Qing dynasties. Early immigrants to Singapore who came from different parts of China actively built places of worship for their deities, and also formed community guilds based on their dialect groups or localities of origin.17 As the leaders of these immigrant communities would typically hope that their temples and associations could have their plaques inscribed by eminent individuals, there are plaques that have been inscribed by individuals such as the Guangxu Emperor, Tso Ping Lung the Qing government’s frst Consul to Singapore (fg. 6.5), and Consul-General Huang Zunxian, some of which still survive. Other examples include Teochew Poit Ip Huay Kuan’s plaque inscription by Li Jian, which bears the name of the clan association itself, as well as one by calligrapher Tan Hengfu that was inscribed on the completion of the Nanyang Khek Community Guild (fg. 6.6).18 In the latter example, the four large characters “li junzi zhen” (advantageous for upholding the frm respectability of a gentleman) had been executed elegantly with strokes charged with

20

lars for Haw Par Villa and the Jing Lu School. (See Yeo Mang Thong, Yu Dafu lü Xin shenghuo yu zuopin yanjiu [A study of Yu Dafu’s life in Singapore and his works], volume 4 of Xinjiapo Xinshe xueshu congshu [The academic collection of Xinshe, Singapore] (September 1987), 242; and Yeo Mang Thong, “Yu Dafu, Huang Menggui yu Jinglu Xuexiao” [Yu Dafu, Huang Menggui and the Jing Lu School], in Asian Culture 4 (October 1984). The name-bearing plaque of Hai Inn Temple was inscribed by Xu Beihong. See Yeo Mang Thong, “Ershi shiji chu (1900–1929) Xinjiapo huashe meishu huodong yanjiu” [A Study on the art activities of the Singaporean Chinese Community in the early 20 th Century (1900–1929)], Xinjiapo yishu [Singaporean Art] Issue 2 (August 2014).

breadth of spirit. The adjacent congratulatory message reads: “Given the wisdom and civility of our guild members, as they act with resolution, and get along harmoniously with every sector of society, our guild will surely fourish.” When we look back in history, these inscriptions are akin to ties that connect us to the past. They refect folk religion, politics, the everyday life of the people and cultural philosophies of the time. Up to the 1930s, esteemed individuals such as the renowned writer Yu Dafu and painter Xu Beihong continued to leave inscriptions for plaques in Singapore.19 These traces of the past add to the heritage in urban Singapore, constituting quite a splendid sight. From the late 19th century, there were calligraphy and painting studios in Singapore that would inscribe signboards for businesses. In the early 20th century, Chang Shu Nai, the chief writer of the Sin Kok Min Jit Pao, often published advertisements for calligraphy (fg. 6.7). This indicates a close relation between calligraphy and commerce. It should also be noted that signboards for shops were mostly written in Chinese.20

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21

See Yeo, “Shijiu shiji mo (1887–1899) Xinjiapo huashe meishu huodong yanjiu” [A study on the art activities of the Singaporean Chinese community in the late 19 th Century (1887–1899)], Journal of Chinese Cultural Studies 1, no. 2 (December 2013): 102. 22 See Yeo Mang Thong, “Qiu shuyuan yinshi” [Khoo Seok Wan’s and his Seals], in Asian Culture 7 (April 1986): 29–37. 23 Shihanzhai yincun is currently in the collection of the renowned Singaporean painter Tan Kian Por. I am grateful to him for providing access to the material. 24 My thanks to Professor Wu Yongliang from the China Academy of Art for his review of impressions of

Another set of artefacts to note are seals of personal names and shop names which were tokens of authentication for individuals and businesses. With the arrival of Chinese immigrants, the tradition of using seals as a practical object of authentication was introduced to Singapore. As early as the 1860s, there was a seal carving shop here by the name of Zuishi Xuan (The Studio of Drunken Stones). Traditional seals were known to take on local elements to meet the needs of the immigrant communities. For instance, English, Indian or Malay scripts were sometimes engraved onto seals, as requested by customers.21 At the end of the 19th century, collecting seals was also an activity of the traditional literati, who took pleasure in carving and gifting them to friends.22 Such practices enriched the art activities of the Chinese community during this period. Lat Pau’s chief writer Yeap Jit Yun (1859–1921, also known as Yong Weng) was a skilled seal carver, as evidenced by his surviving work Shihanzhai yincun (a compilation of impressions of his seals, which he titled after his residence, Shihanzhai).23 Considering that the album was completed in 1898 and that Yeap’s seal carvings (fg. 6.8) 96

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seals carved by Yeap Jit Yun. Yeap has been hailed by scholar Tan Yeok Seong as the Southern Seas’ leading newspaperman. See Tan Yeok Seong, Nanyang diyi baoren [The leading newspaperman in Nanyang] (Singapore: Xingzhou Shijie Shuju, 1958). See Tan Kian Por’s foreword to Xinjiapo yinren zuopin ji [A collection of works by Singaporean seal carvers] (Singapore: Siaw-Tao Chinese Seal-Carving Calligraphy & Painting Society Si Bao Zhai & The Drawing Gallery, March 2004), unpaginated. See the preface to Peigu Shanren qianyin [The seals of Peigu the mountain recluse], dated 10 October, the 11th year of the Republic of China (i.e., 1922), writ-

are “characterised by an ancient quality of robustness and simplicity, and infuse a cultural energy into others,” I believe he deserves to be recognised as the leading seal carver in Singapore.24 Four of Yeap’s seals are featured in Xinjiapo yinren zuopin ji (A collection of works by Singaporean seal carvers), published in 2004. In the accompanying foreword, Tan Kian Por notes that the signifcance of the publication lies in “saluting the contributions made by the early seal carvers, remembering them, and also fnding the beginnings and tracing the development of seal carving in Singapore.”25 Explicitly articulated here is the transmission of the culture of seal carving. Another case in point is Sun Peigu, who came south to teach at Tuan Mong School in 1915, and was an adept poet, painter and seal carver. During his sojourn in Singapore, he “painted occasionally, but was troubled by the lack [of seals] to use [in his paintings]; so [he] carved quite a number of seals on [his] own, and when [he] had some spare time, [he] playfully compiled the impressions of these seals into a book.”26 From this we know that Sun, too, compiled impressions of his seals.

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ten by Sun Peigu himself at Singapore’s Tuan Mong School. Access to this source material was provided courtesy of Sun Shuyan, from Jieyang. After the founding of its Republican regime, China bustled with activities that invigorated its domestic industries and promoted Chinese goods. Gestures that refected patriotism by the industrial and commercial sectors spread to the society in Singapore. Schools became infuenced. For example, the Yeung Ching School established its own Students’ Society of Arts and Crafts in 1919, which held an exhibition in the following year with the purpose of “fulflling the students’ moral obligation to promote Chinese mer-

chandise.” (See Lat Pau, 5, 7 and 12 January 1920.) Local newspapers called for the resident Chinese community to purchase Chinese products, so as to help reclaim the mother nation’s rights and profts. (See Sin Kok Min Jit Pao, 11–12 March 1921.) 28 Cited from Zhang Dianyuan, “Zhengzhi jingjixue pipan: Guanggao chuanbo yanjiu de linglei shijiao” [A critique of political economics: An alternative perspective on the study of the propagation of advertising], in Zhejiang daxue xuebao [Journal of Zhejiang University] 36, no. 1 (Jan 2006). 29 See the Yi Shi Art School’s enrolment advertisement in Sin Kok Min Jit Pao, 15 March 1921.

Interactions Brought about by China’s Political Situation and Economic Development

the kind of emotional appeal here was a strong sense of national identity. When Chinese immigrants consumed merchandise that had been artfully packaged in this manner, the awareness of economic rights draining away and of the need to reclaim these rights seeped into their lives (fg. 6.9). Advertisements thus functioned as an effective medium, subliminally reexpressing the hopes of the people. “Not only did [they] not feel that anything was forcibly imposed upon them, but actually came to agree with the viewpoint presented in the advertisements. The advertisements were thus shaping people’s behaviour and thinking.”28 The Chinese characters in fgure 9 are basically saying: why spend money on foreign cigarettes when Great Wall is an excellent brand of cigarettes? The underlying message is that the consumption of Chinese products would lead to the recovery of China’s economic rights. This advertisement was created by Yi Shi, the head of the Yi Shi Art School, for the Nanyang Brothers Tobacco Company Limited in Singapore.29 Its image is humorous and as far as its aesthetics, underlying thought and language are concerned, the advertisement would have attracted the interest and attention of consumers.

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Advertisements to Promote Chinese Goods, Art Schools to Invigorate Industries The majority of advertisements at the end of the 19th century were purely textual; any images that were featured were mostly photographs of actual objects. Only from the early 20th century onwards did Chinese-language daily newspapers gradually begin to publish advertisements of commercial products that included a combination of both images and text. These mostly expressed their artistry through forms and lines, and the resultant visual effect possessed the qualities of both advertisement and illustration. Due to specifc historical circumstances at the time, the notion of “invigorat[ing] China’s industries and promot[ing] Chinese goods” was incorporated into advertisements of various commercial products.27 The message of these texts and images in advertisements was very clear: in the course of everyday life, any activity, even smoking and drinking, could be considered an act of patriotism as long as one was consuming Chinese products. Inherent in

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According to “Xinjiapo gongbuju hukou diaocha” [The Singapore Municipal Commission’s household survey], Lat Pau, 30 April 1931, 4. 31 See Lat Pau, 25 October 1922. 32 Yeo, “Cong Zhongxing Ribao shang de manhua tanqi” [Beginning with the cartoons in Chong Shing Yit Pao], in Zonghui shi nian [Ten years of the SFCCA] (Singapore: Singapore Federation of Chinese Clan Associations, 1995), 79–85. 33 See Lao Shanghai manhua tuzhi [A Pictorial Record of Old Shanghai’s Cartoons] (Shanghai: Shanghai

In 1911, the Chinese population in Singapore numbered 255,611, and grew to 350,355 by 1921.30 With this tremendous increase in population, art schools began to emerge. In 1906, Su Binting established a portraitpainting workshop in the belief that art could develop the minds of the people and help to strengthen the country. In October 1922, Sun Peigu co-founded Singapore’s frst fne art academy—the Singapore Academy of Fine Arts for Overseas Chinese. In his speech at the inauguration of the institution, Sun noted: “Sales of the products of our country have been poor in recent years because they are poorly made and lacking in fne artistry. This is why we have fallen behind foreign goods and are at a huge disadvantage.”31 The establishment of art schools was thus also associated with the idea of invigorating the motherland, and increasing the wealth and strength of the nation and its people. Discourses of this sort highlight, frstly, that art educators in Singapore worried about the gradual weakening and impoverishment of their motherland; secondly, that they hoped to catch up with foreign countries and power up the industries “back home” through the use of artistic design and packaging. Their motivation was markedly different from that behind Lim Hak Tai’s founding of the Nanyang Acad98

Kexue Jishu Wenxian Chubanshe, July 2010), 12–4.

34 Lim Cheng Tju, “Tong Meng Hui, huaren zai tuxi-

35 36

ang zhong de zhiwo zaixian, yiji 20 shiji chu Xinjiapo huawen manhua de lanshang” [Tong Meng Hui, Visual Self-Representations of the Chinese and the Birth of Chinese Cartoons in Early 20 th Century Singapore], translated from English by Chew Wei Li & Chan Cheow Thia, in Tangent 6, no. 2 (2007): 172. Ibid., 169–79. Chen graduated from the Tuan Mong School, and was at one time a clerk at Tuan Mong Branch School. See

emy of Fine Arts in 1938. Lim believed that Singapore, being geographically situated as a transport hub between Europe and Asia, was blessed in its arts with a tropical ethos and a complex ethnic consciousness. Allegorical Pictures that Critiqued Current Affairs, Cartoons that Called for Resistance against Japan and to Save China Between 9 September 1907 and 21 March 1908, Fei Fei, the supplement to Chong Shing Yit Pao, published a total of 41 allegorical pictures, most of which were reprinted from foreign newspapers.32 Two of these bore the name of Ma Xingchi, a well-known frst-generation cartoonist from China.33 Ma’s works published in Fei Fei are likely to be political cartoons drawn while he was in Singapore with Sun Yatsen on revolutionary business.34 These allegorical pictures, which were critiques of current affairs presented visually, opposed the Manchu government and supported the revolution in China. For example, “Manqing guanli, guiguo huaqiao” (Qing bureaucrats, returning overseas Chinese, fg. 6.10) by an unknown illustrator, depicts how, after having worked very hard abroad for a living, overseas Chinese returned to their motherland only to be exploited by corrupt bureaucrats.

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Duanmeng Xuexiao ershiwu zhounian jiniankan [Tuan Mong School’s 25th anniversary souvenir magazine] (Singapore, 1931). In addition, Zhang Bohe, Zheng Zhaowu and Wang Yunsheng wrote forewords for Chen Kunquan manhua ji [The collected cartoons of Chen Kunquan]. See Duanmeng yuekan [The Tuan Mong Monthly] 2, no. 2 (15 December 1932). See “Dai Yinlang bian Nanyang Shangbao Xingqi Kan Jinri Yishu xilun” [Analyses of Art Today in the Sunday edition of Nanyang Siang Pau], in Yeo, Xinjiapo zhanqian huaren meishushi lunji, 59–70.

The satirical political cartoons that were published in Fei Fei to comment on current affairs and educate the public were the frst of their kind in Singapore’s Chinese-language daily newspapers. Soon after, the shifting political situation in China brought about cartoons of a different nature. For example, shortly after its founding in 1914, Kok Min Jit Pao began to feature a series of cartoons that censured the aggressively ambitious Yuan Shikai. Between September and October 1918, there were also combinations of images and texts produced by the Singapore-based cartoonist Zhu Mingxin that exposed the fatuousness and incompetency of the warlords in China while consolidating support for the Kuomintang.35 The emergence of such political cartoons evidenced the concern the overseas Chinese had for the political situation back in China. Political cartoons appeared sporadically in the Chinese-language daily newspapers thereafter. The editors of the supplements to these newspapers focused on expressing sentiments and new ideas primarily through texts. By the 1930s, however, cartoons as a means to educate the people to resist the Japanese invasion gradually gained importance. In 1930, satirical cartoons by Tchang Ju Chi and Chen Kunquan were featured from time to time in Lat Pau’s pictorial supplement Yehui (Coconut splendour),

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As seen in Dai Yinlang’s “Yige tigong—Xian gei xinxing de muke zuozhe” [An option—For emerging woodcut artists], “Lun muke yishu” [On the art of woodcuts] and “Lun ticai” [On subject matter], which puts forth eight “isms” as guidelines for taking the woodcutand-cartoon movement forward and as a set of standards for evaluating the works of the movement. See “Huajia Dai Yinlang” [Dai Yinlang the artist], in Yeo, Xinjiapo zhanqian huaren meishushi lunji, 199–212.

the Union Times’ supplement and Xingguang (Starlight).36 Chen Kunquan’s “Zhe shi women weiyi de mudi” (This is our sole objective, fg. 6.11), for example, lays bare the Japanese military’s ambition to take over Manchuria. Such cartoons which expressed concern over current affairs and revealed ugly realities were a manner of art prevalent in pre-war Singapore. In the 1930s, the Chinese diaspora fervently responded to the resounding cries to resist Japanese aggression and save the motherland. The art community at the time collectively relied on the use of cartoons as a publicity tool to educate the public and motivate the masses to take action. Dai Yinlang, the editor of Nanyang Siang Pau Wenman Jie (The world of literature and cartoons) as well as Nanyang Siang Pau (Sunday Edition) Jinri Yishu (Art today), believed that woodcuts and cartoons were effective weapons in the Chinese people’s war of resistance, comparable to airplanes and tanks, or at the very least a bullet or javelin.37 These two periodicals played an important role in promoting cartoons and woodcuts in pre-war Singapore for they not only provided a platform for people who enjoyed cartooning or making woodcuts to express themselves, they allowed Dai—due to his skill in drawing, talent in carving and rich creative experience—to come up with a set of art theories (fg. 6.12).38

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39 See “Xinjiapo zhanqian wu nian (1937–1941) manhua yanjiu” [A study of Singapore’s cartoons in fve pre-war years (1937–1941)], in Yeo, Xinjiapo zhanqian huaren meishushi lunji, 174–85. 40 See Sin Kok Min Jit Pao, 17 January 1927. 41 Because Ho Hsiang-ning’s political stance was at odds with Chiang Kai-shek’s, Ho’s exhibition was given a rather low-profle treatment by some of the local Chinese leaders and groups. Although the original plan was to invite the wife of the Governor of Singapore and that of the Chinese Consul-General to Singapore to co-host the opening of the event, both women ultimately did not show up, nor did Aw

Notably, in its manifesto publicised in 1937 at the First Malayan Chinese Cartoon Exhibition, the Nanyang Youth Lee Chee Association stated that political cartoons, when done correctly, often could be more powerfully and widely effective than an argumentative essay on politics.39 In 1939 and 1940, cartoons about the ongoing Sino-Japanese War were always prominently featured on the front page of Nanyang Siang Pau. Among these was 1939’s Dadi huichun (Spring returns to the earth), created by the newspaper’s graphic editor Tay Kong Han. The cartoon expresses conviction in China’s eventual victory over Japan and the successful establishment of the Chinese regime that was to come. Calligraphy and Painting Events to Raise Relief Funds The earliest fundraising calligraphy and painting event in Singapore took place in 1927, from 22 to 23 January. It was an exhibition organised for the sale of poetry, prose, calligraphy, paintings and seal carvings, held by Li Zhongqian (also known as Li Jian) at the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce, in support 100

Boon-Haw, the Chairman of the exhibition’s organising committee. This goes to show that art exhibitions were affected by the political climate in China at that time. See “He Xiangning zai Xinjiapo” [Ho Hsiangning in Singapore], in Yeo, Xinjiapo zhanqian huaren meishushi lunji, 13–21. 42 See “Xu Beihong: Cong Xinjiapo zhanqian (1930– 1941) huawen ribao suo kanzai ziliao kan qi zai haiwai de meishu huodong” [Xu Beihong: A look at his overseas art activities, based on materials published in Chinese-language daily newspapers in pre-war Singapore (1930–1941)], in Yeo, Xinjiapo zhanqian huaren meishushi lunji, 98–108.

of the founding of a Confucianist university.40 Li was the frst painter from China to hold an art exhibition at the venue. Another exhibition of a similar nature, this time of Ho Hsiangning’s works, was held at the same premises on 7‒9 November 1929, ostensibly to raise funds for the Chung Kai Agricultural and Industrial School.41 From the 1937 Marco Polo Bridge Incident to 1941, a total of 19 exhibitions to raise relief funds were held (fg. 6.13). This fully demonstrates the overseas Chinese’s intense interest in China’s war effort against the Japanese. Thanks to the Chinese immigrants’ fervent enthusiasm, a committee would typically be formed prior to such art shows to prepare for the event, taking charge of everything from publicity to installation and reception. Prices of the exhibited artworks ranged from tens to thousands of dollars. The organisers would form teams and travel far and wide to sell vouchers to be used for purchasing these artworks, to local Chinese businessmen. This was a distinctive aspect of the pre-war art exhibitions. The various Chinese-language daily newspapers not only reported these fundraising exhibitions in thorough detail, but also issued special publications to promote these events. Examples include

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43 Lim Loh was a renowned architect who engaged in architectural work and the manufacturing of bricks and tiles. In 1901, he took on a commission to construct the Victoria Memorial Hall with the lowest bid, and caused a stir in Singapore when he completed the building in fve years. Lim Bo Seng was his 11th child. Zhao Xun and Wang Ying founded the New China Theatre Troupe in Singapore on 6 April 1940, and went on to give performances at various locations in Singapore and Malaya. Fangxia ni de bianzi (Put down your whip) was a sensational street play at the time. 44 See Yeo Mang Thong, “Situ Qiao fufu zai Xinjiapo” [Mr and Mrs Situ Qiao in Singapore], in Yeo, Xinjiapo

Kunmingwen xiehui manhua zhanlan tekan (A special publication on the cartoon exhibition of the Kunming Branch of the All-China Resistance Association of Writers and Artists) and Liu Haisu xiansheng huazhan tekan (A special publication on Mr Liu Haisu’s painting exhibition). A remarkable number of visitors attended these events. A Xu Beihong show, for instance, attracted 20,000 visitors and ran for a long duration, raising as much as 15,398 Straits dollars.42 Cultural societies, schools and radio stations frequently invited exhibiting artists to give talks, and their insightful understanding and profound discussions of art nourished art lovers in Singapore. Xu’s “Zhongxi hua de fenye” (The divide between Chinese and Western painting) and “Yishu de fangxiang” (The direction of art), as well as Liu’s “Zhongguo hua yu yanghua zhi yidian” (Differences between Chinese and Western painting) and “Xiandai yishu” (Modern art), for example, helped Westerners become better acquainted with Chinese art. The painters who came south were warmly welcomed by the local Chinese community, with which they would frequently interact. Xu, for example, was invited to write on the title labels of books and leave inscriptions for plaques. He painted full-length portraits of the then

45

zhanqian huaren meishushi lunji, 112–7; Yao Mengtong [Yeo Mang Thong], “Artistic Scene under Specifed Historical Structure: Situ Qiao’s Put Down Your Whip,” Art Journal 95, no. 2 (2016): 70–6, published by the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. The original Hanjiang dudiao tu was lost or destroyed during the Japanese Occupation of Singapore. In 1948, however, Tan Ean Kiam’s son wrote a letter to Xu Beihong, requesting him to re-create the work. Recognising that Tan was “not lacking in flial sentiments,” Xu thus painted Hanjiang chuidiao tu and gave it to him. See Hanjiang chuidiao tu [Angling in winter], published by the Tan Ean Kiam Foundation in 1988.

Governor of Singapore Sir Shenton Thomas in military attire and Lim Loh (fg. 6.14); Hanjiang dudiao tu (Fishing Alone in Winter) for Tan Ean Kiam; a portrait for Lee Choon Seng, a full-length portrait of Miss Jenny, paramour of the Vice-Consul of Belgium in Singapore; as well as the famous tableau Fangxia ni de bianzi (Put Down Your Whip, fg. 6.15) which is based on a performance of the titular street play by actors Zhao Xun and Wang Ying.43 Incidentally, in relation to the last work, the painter Situ Qiao, who was sojourning in Singapore at the time, had at one point specially invited the two said actors to his studio. With the conditions of the stage performance replicated (in terms of lighting, as well as Zhao’s and Wang’s appearances), Situ completed another famous painting associated with the Second Sino-Japanese War, also titled Put Down Your Whip.44 After Xu painted Hanjiang dudiao tu (Fishing Alone in Winter) for Tan Ean Kiam, Tan was known to have invited fellow poets—including Lee Choon Seng, Venerable Shi Chichan, Guan Zhenmin, Xu Yunzhi, Chen Tianxiao, Khoo Seok Wan, Huang Menggui and Wu Ruifu— to contribute inscriptions to the work.45 This was a continuation of the tradition of inscribing poems on famed paintings that was in prac-

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tice at the end of the 19th century. Furthermore, not only did Xu create a good number of calligraphy works and paintings, he also left the Chinese literary circles in Malaya with many pieces of fne literature. Xu’s notes about his travels in India, his poetry exchanges with Huang Mengkui, along with poetic inscriptions for his paintings by Yu Dafu and other fellow poets enriched the art activities of the pre-war Chinese community. (In addition, Yu Dafu also inscribed a good number of poems for Liu Haisu’s paintings.)46 The Society of Chinese Artists in Singapore contributed considerably towards the war relief. In its exhibitions, the favour of Nanyang (the South Seas) was recurrent. Artists who by then had resided in Singapore for a long time had developed a deeper attachment to the Nanyang region, and thus unconsciously included elements from their surroundings in their paintings. Shown at the Society’s exhibition in 1939, Tchang’s oil painting Mila and Jena (fg. 6.16), for example, depicts two girls, one seated and the other standing; rough-edged and unsophisticated in appearance, they gaze into the distance ahead, seemingly absorbed in thought. The rose-red tones and the overall pictorial composition leave an exuberantly tropical impression, a sincere expression of the artist’s feelings about life in the region. Another example is Untitled (Still Life) (fg. 6.17), which depicts fruits commonly seen in Southeast Asia, such as mangoes, mangosteens, rambutans and jackfruit. On the right, behind the footed fruit bowl hangs a Sumatran batik that sports a pattern of dots and lines on a dark brown background.47 Through artistic collaging, the artist has vivifed the overall image with vibrant colours and a sense of three-dimensionality. Conclusion The unique character of pre-war Singaporean art was shaped and informed by the immigrant Chinese’s manifold emotional bonds to their 102

homeland. Creating cartoons and advertisements was a way to connect with the social dynamics of their homeland. These were also mediums that inspired and deepened patriotism. The traditions of composing poetry for paintings, seal carving, calligraphy and inscribing plaques were brought south to Singapore. These cultural artefacts, which speak of delightful, ancient historical stories, allow a gradual understanding of the steady transmission of cultural heritage. With the unfolding of the Second SinoJapanese War (during which the fate of the Chinese nation hung in the balance), painters and calligraphers from China as well as those residing in Singapore held one fundraising art exhibition after another. Frequent art exhibitions, in the fve pre-war years from 1937 to 1941 in particular, were unusual for this region. The artists’ insightful talks and the assistance given by students to such exhibitions contributed to an unprecedented artistic atmosphere in prewar Singapore. The war destroyed everything, yet it also catalysed the development of art on this island. As calligraphers and painters arrived frst in Singapore, and subsequently travelled north to different parts of Malaya to hold exhibitions—as in the case of Ho Hsiang-ning, Gao Jianfu, Shen Yibin, Ong Schan Tchow, Xu Beihong and Liu Haisu—Singapore became a relay station for the propagation of art by Chinese at home and abroad. The materials discussed in this essay have provided us with a wonderful perspective, allowing us to witness the visual artistic diversity that arose within a specifc historical context.

This essay was originally written in Chinese by Yeo Mang Thong, translated by Wang Yitong and edited by Ng Kum Hoon.   Chinese proper nouns and terms in this essay are given in its most commonly used form; where there is none, these are transliterated in the hanyu pinyin romanisation system.

Yeo Mang Thong

46 47

See “Yu Dafu yu Liu Haisu” [Yu Dafu and Liu Haisu], Asian Culture 3, (April 1984). See Zhang Xinghong, “Zai shuo Zhang Ruqi hua zai Nanyang feng chuqi shi” [On Tchang Ju Chi’s paint-

ings during the nascence of the Nanyang Style], in the “Crossroads” (Xin huidian) section of Singapore’s Lianhe Zaobao, 16 June 2014.

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Lü Xicun (also known as Lü Shiyi) Calligraphic model, in emulation of Su Shi’s script Collection of Mr Ong Cheng Kian

Yin Xishi (also known as Yin Qun and Yun Kye-sok) A section of Taohuayuan ji (An Account of the Peach Blossom Spring) in cursive script 1898 Collection of Mr Ong Cheng Kian 6.2

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Yu Tao Fengyue qinzun tu (Painting of Zither Romance) 1898 Chinese ink and colour on paper Collection of Mr Ong Cheng Kian

Yan Yiyuan (also known as Yan Wenhao and Yan Diyuan) Shoumei tu (Plum Blossoms of Longevity) 1924 Ink on paper Collection of Mr Ong Cheng Kian 6.4

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Tso Ping Lung Xian che youming (Prominence throughout the spiritual and mortal worlds), a plaque inscription for Thian Hock Keng Temple 1886 6.5



Tan Hengfu Li junzi zhen (Advantageous for upholding the frm respectability of a gentleman), a plaque inscription to commemorate the completion of the Nanyang Khek Community Guild 1929 Image courtesy of Mr Xue Zhenchuan 6.6



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Chang Shu Nai An inscription on a signboard for a commercial business. c. 1930s Yeap Jit Yun (also known as Yong Weng) Shihanzhai Seals As published in Xinjiapo yinren zuopin ji [A collection of works by Singaporean seal carvers] (Singapore: Siaw-Tao Chinese Seal-Carving Calligraphy & Painting Society, Si Bao Zhai & The Drawing Gallery, March 2004).

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Yi Shi Advertisement as published in Lat Pau, 24 December 1921 The Chinese characters at the top read: “Hey, buddy! When we have excellent Great Wall cigarettes and you are not buying them—your purse is hanging upside down!” Image courtesy of the National University of Singapore Libraries Artist unknown Manqing guanli, guiguo huaqiao (Qing bureaucrats, returning overseas Chinese) As published in the Chong Shing Yit Pao supplement, Fei Fei, 24 February 1908 Image courtesy of the National University of Singapore Libraries

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Chen Kunquan Zhe shi women weiyi de mudi (This is our sole objective) As published in the Sin Chew Jit Poh supplement, Xingguang (Starlight), 12 May 1930 Dai Yinlang Dai zhe guangming lai (Arriving with light) As published in the Nanyang Siang Pau (Sunday Edition) supplement, Wenman Jie (The world of literature and cartoons), 8 November 1936

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Description of Exhibition

Exhibition Venue

Date

Remarks

1

A calligraphy and painting exhibition to raise funds for refugees organised by the Society of Chinese Artists

Great World Park

1–3 October 1937

Oil paintings, traditional Chinese paintings were exhibited

2

An exhibition of works by Jiang Xiuhua organised by The Cantonese Community’s China Relief Fund Association

New World Amusement Park

3–6 December 1937

Traditional Chinese paintings were exhibited

3

The Save-China Cartoon Exhibition by the Society of Chinese Artists

New World Amusement Park

3–6 December 1937

Exhibition presented cartoons

4

The Society of Chinese Artists’ Annual Exhibition

Young Women’s Christian Association

4–6 July 1938

Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce

8–10 July 1938

Half of the proceeds donated to relief efforts; 230 works exhibited: oil paintings, watercolours, sculptures, traditional Chinese paintings

5

An exhibition of works by Wang Jiyuan

Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce

9–12 April 1938

104 works exhibited: traditional Chinese paintings, oil paintings, watercolours

6

An exhibition by The Singapore Commercial Art Society

New World Amusement Park

5 August 1938

Watercolours, charcoal portraits, commercial graphic designs, oil paintings were exhibited

7

The Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts’ Student Exhibition

Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce

19–21 August 1938

Over 200 works exhibited: watercolours, traditional Chinese paintings

8

An exhibition of works by Hu Chengxiang

Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce

14–18 August 1938

130 works exhibited: traditional Chinese paintings, watercolours, woodcuts, sketches

9

An exhibition of works by Chang Tan Nung

Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce

8–15 October 1938

170 works exhibited: traditional Chinese paintings, woodcuts, sketches, epigraphy

10

An exhibition of works by Shen Yibin

Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce

6–14 January 1939

Works exhibited: traditional Chinese paintings, calligraphy

11

An exhibition of works by Xu Beihong

Victoria Memorial Hall

15–16 March 1939

171 works exhibited: traditional Chinese paintings, oil paintings

Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce

18–26 March 1939

Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce

17–26 June 1939

12

An exhibition of works by Ong Schan Tchow

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Yeo Mang Thong

Works exhibited: traditional Chinese paintings

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A list of calligraphy and painting exhibitions (1937–1941) organised to raise funds for war relief

Description of Exhibition

Exhibition Venue

Date

Remarks

13

An exhibition of works by Yu Shihai and Ning Hanzhang

Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce

27–31 October 1939

Over 300 works exhibited: woodcut cartoons, photography

14

The Society of Chinese Artists’ Annual Exhibition

Victoria Memorial Hall

11–13 December 1939

Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce

16–18 December 1939

Over 200 works exhibited: pastels, traditional Chinese paintings, oil paintings, watercolours, woodcuts, etc.

15

The United Calligraphy and Painting Exhibition

Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce

9–15 February 1940

For raising relief funds; over 300 works exhibited: traditional Chinese paintings, calligraphy

16

An exhibition of works by Wang Aiduo

Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce

27 September– 1 October 1940

Over 500 works exhibited: traditional Chinese paintings, calligraphy

17

An exhibition of works by See Hiang To

Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce

9–11 November 1940

180 works exhibited: traditional Chinese paintings, calligraphy

18

An exhibition of works by Li Feihong

Raffes Hotel

21–24 November 1940

For the aid fund of Britain and relief funds for war refugees in China; 100 works exhibited: oil paintings, traditional Chinese paintings

19

An exhibition of works by Liu Haisu

Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce

23 February– 4 March 1941

Over 200 works exhibited: traditional Chinese paintings, oil paintings

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Copyright not available

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6.14 Xu Beihong Portrait of Lim Loh 1927 Oil on canvas 114 x 76 cm Gift of Lim family in memory of Lim Loh Collection of National Gallery Singapore 6.15 Xu Beihong Put Down Your Whip 1939 Oil on canvas 144 x 90 cm Private collection 6.16 Tchang Ju Chi Mila and Jena 1939 Oil 6.17 Tchang Ju Chi Untitled (Still Life) Undated Oil on canvas 94 x 130 cm Collection of Chang Si Fun (Shewin Chang)

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1

2

Katharine Sim, Malayan Landscape [with an introduction by Sir Richard Winstedt] (London: Michael Joseph, 1946), 28. Published in 1946, Malayan Landscape is presented as a recollection of Sim’s experience in Malaya, that was in all likelihood originally penned as private correspondence. We are reminded by the author that much of the content of the book, from which this excerpt was taken, was derived from the notes and letters sent during the period 1938 to 1942 to close friends or relatives. See her foreword in the second edition of Malayan

3

Landscape published in 1969 (Singapore: Donald Moore for Asia Pacifc Press), 6–8. Sim went on to pursue deeper knowledge of the Malay language (and culture) and became one of very few British women who wrote about pantuns. For more on this subject, see Krishnavanie Shanmugam, “Pantun Translations into English in Women’s Writings in Twentieth Century British Malaya,” Journal of Modern Languages 20 (2010): 80–93. If we accept the view that colonisation was not primarily concerned with transposing cultural values

(7)

A “Forgotten” Art World: The Singapore Art Club and its Colonial Women Artists Yvonne Low

In 1938, Katharine Sim, a newly wed artist who accompanied her husband, Stuart Sim, from England to Parit Buntar, wrote: The Malays were good to paint. The men have that little-boy look which is so attractive, and the women bashfully droop their heads, shy and demure. I could not offend the modesty of Moslem Malay women by asking them to pose in the nude; but it was a disappointment not to be able to do any studies of Malay nudes.1 In thinking about the relationship between colonial women artists and their subjects, and the kinds of roles they might play in the colony, there are various things observable in this brief autobiographical description. First, the Malays made “good” painting subjects to the colonial painters; second, qualities of deference in the colonised (“that little-boy look”; “shy and demure”) appeared to appeal to colonial sub104

jectivity and taste; and third, the “disappointment” of not being able to do nude studies tellingly placed the author among the pedigree of academically trained artists. Katharine Sim belonged to a long history of colonial women artists who painted the tropics during their intermittent stay in the British Colony, no less due to their privileged status as the spouse of colonial expatriates and offcials. What perhaps set Sim apart from the others was her deep fascination and love for Malayan peoples and the Malayan culture which germinated during an initial three-year stay (what she called her “three youthful, glib years”) that ultimately led to her making a conscious and concerted effort to embrace the different cultures in Malaya upon her subsequent return following the end of the war.2 Colonial women and men formed the precursors of Singapore’s history of self-modernisation.3 Yet their histories were often excluded in nationalistic discourses of art. The work and

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but whose real objectives were related to trade, economic exploitation and settlement, then it might be useful to consider Singapore’s modernisation beyond the nationalist frame, but as possibly one of selfmodernisation, and as having been shaped by colonial conditions of modernity. See for example Robert Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2001), 22–4. This was particularly clear in Sim’s revised foreword written for the second edition of Malayan Landscape, 6–8.

contribution of privileged colonial women artists, such as Katharine Sim, belonged to a no man’s land—as part of the colonial community, they were distanced from their own community where they belonged, and marginalised in anti-colonial histories in spite of how many may well have acknowledged the colony to be their second home.4 This essay discusses the cultural institutions that were in place during colonial rule and the signifcant roles colonial women played. By tracing the long process of cultural remodelling in Malaya, it is possible to observe how cultural institutions such as social art clubs were later inherited and continued by post-Independent Malaya, opening up participation within them to various excluded groups. Far from a homogenous or an undistinguished mass, “colonial artists” themselves comprised professional, offcial and amateur artists, who also operated under uniquely colonial conditions. They introduced not merely a new form of visual representation, but a secular artist-spectator system that made the production and reception of modern visual representations comprehensible as a professional or amateur art practice. The Little-Known Singapore Art Club and the Very Social World of Art Postcolonial discourses of art were problematically devoid of colonial references. Where colo-

5

6

Kwok Kian Chow, Channels and Confluences: A History of Singapore Art (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 1996). See chapter on “Amateur Drawing Association and the Low Brothers,” 10–2. In taking a revisionist approach to fll a gap in history, the author of this essay is aware that advances in technology have increased accessibility to sources and improved the speed at which information is obtained. In this instance, the digitisation of newspapers by the Singapore National Library Board has signifcantly enhanced the research process for present researchers.

nial infuence, if any, was believed to have taken place, it could be traced to the rise of formal art education in public schools and later to the appointment of an Art Superintendent, Richard Walker, in 1928. This explicit occlusion of colonial infuence is most markedly discernable in the canonical text, Channels and Confuences: A History of Singapore Art, in which the author chose to begin the narrative with the Amateur Drawing Association founded by the Straits Chinese community. Here, Kwok Kian Chow wrote: Although there is some scanty information on an art club established in Singapore around 1882, a good starting point for a survey of twentieth-century Singapore art history is 1909—the year when the Amateur Drawing Association was established.5 The opening chapter paid little attention to the wider cultural contexts of the Amateur Drawing Association, its historical precedents or the relations of its members within the nascent art world. Instead, it drew exclusive attention to the association’s existence as the evidence for local agency as seen in the works of a few members, the much celebrated “Low brothers” for example. However, the “scanty information” of this art club does in fact reveal an earlier history.6 As records of this art club and artworks produced by the artists may have been

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7

See Kelvin Chuah, “The Practice of Watercolour at the Dawn of Modern Art in Malaya,” in Imagining Identities: Narratives in Malaysian Art Volume 1, eds. Nur Hanim Khairuddin & Beverly Yong with T.K. Sabapathy (Kuala Lumpur: RogueArt, 2012), 52–80. 8 “Art Critics,” Straits Times Weekly Issue, 18 October 1884, 8. 9 For example, Guido, “The Art Club,” The Straits Times, 12 January 1884, 3. 10 See for example the following published in The

destroyed during World War II, I was unable to successfully fnd any catalogues or reproductions of exhibited artworks.7 Instead, I found over 200 articles of varying length and quality describing the activities, exhibitions and artworks published in a number of local daily newspapers between 1883 and 1941. These have yet to be referred to in any way by writers or scholars on this subject. These articles have since been maintained by the National Library Board of Singapore as archival material, and are publicly available. The Art Club, which was also sometimes called the Singapore Art Club to differentiate from art clubs in neighbouring states, was purportedly started in the early 1880s by “a few ladies and gentlemen having a turn for drawing and painting” with the aim of encouraging amateur painting and sketching.8 Reports of the club and its activities in the form of announcements and reviews were mostly written by committee members, newspaper correspondents or by members of the public addressing the editors. In the absence of any visual evidence, such reports provide critical insights to the early art developments of British Malaya. They provide some clues as to how local art societies such as the Amateur Drawing Association came to be, and the social conditions in which the art of the Low brothers was produced and received. In the unravelling of this forgotten art club, the 106

11

Straits Times: “Singapore Art Club,” 5 March 1883, 2; Nemo, “The Art Club Exhibitions,” 6 September 1883, 2; “Untitled,” 29 February 1884, 2. “Singapore Art Club,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser (1884–1942), 22 May 1914, 7. In “Singapore Art Club: Exhibition at the Memorial Hall,” The Straits Times, 27 May 1914, 9, there was mention of “Mr Ben Brown,” a member of the Singapore Art Club who resided at Rangoon and had also participated in the Rangoon Art Club exhibition.

many “hidden” roles that women played in the nascent art world of British Malaya as patrons, artists, committee club members and the viewing public, also came to light. The Singapore Art Club was initially a private club, but it eventually grew in size and reputation, becoming somewhat public from 1883 onwards. Its activities were undertaken seriously and the members were careful not “to neglect the interests of a society so eminently calculated to promote the cultivation of all that is ennobling and purifying.”9 The club appeared to have lasted for 60 years in spite of long periods of inactivity before it fnally ceased operation during the Japanese Occupation. Although the leadership of the club was inconsistent and information about the club from secondary sources is scarce, throughout this period it was not by any means a low-profle club, for it was well-patronised by personalities belonging to the upper classes of colonial society. The club gained prominence around the region and frequently enlisted participation from neighbouring states such as Perak and Penang, until they too started their own clubs. By 1883, the club had about “ffty active members” based in settlements across the Straits, a small running subcommittee of 12 in charge of organising the club’s activities, including the publishing of regular announcements and reports of their activities in the local daily news-

Yvonne Low

12

“Fine Art Exhibitions,” Straits Times Weekly Issue, 13 August 1884, 6. 13 Ibid. 14 Tan Kok Tiong, Chua Choon Seng and Lee Chim Kuan were also invited to participate. 15 See “Singapore Art Club,” The Straits Times, 5 February 1906 and “The Art Exhibition: An Interesting Collection,” Eastern Daily Mail and Straits Morning Advertiser, 3 February 1906. 16 It is presently unknown if other states that were part

of the FMS might have had similar art clubs but if there were, they did not participate in these events. The Penang Impressionists Art Club was thought to be exclusively female and was described as a women’s club in modern Penang art history, but this is untrue. There were male participants namely Mr H.A. Neubronner and others. See for example, “Singapore Art Club: Exhibition at Government House Yesterday,” The Straits Times, 16 March 1905, 5 and “The Art Exhibition: An Interesting Collection,” ibid.

paper The Straits Times and others.10 Initially, when their seasonal exhibitions were held at the Upper Room in the Town Hall, they were well-attended by people in society and the ruling elite, for example, the Governor and his family, who were also amateur painters who would participate in the exhibitions. The Singapore Art Club must have enjoyed much publicity and stature, for news regarding its activities, reputation and success spread to other colonies. In its later years, the club was able to garner entries regularly from the Federated Malay States (FMS) as well as from Rangoon and Ceylon.11 One 1884 report discussed the “art club model” as ideal. It described Singapore as taking “the lead” in the matter of Art Club exhibitions in the “Far East,” with even Shanghai, its “elder and more aspiring settlement,” following its example for having also “produced an Art Club, which exhibits, at stated seasons, a fair collection of sketches in crayon and water colours, and even more ambitious efforts.”12 The writer went on to propose that the Art Club “might advance a step further in the direction of popularising art” by “constitut[ing] themselves a sort of academy,” drawing as an example the Simla Fine Art Society in Calcutta. It was the “liberality of the members” that the article drew specifc reference to as worthy of modelling after, in which prizes and medals within sections were offered

to the amateurs divided into categories: the native artist, warrant and non-commissioned offcer and the commissioned offcer.13 This unfortunately did not materialise. The Singapore Art Club kept to its original structure and remained generally closed to non-European members, though it did conduct regular nonmember competitions and on a few occasions invited non-European members to exhibit and compete, for example members of the Amateur Drawing Association including Low Kway Song.14 There were also rare occasions when locals participated in the exhibitions, such as students of the Kuala Kangsar Malay Art School and the “little Chinese boy” by the name of Fam Seh Goha, who was commended for his picture, Battle of Trafalgar, painted in a technique he had invented, using a piece of bamboo bitten at the end and dipped in ink.15 To boost diversity and stimulate interest and motivation within the community, the Singapore Art Club reached out to fellow European members in art clubs from the region. For instance, members of the FMS art clubs (namely in Perak, Selangor and Negeri Sembilan) and the Penang Impressionists Art Club were regularly invited to take part in their annual exhibition, sometimes competing for prizes, and vice versa.16 Their support was especially crucial when key members of the club were absent and participation in the exhibitions dipped.

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17 “The Art Exhibition: An Interesting Collection,” ibid. 18 Norman Edwards, The Singapore House and Resi-

19

dential Life 1819–1939 (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1990), 9. Graham Saunders, Tropical Interludes: European Life and Society in South-East Asia (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1998), 153.

Given the social limitations in a foreign environment such as the tropics, it was to be expected that the European community attended events for mostly social reasons with only a small group dedicated to advancing artistic developments. Descriptions of the club’s activities and reception conformed with accounts of the general way of life in colonial circles, where men and women partook in tennis parties, picnics, balls and evenings at the club. This seemed especially the case in the early days of the club when its meetings and exhibitions turned out to be massive social affairs with some exhibitions initially held at the Town Hall, and later at the Government House or Victoria Memorial Hall (and elsewhere). At these exhibitions, apart from the display of paintings and art objects for competition (sometimes open to non-members), there was also the display of works on loan, which aimed to showcase artworks by famous artists or noteworthy craft and antiques. The viewing of works was often conducted to the accompaniment of refreshments and music. There was usually a miscellaneous concert that included vocal and instrumental music. The events became increasingly sophisticated in later years and the club catered from Hotel de l’Europe Syndicate, and hired the services of music groups such as the Band of the Sherwood Foresters.17 Norman Edwards reminds us that the European population consisted not only of members from suburban England, but also the 108

20 “The Year 1883,” [reprinted from The Straits Times, 31 December] Straits Times Weekly Issue, 5 January 1884, 5. 21 Lynn Hollen Lees, “Being British in Malaya, 1890– 1940,” The Journal of British Studies 48, no. 1 (January 2009): 76–101.

British settlers in India. It was from the ranks of the new English middle-class suburbanites that most of the colonial offcials sent out to manage affairs in India were drawn. This latter group, he argues, went from being part of a socially mobile class aspiring to the norms of a landed aristocracy to being a minority but elite group in a less advanced foreign world, on the fringe of a rural-based agricultural economy. They were on the one hand wary of “going native” and on the other, experienced the pressure to interact with the native community in order to adapt in a foreign environment.18 Both British India and Malaya witnessed an interchange of ideas between the local and British communities—much more than in other British colonies; the fear of losing their identity and social position did much to justify their need for conservatism, order and conformity. As the ruling minority in a foreign settlement, the European community was a close-knit one and settling into the colony required learning how to live within such a community. The club, which was usually exclusively European in membership, has been described by Saunders as the “centre of European activity”; it was a place where the Europeans could relax among their fellows and for many women (usually wives or relatives), who were typically provided domestic help and found time heavy on their hands, club activities formed a critical component of their social and everyday life.19 One 1883 annual report revealed that social life and entertainment in Singapore con-

Yvonne Low

22 For example, it was reported in “Art in Singapore: Successful Exhibition at the Tanglin Club,” The Straits Times, 15 February 1908, 7, “the Hon. Secretary, Mrs Evatt, is to be congratulated upon having induced so many amateurs to forward their pictures for exhibition.”

sisted of balls, club events, including exhibitions organised by the Teutonia Club and Art Club, cricket and lawn tennis tournaments, and various forms of dramatics such as English opera, minstrels, circuses—all of which were “fairly well patronised.”20 Although rare, upwardly mobile “natives” who were suffciently naturalised as British subjects were rewarded membership to such clubs, but even so, the distinction between the European and non-European fractions was kept consistent. A good example was how Haji Abdul Majid, the frst Malay assistant inspector of schools, was himself a member of the Ellerton Club in Kuala Kangsar, a club organised for “lower-ranking colonial offcials and clerks from various ethnic groups.”21 Beginning in 1887, both James Miller and Major Manners Kerr were remembered for leading and driving the Singapore Art Club during the early period. Then there was W.F. Nutt and W.R. Collyer who avidly supported the club by serving as its President during the frst decade of the 20th century. They were wellsupported by Mrs Evatt.22 Sir Frank Swettenham, then Governor and Commander-inChief of the Straits Settlements, supported the club as a keen competitor and patron, offering as well the Government House as the venue for several successful exhibitions. The subsequent decade reached a new milestone in terms of the quality and scale of the exhibitions under a predominantly female-led committee. News about the club’s success was frequently reported, such as the following:

23 24 25

“Singapore Art Club: Exhibition at Government House Yesterday,” 5. “Art in Singapore: Annual Exhibition of Local Club,” The Straits Times, 13 March 1912, 7. “Singapore Art Club,” The Straits Times, 31 January 1912, 6.

In fact there were more exhibits and onlookers than there was space for either […] the guests gathered together and trod on each other’s toes with the utmost affability and variously praised and criticised the exhibits—intelligently and otherwise—as is the happy and praiseworthy fashion at all such assemblages […] and the demand for catalogues demonstrated the excellence of the show.23 Under the leadership of Lady Evelyn Young, from 1912, the club underwent a period of success. Reports were glowing with accolades with regard to both the quality and quantity of the exhibits: The current exhibition, which opened yesterday afternoon in the Tanglin Club premises and extends over today, surpasses all previous events of the kind, and, apart from the fact that it contains twice as many exhibits as last year’s, the standard of work is distinctly better all over.24 Lady Evelyn Young served as the President from 1912 till possibly 1915 and was assisted by an all-female committee team in 1912. These members were known only by their last names, and they included Mrs Owen, Mrs W.L. Watkins, Mrs Darby, Mrs F.M. Elliot, Mrs Money and the honorary Secretary and treasurer, Mrs Felkin.25 Young was herself very competent in the category of Applied Arts and submitted a Limerick lace collar for exhibition,

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“Singapore Art Club: The Annual Exhibition,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser (1884– 1942), 6 June 1918, 357. 27 “Singapore Art Club,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser (1884–1942), 6 September 1929, 9. 28 Denis Santry & “Claude,” Salubrious Singapore (Singapore: Kelly and Walsh, 1920). 29 See for example “Local Art Club’s Exhibition,” The Straits Times, 4 November 1929, 14 and “Pictures

from the Recent Singapore Art Club Exhibition,” Malayan Saturday Post, 7 December 1929, 37. 30 “Singapore Art Club,” The Straits Times, 25 January 1929, 10. 31 “Local Art Club’s Exhibition,” 14. 32 “Healthy Art: Singapore Club’s Refreshing Exhibition,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser (1884–1942), 3 November 1931, 16. See as well, “Singapore Art Club: Exhibition by Local Artists,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser (1884–1942), 15 November 1932, 7.

among other items.26 In 1919, the Governor and Lady Young completed their service and left the colony. It was a good decade before more news of the freshly revived Singapore Art Club appeared, with reportage of its founding to have taken place in January 1929.27 This fnal incarnation of the Singapore Art Club before the Japanese Occupation was led by Denis Santry, who appeared popular and was elected president of the club consecutively for several years. Santry was also the co-author of a colourful book entitled Salubrious Singapore, in which many samples of his ink drawings and satirical cartoons (fgs. 7.1 and 7.2) of the European community based in Singapore were printed.28 Figure 1 shows a black and white caricature of Mr F.S. James, then Colonial Secretary of Singapore, whose dress sense became the subject of Santry’s mockery. In these cartoons of what were scenes observed by the artist, women were very much part of the social milieu of the time. Black and white ink drawings of such type was one of several categories in which members could contribute their works to for the exhibitions. A member, Mr W. Stirling, was particularly adept in this medium; his works were given special mention and reproduced in the local papers (fg. 7.3).29 Under the leadership of Santry, the overall

conduct of the club remained generally similar to its previous incarnations, which saw the club making attempts to organise monthly exhibitions, art appreciation sessions, and weekly drawing sessions.30 Like previously, the vast majority of the club’s members were amateurs, with only a handful who were professional artists. Nonetheless, the quality of the exhibits, which spanned oils, watercolours, black and white drawings, etchings and bas-relief modelling, was praised by a writer to have reached a “high amateur standard.”31 This period also saw the active participation of the prominent Government Art Superintendent, Richard Walker, whose works, especially in watercolours, were frequently mentioned for their excellent execution and the high price they commanded.32 A poor reproduction of his rendition of a young fsherman heading back to his rumah panggung (house on stilts) was published in the Malayan Saturday Post (fg. 7.4).33 In particular, the annual exhibition of 1932 was noted for its “high standard” and saw the participation of neighbouring clubs from Penang and Kuala Lumpur, including artists such as the famed watercolourist, Abdullah Ariff.34 Under the relatively short-lived leadership of Santry, arrangements were also made for the circulation of art magazines amongst members

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“Pictures from the Recent Singapore Art Club Exhibition,” Malayan Saturday Post, 7 December 1929, 37. 34 “Healthy Art: Singapore Club’s Refreshing Exhibition,” 16. 35 See “Singapore Art Club: Good Progress Reported at Annual Meeting,” The Straits Times, 9 March 1931, 18; “Singapore Art Club: Encouraging Progress During the Year,” The Straits Times, 26 March 1932, 19. 36 There was a 1948 public announcement seeking old members of the club. See “Art Club Seeks Old Members,” The Straits Times, 7 November 1948, 5.

37

and to develop the drawing skills of its members, an aspect that Santry emphasised as leader of the club.35 Whilst the club already offered weekly life drawing classes, Santry, an amateur sculptor himself, was keen to develop the activities of the club pedagogically in a broad range of art forms. Plans were made to acquire plaster casts, photographs of posed models, and a skeleton. There were few reports after 1932 and though attempts were made to revive the club in 1937, it never regained its past glory, and was almost unheard of after the end of World War II.36 It is clear from this brief illustration that the Amateur Drawing Association did not emerge from a vacuum, but was in fact part of an existing art world circuit made up of predominantly colonial artists (amateur and professional), patrons, and an English-speaking viewing and reading public. Though he was not a member of the Singapore Art Club, Low Kway Soo himself had participated occasionally in the Singapore and F.M.S. Art Club exhibitions and, like other members of the Amateur Drawing Association, was part of a nascent art world and art market that was modelled after the social art clubs of the colonial world. His portrait of Mr Loke Chow Thye shown at the 1913 F.M.S. Art Club exhibition was described as showing “much promise.”37 Whether the Low brothers were indeed, as some records

have it, the frst locally born artists or otherwise is likely a matter of defnition and technicality. They were certainly among the frst in the Malaya region to have made the individual work of an artist an aspired and professional vocation that was modelled after a European one. Singapore in the early 20th century was fast becoming an important city and trading port. It became the world’s seventh largest port, and by 1914 its trade had multiplied by a factor of eight, further securing its position as an important Southeast Asian entrepôt for the import of Western manufactured goods and the export of raw materials. This indicated a burgeoning economy that was becoming increasingly affuent and likely more receptive to such activities of high culture. Low Kway Song, for example, could have found himself a publishing frm that would employ his artistic skills, but he must have been relatively reassured by contemporary conditions to have considered making a living as a professional artist. He consequently took the advice of Mr Philip, his former school principal, and opened a studio, which he called the Raffes Art Studio, along Bras Basah Road in the heart of the Singapore metropolis.38 The “studio” as an integral component of an artist’s practice fnds roots in a well-established European tradition, as a space for the artist to develop and gain mastery of his or her artistic

33

38

“F.M.S. Art Club,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser (1884-1942), 11 December 1913, 380. It is presently uncertain whether this is the frst such studio, however, based on existing records, this seems to be the case. Details of how the studio was run remains unclear, but it seems likely that it was a public space that enabled Low to paint regularly, and to receive patrons as implied from the many commissions later in his painting career.

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39

“Brothers who Blazed the Trail of Art in Malaya,” The Straits Times, 19 July 1953, 4. The article provided details of his early struggles and later successes, including commissions for paintings by a number of government offcials. 40 See for example, Chew Teng Beng, “History of the Development of Art in Penang,” in Penang Artists 1920’s–1990’s, ed. Tan Chee Khuan (Penang: The Art Gallery), 5–7. Chew mentions another “local talent” who was part of the group, the wife of a wealthy Chinese millionaire, Mrs Lim Cheng Kung. 41 Little was mentioned about the type of work they did in Chew’s account, save for the anecdote that their instructor was a Malay watercolourist, Abdullah Ar-

iff. Abdullah later became commemorated as a pioneer Malaysian artist in Malaysian art discourse. 42 Drawing on the writings of Yeo Mang Thong, Kwok did however qualify that until further research reveals otherwise, this was one of few important early art exhibitions. The others being the Amateur Drawing Association exhibition of 1913 and the exhibition on the work of Chinese art students from France of 1927. See Kwok, op. cit., 16. 43 Ibid. 44 See chapter, “The Legacy of Women in Singapore Art History,” in Bridget Tracy Tan, Women Artists in Singapore (Singapore: National Heritage Board, Singapore, 2011), 11–6.

experience. It was a bold commitment on the part of Low Kway Song but one which despite a diffcult start eventually paid off.39

further taken up by Bridget Tracy Tan, author of Women Artists in Singapore, as a starting point to survey exhibitions of women artists “between 1931 and 1991” and as the point of beginning for discussing the legacy of women artists in Singapore.44 It is clear in both examples that the purpose of staging these historical events—of amateur beginnings—served to open up a dialogue about the present: to set the stage for the modern art world of professional artists. Such historical delineations serve to reify the amateur–professional divide by tracking its course of development chronologically and by privileging a discourse that mapped the ideological progress of a nation’s art and the progress of women, respectively. Whereas in fact, there is little correlation between the two. The colonial art clubs, as discussed, developed out of circumstances that were unique to the colonial social life and were generally distinct in the form, structure and intent of hobby classes. Though there is a tendency to view art club members, in the present-day context, as “Sunday painters,” it seems more likely that most of the Singapore Art Club members were amateurs that grew from an important and distinct European tradition.45

Amateurism and the “Accomplished Women” of the Early Art Clubs The Penang Impressionists appeared to be the only known colonial art club and is often described in postcolonial narratives as being made up of mostly “English housewives.”40 None of them, save for one other non-European member of the group, the wife of a Chinese millionaire, Mrs Lim Cheng Kung, was identifed, together with the instructor, Abdullah Ariff. Nor was there signifcant interest given to research the type of works produced by the members.41 The marked absence of female participation in the historical treatise, Channels and Confuences, was also telling. Brief mention was made of an early exhibition, organised by the Young Women’s Christian Association in 1931, which the author claimed was “probably the frst all-women art and craft exhibition in Singapore.”42 This was also the only instance where he made any mention of women artists outside of a chapter that he had dedicated to women artists.43 This 1931 exhibition was 112

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45

46

In David Y.S. Liew’s thesis, “Shifting Images: Women & Art in Singapore” (unpublished honours thesis, National University of Singapore, 1995), he claimed that “Sunday painters” abounded among the Western community, “but there are apparently no records to indicate whether professional artists existed within this group.” This is a common misconception, and one which this chapter hopes to correct. See Amanda Isaac, “Ann Flower’s Sketchbook: Drawing, Needlework, and Women’s Artistry in Colonial Philadelphia,” Winterthur Portfolio 41, no. 2/3 (2007): 141–60 and Kim Sloan, “A Noble Art”: Amateur Artists and Drawing Masters c.1600–1800 (London: British Museum Press, 2000), 41–3, 217.

From as early as the 18th century, drawing was deemed “a noble art, a signature of artistic genius, and a mode of mental and moral improvement for gentlemen and ladies.” It gained gradual but widespread acceptance as a skill that needed to be developed in one’s formative education so much so that by the 19th century, it was viewed as “a useful art” for it was the “basis of sound military reconnaissance and engineering, scientifc description and classifcation, and the design of superior manufactured goods, from silks and lace to pottery and furniture.”46 Kim Sloan’s essay discusses the historical signifcance of these terms to show that, at least in the 17th century, attitudes toward amateur artists and professional artists were the reverse of the present understanding that amateur work did not meet professional standards. Professional artists were frequently described as “mere artifcers” whilst the amateurs were “gentlemen” and “ladies.”47 Nonetheless, “amateur artist” as a descriptive term generally referred to a person who loved and practised one or more of the arts without expectation of payment and this seems closest to how the members of the Singapore Art Club were described in the many reports

47 48 49

Sloan, ibid., 7. “Singapore Art Club: Exhibition at Government House Yesterday,” 5. “Singapore Art Club: A Good Exhibition,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser (1884– 1942), 13 March 1912, 7; in other reports mention was made of the quality of this category of work: “There are a fair number of exhibits of applied arts, in needle work, metal work, plaster, tapestry, and lace, some of it very delicate and excellent work.” See “Singapore Art Club,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser (1884–1942), 27 May 1914, 6.

and announcements. Viewed in this context, though “amateurs,” the members of the Singapore and FMS art clubs appeared to be skilful in a range of arts, which they would readily apply in various social (including charitable) occasions. It did not appear that they were pursuing art-making with the intensity of a professional artist which often required them to expend energy in the promotion and sale of their art. At the art clubs, at least a handful of the women members so impressed their audience with their fne craftsmanship in the applied and domestic arts that they were mentioned in the exhibition reviews. One lady, Mrs Romenij, gained a reputation for excelling in a rare and diffcult art form, repoussé in brass and silver. She was an active member of the Singapore Art Club during her residence in the early 1900s, and competed frequently in the categories of Oils and Applied Arts.48 The latter was not unusually dominated by female participants, and because it represented an extensive range, judging was reported to have been diffcult. In one instance, four ladies were all given “equal frsts” for their works which included a “smock frock,” a “berthe of Point Renaissance,” a “metal box,” a “leather box” and a “painted gauze.”49

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50 Sloan, op. cit., 7–8. 51 “Singapore Art Club: Exhibition at Government

53 Saunders, op. cit., 19. 54 See Isabella Bird, “Letter VII,” in The Golden Cher-

House,” The Straits Times, 4 December 1901, 3. The participating contributors in this event from the Selangor and Perak art clubs were all female. Instances like these were not exceptional. The two male members were R. Dunman and Frank Swettenham. Caroline Jordan, Picturesque Pursuits: Colonial Women Artists and the Amateur Tradition (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2005), 12.

sonese and the Way Thither (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1883), 108–16. 55 Edwards, op. cit., 30. The number of Europeans in the Peninsula also increased substantially. Between 1891 and 1931, for example, the European population of the Straits Settlements grew from 4,422 to 10,003 while that of the FMS (formed in 1895) increased from 719 to 6,350 (of which Pahang accounted for only 390). On the other hand, there were only 1,295

The “traditional vague perception” that most amateurs were solely women, as Sloan has shown in the frst London exhibition on amateur artists, is not true; there were, she affrmed, as many, if not more, male amateur artists than female.50 Here at the colonies’ art clubs, women did seem more active than men as participants. One suspects, even without the availability of full members’ records, that female members far outnumbered their male counterparts in representation in most of the clubs. This can be inferred from the names published in regular reports of the participants’ works, the committee members of the clubs and lists of judges and winners. At the 1901 year-end exhibition, for example, of the 100 exhibits on display, with the exception of a handful submitted by two male members, the exhibits were predominantly by women.51 Caroline Jordan’s study on Australian colonial women demonstrated that women sketched whenever they had the opportunity in the colony, and speculated it was likely they needed to do that more than ever in the new country:

and-ready society that seemed to many to care little for the arts, even to make a little money on the side.52

52

Sketching was a way to learn about the fora and fauna, to record their colonial dwellings and children for their distant families, to ward off ennui and depression when they felt isolated, to cling to the things that defned a “lady” in a rough114

One does get a similar sense of the “ennui” that is shared by women who have accompanied their husbands to the tropical colonies of Malaya in travel and biographical descriptions. Isabella Bird was among a handful of European women who left behind written records of their travels and experience of colonial Southeast Asia and Asia during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Her books Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880) and The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither (1883) helped establish her reputation and contributed to her election as the frst woman fellow of the prestigious Royal Geographical Society. Graham Saunders shrewdly pointed out that it was to the womenfolk of colonial society, who were unemployed and “burdened with lonely domesticity,” to whom we are now indebted for insightful accounts of colonial life.53 It seemed that many women did write to alleviate the monotony in the tropical colonies—as attested by Bird, who made the following observation:

Yvonne Low

It is a dreary, aimless life for them—scarcely life, only existence. The greatest sign of vitality in Singapore Europeans that I can

Europeans in the FMS in 1931.

56 See letters in Harriette McDougall, Sketches of our

57

Life at Sarawak (London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1882). See for example, “Singapore Art Club,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser (1884–1942), 27 May 1914, 6 and “Art in Singapore: Annual Exhibition of Local Club,” 7. Unfortunately, examples of their works were not published in the newspapers; neither were catalogues (if any were printed) or reproductions of exhibited artworks located. However,

see is the furious hurry in writing for the mail. To all sorts of claims and invitations, the reply is, “But it’s mail day, you know,” […] The hurry is desperate, and even the feeble Englishwomen exert themselves for “friends at home.”54 By the end of the 19th century, the European population, though still a minority, had grown signifcantly and was no longer confned to the Straits Settlements.55 In particular, the opening of the Suez Canal also signifcantly reduced the travelling time and improved the development of infrastructure in the colonies so that as a consequence, more European women were able to travel to and reside safely in parts of the colony. With the increase in female presence and overall population, the gap between the European community and the local Asian communities actually widened. The differences in social behaviour of women in the communities was marked—whilst European women accompanied their husbands in social settings, Asian wives rarely did so. The European community itself was still very much governed by notions of proper conduct among the social classes. Harriette McDougall’s letters for example, described her inability to mix with other European women in Sarawak because they were of a lower social class.56 If that were the case, there

National Gallery Singapore has in its collection works by two foreign women artists, Eleanor Watkins and Margaret Felkin, completed during the 1940s and 1920s respectively, which show highly competent sketches and watercolours by them that are not dissimilar to the descriptive accounts of such newspaper articles. It is presently unclear if both women were members of the Singapore Art Club, or if the works had been exhibited in any of the exhibitions by similar clubs in Singapore or the FMS.

would be even less mingling between the female European and the more inferior “native” classes. Certainly, the woman’s role in establishing familiarity in a place was heightened by the central role she already played in middle-class Western societies as the mistress of the house and the overseer of domestic stability. In recreating what was familiar to their social world, they introduced what would necessitate the conduct of proper behaviour across the social classes and across the genders. In this regard, the art and culture that was introduced, instituted and displayed did more than help the gentlemen and especially the ladies pass their time or “adjust to life” in the tropics. How they conducted themselves around these objects of culture did much to reinforce their cultural identity and social position. In the occasional descriptive accounts of the Singapore Art Club exhibitions, it is evident that members of the club travelled regularly and sought out scenic locations in and around Malaya to paint and sketch. Common subject matter for their sketches, watercolours and oils included seascapes, inland scenes, and genre scenes in and across Malaya. This can be discerned from the titles given to the exhibited paintings deemed exemplary: for example, Silver Sea from Malaya by Miss Abel, Pasir Panjang by Mrs Barnard, Kuala Kangsar by Mrs Stephenson, and Hadji’s Home and Perak River by Mrs Hargeaves.57

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58

This image was later reproduced in J.M. Gullick, Old Kuala Lumpur (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1994). It was frst published in Cuthbert Woodville Harrison, An Illustrated Guide to the Federated Malay States, 4th ed. (London: Malay States Information Agency, 1923). 59 These images were later reproduced in Gullick, op. cit. They were frst published in Philip C. Coote, Peeps at Many Lands: The Malay States (London: A&C Black Publishers, 1923). 60 We may assume that these works (fgs. 5–7) belonged to both “Mrs Aldworth” and “Mrs Barnard.” “Mrs Aldworth” won awards for her drawings and special mentions for watercolours. See “The Singapore Art Club,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercan-

tile Advertiser (1884–1942), 15 February 1908, 12; “The Singapore Art Club,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser (1884–1942), 4 March 1911 and “Art in Singapore: Annual Exhibition of Local Club,” 7. “Mrs Barnard” won frst prize for her watercolour in the 1914 exhibition. See “Singapore Art Club,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser (1884–1942), 27 May 1914, 6. 61 “Art in Singapore: Successful Exhibition at the Tanglin Club,” 7. 62 Ibid. 63 “Singapore Art Club: Exhibition at Government House,” 3. 64 The article also provided further information about

Given their prominence in the colonial artistic circuit, it was not entirely unlikely that some of them may well have contributed as illustrators to the many publications on the Malay States for the print industry back home. For example, an example of a fne watercolour depicting the abandoned mining pits by Mary Barnard (fg. 7.5) was reproduced in Cuthbert Woodville Harrison’s An Illustrated Guide to the Federated Malaya States (1923).58 Similarly, two other fne watercolours (fgs. 7.6 and 7.7) depicting the everyday street scenes of Kuala Lumpur by Dorothea Aldworth were published in Philip Coote’s Peeps at Many Lands: The Malay States (1923).59 Both “Mrs Barnard” and “Mrs Aldworth,” as they were represented in the local dallies, were after all active during that period and had won prizes for their watercolour contributions to the Singapore Art Club exhibitions.60 It was therefore not surprising if they had indeed contributed their paintings for illustrative purposes. Praise and accolades published in the daily newspapers were awarded not only to particularly talented individuals, but also to cooperative or conscientious members as well. For example, Mrs Aldworth was singled out for submitting pastel drawings, a seemingly

“unpopular” medium; they were described as “excellent and conscientious specimens” and it was hoped that her success in the use of this medium would “induce others to take up pastel work.”61 She did not excel in merely pastels, but also in watercolours and oils, which showed her versatility and talent.62 Similarly, women who participated in the Applied Arts category were frequently mentioned for their “dainty” and “exquisite” work. The famed Mrs Watkins also impressed her audience with her repoussé copper work which was unanimously viewed as a “diffcult branch of art.”63 Neither was it uncommon for articles to express a general appreciation of exquisitely executed works by professional artists. For instance, the miniatures by Miss Eva Ward were accorded the “highest praise” by one writer.64 Committee members who performed exceptionally in the area of public relations, administration and management at exhibitions deemed successful were similarly given public recognition. Mrs Evatt, who held the role of Secretary for several years, and her team (“the other ladies”) were frequently commended for having “so ably worked to make the exhibition the success it proved to be.”65 The complexity of her work and responsibilities were variously

Yvonne Low

Miss Ward’s commission by Mrs Lee Choon Guan, wife of an elected member of the Legislative Council then, to paint her portrait. See “Singapore Art Club: The Annual Exhibition,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser (1884–1942), 31 May 1918, 10. “Singapore Art Club: Exhibition at Government House Yesterday,” 5. “The Singapore Art Club,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser (1884–1942), 15 February 1908, 12; “Singapore Art Club,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser (1884–1942), 12 May 1915, 10. “Singapore Art Club: Exhibition at Government House Yesterday,” 5.

68 “Singapore Art Club: Annual Exhibition,” The Straits

noted. It was she who handled the submissions, prepared the catalogue and oversaw the hanging of the works at the designated venue, a task that was described as “far from simple work” for it required the “discrimination and a sense of artistic balance and harmony.”66 Mrs Evatt did so whilst continuing to be an active competitor whose oil paintings were commended on several occasions.67 There are of course many other examples of female participants holding similar such positions, such as Mrs Felkin in 1912, Mrs Tomlin in 1915 and Mrs M.A. Bateman in 1917—all variously given credit and public acknowledgement.68 Of the clubs affliated to the Singapore Art Club, the Penang Impressionists and the Perak branch generally recorded the best results and most activity. The former submitted 30 exhibits for competition in 1905, mostly by the following members known only by their last names— Mr Neubronner, Mrs J.A. Brown, Mrs McIntyre and Mrs Wolferstan, all of whom were regular competitors during that period.69 The Perak Art Club too invited neighbouring clubs to compete.70 The vibrancy of the club depended on the leadership and management committee; in this case, the club thrived with the assistance of a lady identifed as “Mrs

Bird,” their Honorary Secretary who was credited for increasing the club’s activities during the early years of the 20th century. The club held two exhibitions annually, one at Ipoh and another at Taiping. They too invited neighbouring clubs to compete, and in one year, offered a Satsuma jar as prize for the best painting shown by the members of the Selangor, Singapore and Penang art clubs. This was awarded to James Millar, then ex-president of the Singapore Art Club, for “a very good watercolour,” New Harbour, Singapore (1900).71 The structure of the Perak Art Club and categories for competition were similar to the Singapore Art Club, with prizes offered in the following subjects: oil, watercolour, photograph and needlework. The media’s role in bringing out the best of these colonial women during their brief residency in the colony was particularly signifcant during times of crisis. Stories of women participating actively in fund-raising events and charities were readily spotlighted by local newspapers, especially during World War I and in the lead-up to World War II, when distant colonial societies were co-opted to show their political allegiance and provide support ideologically and materially in the form of remittance and resources.

65 66

67

69

70

71

Times, 1 June 1917, 10; “Singapore Art Club,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser (1884– 1942), 12 May 1915, 10. “Singapore Art Club: Exhibition at Government House Yesterday,” 5 and also “Singapore Art Club,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser (1884– 1942), 16 March 1905, 2. “The Perak Art Club,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser (1884–1942), 10 December 1900, 3. See “Perak Art Exhibition,” The Straits Times, 5 April 1900, 2; “Untitled,” The Straits Times, 3 December 1900, 2; “Perak Art Club,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser (1884–1942), 27 December 1900.

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72 Mary Heathcott, “Free French Women Raise Funds

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for their War Work Party,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser (1884–1942), 2 July 1941, 5. 73 “Art in Singapore,” The Straits Times, 4 March 1911, 9. 74 “Singapore Art Club Yesterday’s Opening,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser (1884– 1942), 24 May 1916, 7. 75 See chapter, “An Ornamental Education,” by Jordan, op. cit., 11–50. 76 For further discussion on this issue, see my essay, “Becoming Professional Artists in Postwar Singapore and Malaya: Developments in Art during a Time of Political Transition,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 46, no. 3 (2015): 463–84. 77 Michael Sullivan, “Ten Years of Singapore Art,” in

Ten Years of Art in Singapore 1946–1956 (Singapore: Singapore Art Society, 1956), unpaginated. 78 Ibid. 79 See Sloan, op. cit., 7–10. 80 For example Frank Swettenham’s Stories and Sketches [selected and introduced by William R. Roff] (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1967) and more recently Sarena Abdullah’s article, “The Early Drawings of Malaya (1880–1894) by Frank Swettenham,” in 1st Malaysian International Drawing Marathon, eds. Safrizal Shahir, Izmer Ahmad & Shahrul Anuar Shaari (Penang: School of the Arts, University Sains Malaysia, 2011), 75–85. 81 The latter was the founder of the YMCA Art Club, whilst the former resumed his role as the Art Inspector of Government English schools after the war.

This need to show political solidarity was exemplifed in all facets of social outlets and for the elite womenfolk who did not work—unlike the men who were able to obtain gratifcation or demonstrate responsibility vis-à-vis their rank and employment, this was a rare opportunity for the women to display their patriotism and their social worth. A typical social gathering of bridge and mahjong was transformed into a fund-raising event by a group of French women who pooled their contacts and resources together to raise over 300 dollars for the Free French Forces in Britain.72 The Singapore Art Club with its large female membership held numerous successful exhibitions with similar objectives. The participants were given the option to put up their works for sale, with either a portion or all of the proceeds going to charities.73 Depending on the gravity of the situation at home, local organisations in the colony would respond accordingly. The mid-year exhibition in 1916 for example was confgured for such a purpose; there were no prizes or judging of works, and proceeds obtained from the admission went to the charity. Participation was particularly strong, with over 400 artworks submitted to help raise funds for war charities such as the

Red Cross, Star and Garter, as well as King Albert Civilian Hospital Funds.74 These anecdotal accounts of colonial women artists based in Malaya nonetheless corroborate the views offered by Caroline Jordan in her study of colonial women artists based in Australia in the 19th century, many of whom had an ornamental education to equip them with a set of accomplishments consisting of music, drawing, dancing, fancy work, recitation, Roman languages and taste in dress.75 She further showed that out of necessity, the women’s ability to do this had depended largely on the skills and resources they had already developed elsewhere. Thus, what and how they came to paint in colonial Australia was in fact grounded in their British drawing education and experiences. Such accounts also provide insightful glimpses into the kinds of gender-based restrictions colonial women artists encountered in British Malaya. Along with the privileges that they shared with the class of the men they married came social obligations of a different nature from the working class (for example, social work). Most of the women discussed here were not professional artists. They did not “work” as professional artists, but their fne art works were

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very much a part of the wider exhibitory circuit of the upper-class colonial public. Brief Concluding Remarks Toward the end of the British Empire, a paradigm shift took place and one of the many strategies undertaken by the transiting state was to perform a narrative of nationalist history, of oppression to emancipation. In particular the impetus to set up the Singapore Art Society (SAS) grew out of this intention to establish a non-discriminatory art society aimed at fostering the practice and appreciation of art in Singapore, for the common man and woman.76 The urgency to recognise the skills and signifcance of the role of an artist was augmented by the call to see in the work of the “Malayan” painters an answer to the imminent question, “What is Malayan culture?”77 Art historian Michael Sullivan argued that it was in the minds and imaginations of the Malayan people—artists, writers, and musicians—that the Malayan culture was created; this, he stressed, was a recent phenomenon that had occurred in the “ten years since Liberation.” As he traced the history of artistic development in Singapore, he highlighted only the founding of the Society of Chinese Artists in 1936, the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in 1938 and more recently (after the war) the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) Art Club and the Chinese YMCA Art Club for developing the art scene and “awakening” an interest in the visual arts in Singapore.78 Eager to elevate the position of the artist to a useful profession, Sullivan’s account sought to locate the role and importance of the professional artist historically. Not unlike other constructions of Singaporean art histories, it was chronological, primarily focused on the achievements of those perceived to have contributed to a progressive history of art.79 Artists, styles, genres and possibly types of art (for example, needlework) that had not contributed

to this progress of the arts were inevitably excluded. There was no mention of the Singapore Art Club, nor the many “amateur” artistic activities that had taken place before the war, such as the St Andrews Sketching Club, started by Francis Thomas in 1936. Generally, attention given to colonial art has inevitably focused on individuals who held some kind of offcial position in the region (not wives!), and this was most certainly occupied by men.80 In taking a gender perspective, I have shown that colonial women artists clearly contributed to the rich colonial cultural infrastructure. Relatedly, in the course of recovering their histories, it has also become clear that the social art world of the colonial community preceded later artistic developments in the excolony, and may well have served as a model in which subsequent clubs and societies could be structured after. Whilst this is a subject open to future research, there is no denying that at least two old and quite prominent members of the then defunct Singapore Art Club, Richard Walker and C.G. Jackson, played central roles in developing the post-war local art scene. Both were key members of the prominent SAS.81 To what extent the SAS was modelled after the Singapore Art Club remains to be examined, suffce to say here that its precedence in already establishing a nascent art world and art market for local artists such as Low Kway Song and Low Kway Soo cannot be ignored. This essay has brought to the fore a much forgotten past of Singapore’s early cultural developments. It seeks to ask how artistic practices carried out by the colonials and wives of offcials have impacted local developments, and to question the oversimplifcation of their role in the scripting of later post-independent narratives. In the course of discussing the conditions and relations critical for artistic production and reception within the community, this essay has also recovered the histories of many colonial women artists based briefy in British Malaya.

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7.1 7.2

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Denis Santry Untitled Undated Pen and ink As published in Salubrious Singapore (Singapore: Kelly and Walsh, 1920). Denis Santry Untitled Undated Pen and ink As published in ibid.

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W. Stirling Teochew Boy Actor 1929 Ink © W. Stirling As published in “Pictures from the Recent Singapore Art Club Exhibition,” Malayan Saturday Post, 7 December 1929. Image courtesy of National Library Board, Singapore

7.4 Richard Walker Full Tide 1929 Watercolour © Richard Walker As published in ibid. Image courtesy of National Library Board, Singapore

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Mary Barnard Untitled c. 1910 Watercolour 7.5



Dorothea Aldworth Untitled c. 1910 Watercolour As published in Philip C. Coote, Peeps at Many Lands: The Malay States (London: A&C Black Publishers, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 1923). 7.6



7.7 Dorothea Aldworth Untitled c. 1910 Watercolour As published in ibid.

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1

2

3 4

Claire Holt, Art in Indonesia: Continuities and Change (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 195; M. Agus Burhan, Masterpieces of the Indonesia National Gallery, trans. Johanes Suyono, language ed. Umi Hartati (Jakarta: Galeri Nasional Indonesia, Kementerian Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan, 2012). My thanks to Matt Cox for discussion of some of these connections in relation to his PhD thesis. S. Sudjojono, Seni Lukis, Kesenian, dan Seniman [Painting, the arts and the artist] (Yogyakarta: Yayasan Aksara Indonesia, 2000), 22. Adrian Vickers, Balinese Art: Paintings and Drawings of Bali 1800–2010 (Singapore: Tuttle, 2012), 112. Lee Man Fong, Lukisan-Lukisan dan Patung-Patung Kolleksi Presiden Sukarno dari Republik Indonesia [Paintings and statues from the Collection of President Sukarno of the Republic of Indonesia], vols.

I–V (Jakarta: Publishing Committee of Collection of Paintings and Statues of President Sukarno, 1964). 5 Apinan Poshyananda, “The Problems of Tradition in Southeast Asian Modern Art,” in New Art from Southeast Asia 1992, exh. cat. (Tokyo: The Japan Foundation, 1992), 55. 6 Jim Supangkat, “Ethnicity Now,” in Ethnicity Now: Indonesian Contemporary Art by I Wayan Bendi, I Made Djirna, Heri Dono, Nasirun, Samuel Indratma, Angki Purabandono, Indieguerillas and Yudi Sulistya, ed. Jim Supangkat (Jakarta: Garis Artspace, 2010), 14–33. 7 Ibid. 8 Richard Katz, Heitere Tage Mit Braunen Menschen: Ein Südseebuch [Cheerful days with brown men] (Berlin: Ullstein, 1930); Rudolf Bonnet, “Beeldende Kunst in Gianjar” [Plastic arts in Gianyar], Djåwå 16 (1936): 59–72.

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Balinese Modernism Adrian Vickers

The stories of modern art in Southeast Asia are national stories. The trajectories of Raden Saleh (c. 1811–1880) and the other pioneers of modern art in the region are tied to narratives of emerging national consciousness, and how that awareness produced art forms that were self-consciously new and engaged with other phenomena of modernity. In the case of Indonesia, the narrative quickly moves from Raden Saleh’s allegorical “native” versus Dutch representations, to the fgure of S. Sudjojono (1913–1986) and the Association of Indonesian Drawing Masters (Persatuan AhliAhli Gambar Indonesia, PERSAGI) movement founded in 1938. PERSAGI was strongly nationalist, challenging the Dutch-dominated mode of representing the colony in what Sudjojono derisively called Mooi Indië (beautiful Indies) art. Claire Holt and others have specifcally shown the links between PERSAGI and 120

nationalist thought, going back to at least the Taman Siswa education system of Ki Hajar Dewantårå (1889–1959).1 Famously, Sudjojono proclaimed that “an artist must be a nationalist.”2 The idea of binding the diverse ethnic and cultural groups of the archipelago into a national entity thus required artistic forms that could express a modern way of being equal to the precedent established by the West. From PERSAGI, according to all accounts, the chief school of Indonesian art developed as political art, notably as practised by Sudjojono and colleagues in the leftist Institute of People’s Culture (Lembaga Kebudayaan Rakyat, LEKRA). LEKRA art was mainly based in Yogyakarta and associated with the art school there. LEKRA’s chief rivals came from the city of Bandung, and their tendency to formalism was derided by LEKRA artists for being too “Western.” Bandung art came to dominate

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after the post-1965 purge of the left from all aspects of Indonesian politics and society. From both Bandung and Yogyakarta came the 1970s New Art Movement (Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru, GSRB) which manifested contemporary art in Indonesia, meaning their inauguration of the diversity of globally oriented practices superseded the quest for formal newness that was the hallmark of modernism. There is no place in such a story for the alternative model of modern art that fourished in Bali between 1928 and 1942, the period during which the Western art world discovered that new forms of representation were emerging on the island. The discovery came via the new industry of tourism, although the frst reports of modern art on Bali were written in 1928, and the Japanese Occupation changed the mode of artistic production on the island.3 Part of the diffculty in discerning modernism beyond the national is that all other forms of art, including Balinese, are generally placed in the category of “tradition” by both exponents of art movements and art historians. In standard publications on modern art, including the famous Sukarno collection catalogue, the Balinese works are published preceding any others, even when this is chronologically incorrect.4 Apinan Poshyananda extrapolates from the Thai case to the wider context of how “tradition” provided a residual category for the “modern”: When painting became [a] vehicle for national identity it was manipulated and controlled to the extent that its standard and criteria screened and rejected subjects, themes, and styles that did not ft into the national conventions. In relation to visions of serene, tranquil and bucolic scenes, tradition became part of the intention of exotic splendour and enchanted paradise in Southeast Asia.5 Certainly Bali, the most exoticised part of exotic Indonesia, is also most easily classed as pro-

viding conventional and superfcial stereotypes of ethnicity in its art. Leading Indonesian art critic Jim Supangkat has, however, questioned the separation of the “ethnic” from high art, and in a 2010 exhibition attempted to challenge the exact categorisation that Apinan says underpins the national modern and its contemporary successors.6 This is not a problem specifc to Southeast Asia, but one related to the international categories used by art institutions. Supangkat points out that the exclusion of “ethnic” art from the galleries that form the temples of modern art constitutes exclusion from the category of “global” art, a category created by the passage from modern to contemporary art.7 In such schemes as Supangkat wishes to break down, the “ethnic” is defned as local; the “modern,” national; and the “contemporary,” global. Modern Balinese art shows that these categories are tenuous, and easily undermined. Ubud and Pre-War Balinese Modernism Modernism—new modes of representation that responded to the new conditions of a world increasingly dominated by capitalist relations—had been going on in Bali before 1928. That year marks the moment during which new audiences began to connect modernism with the emerging markets for art. In 1928 the frst Western observers recorded the art of a priestly family from Tampaksiring, one member of which was Ida Bagus Putu Mukuh who was producing exciting new compositions based on representations of ceremonies.8 The same people who recorded that moment became brokers for growing numbers of tourists to the island; the latter’s demand for portable souvenirs prompting Balinese to search for something novel that would communicate with this burgeoning audience. Mukuh himself did not produce a lot of works but a cousin of his in Tebesaya, Ida

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Bagus Kembeng (1897–1952), took up his inspiration and became one of the teachers for a growing number of young men in the area, which included the nearby village of Ubud. Included amongst Kembeng’s students were his sons, especially Ida Bagus Made, known as “Poleng” (1915–1999).9 The new art was “modern” in many ways. It made use of new technologies, notably paper, acrylics and other recently developed types of paint. It was also experimental, based on novel ways of presenting space, bodies, and colour. This art was formed from the rapid transition to modernity, during which colonial rule and unfamiliar power structures were imposed upon Bali. The style pioneered by Ida Bagus Kembeng became most closely associated with the village of Ubud as presenting one mode of that modernity, although hundreds of artists from all over the island were drawn into the new forms of art. While dozens of other artists continued to produce works within traditional modes, even these were drawn into the industry of creating for tourists. Following Kembeng, one Ubud family of lower aristocrats rose to particular prominence. Two cousins from this family were Anak Agung Gede Meregeg (c. 1908–2001), and Anak Agung Gede Soberat (1912 or 1917– 1992), and others included A.A. Raka Turas (1917–1992). Other notable Ubud artists were Dewa Ketut Ding (1912 or 1920–1996), Dewa Made Sek, his relative Dewa Nyoman Leper (1917–1984), I Wayan Tohjiwa (1916 –2001) and Ida Bagus Made Nadera (1915–1998). An illustration of what is both distinctive to Meregeg’s works and general to the Ubud style is a work showing an episode from the Hindu Ramayana epic (fg. 8.1). The content, showing Rama leading his wife Sita by the hand with Laksmana following, is “traditional” in the sense that it is based on the fat fguration of the wayang, or shadow puppet theatre. He maintains wayang iconography for the headdresses of the characters but their sarongs 122

are new, and conform to everyday attire at the time of painting (the early 1930s). The sleeping fgures below these three are rendered in a different type of stylisation—not precisely naturalism, but using the rounded fguration of Kembeng’s work to integrate fgures and background. Meregeg works with two types of line here: The zigzag of the ridge and mountains, and the wavy line of the river reinforced by what became the conventional mode of depicting water as a set of ripples. Breaking these up is the use of foliage, which proliferated and was perfected by him and his contemporaries in the 1930s. While the work has a basis in traditional colouring, the heavy use of blue tones against the ochre colours is unprecedented. Meregeg’s cousin Soberat became the best known of the modernists, and developed his own version of the style shown by taking towards a more naturalistic mode that became the hallmark of Ubud art after 1950. On the way to developing this new variation of the style, Soberat produced scenes of performances; a cockfght work has also been attributed to him (fg. 8.2). Again, these paintings show features of the way of depicting bodies that Kembeng and others of his family developed, but with more complex overlaying of fgures. In this example the square of the cockfght ring is an internal frame that is deliberately crossed and disappears under the crowd of fgures, emphasising the liveliness of the men’s gathering. Soberat’s earliest works are based on wayang fgures, but he very quickly moved to depicting dance-drama performances.10 The other famous Ubud artist was I Gusti Nyoman Lempad (1862 or 1875–1978), who came from a long career in architecture. Lempad’s work was linear, mainly pen drawings on paper with sparse use of colour (fg. 8.3). Approximately 1,000 works by Lempad are known, most of these sketches.11 The best of his work was that done in the 1930s, when his contact with other artists provided a stimulus towards experimentation. Part of Lempad’s

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9 10

Kaja McGowan et al., Ida Bagus Made: The Art of Devotion (Ubud: Ratna Wartha Foundation, 2008). One work very close to the style of Soberat is attributed to Walter Spies in John Stowell, Walter Spies: A Life in Art (Jakarta: Afterhours Books, 2011), 313. A very similar work once owned by Miguel Covarrubias

success as an artist, like the other greats of the period, was that he was able to channel Balinese ideas of the magical manipulation of power through images into his work. He, like Soberat and others, began from the drawings of power called rerajahan, designed to effect both good and bad outcomes. In his depiction of Hindu-Buddhist mythology, Lempad demonstrated how the power of images related to notions of movement through life into the other world. As well, his imagery was concerned with workings of gender differences and concepts of nature within Balinese philosophy. Multiple Sites of Modernism Ubud may now be synonymous with Balinese modernism, but it was one of many sites in the 1930s. A number of individual modern artists sprang up in different areas. There were small groups clustered around particular teachers, notably the students of Chinese photographer Yap Sin Tin, the most famous of which was I Gusti Made Deblog (1906–1986, fg. 8.4). Two villages each produced more artists than Ubud and also provided a wider variation in modes of art: Sanur and Batuan. The coastal village of Sanur became a centre for rapid production of works of art, but this all but disappeared at the beginning of the Japanese Occupation in 1942. Those involved were usually teenagers or young men, and they came from a variety of backgrounds. Notable amongst them were members of priestly houses, such as Ida Bagus Sunia (c.1906–1990) and

11

raises questions about the relationship between the two artists, Miguel Covarrubias, Island of Bali (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1937; repr., Kuala Lumpur; Singpore: Oxford University Press, 1972), 202–3. Bruce Carpenter et al., Lempad of Bali: The Illuminating Line (Singapore: Editions Didier Millet, 2014).

Ida Bagus Nyoman Rai (1915–2000). Ida Bagus Nyoman Geria (1901–1982) was the frst of this caste to paint, and his collaboration with a new tourist outlet in the village provided the economic stimulus for his fellow villagers. This new tourist outlet was an aquarium started by two German brothers, Hans and Rolf Neuhaus, and the brothers quickly realised they had a ready supply of local art to sell as souvenirs to the tourists who landed in Bali from the cruise ships that had started visiting the south. In the case of the Sanur artists, many of the dozens who took up painting only did one or two works. Their brief involvement refects the novelty of art at the time—it was something with which they experimented, and provided a playful venue in which to represent the rapidly changing world around them. The more fantastical of these artists produced bizarre sexual imagery that may have its roots in Tantric Hindu-Buddhist practices, notably in the work of Sunia. Others, such as Ida Bagus Made Pugug (1919–2006), were concerned with more serious issues such as moments of life and death when various forms of intervention were required. He, like Lempad and other artists of the time, thus produced a series of scenes of women giving birth, assisted by balian or healers (fg. 8.5). Pugug was one of the few artists who continued to work into the post-war period, like his close friend Rai. From the south of the village came a group of closely related young men. The best of these, I Made Sukarya (1912–1988) and his brother-in-law Gusti

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12 Vickers, op. cit. 13 Ibid. 14 Ushiroshoji Masahiro, The Birth of Modern Art in Southeast Asia: Artists and Movements, eds. Ushiroshoji Masahiro & Toshiko Rawanchaikul, exh. cat. (Fukuoka: Fukuoka Art Museum, 1997), 70.

Rundu (1918–1993), also continued to work into the post-war period. Rundu, like Sukarya, used theatrical themes but excelled at bringing animal motifs into his compositions. Sukarya is one of the artists who made good use of colour as a way to develop depth in compositions and highlight the variety of forms of foliage that were integral to paintings of the time (fg. 8.6). The colour may not always have been his own, however, since the Neuhaus brothers paid a talented Sanur artist, I Pica (c. 1915–1946), to colour the black-and-white works of others. Rai’s work showed similar kinds of compositional play but his major concern was to depict the world around him, including the Westerners with whom he interacted. Rai was more of a history painter in the sense that he wanted to represent major and minor events of the village—from the eruption of Bali’s volcano and the beaching of a whale (fg. 8.7), to the Japanese invasion and the lives of his post-war patrons: the Wawo Runto family and the Australian artist Donald Friend. The art of the villagers of Batuan was more profound, and more disturbing, than that of their coastal colleagues and relatives. While a few of the best Batuan works were coloured, again mainly by the Sanur workshop of the Neuhauses, the signature of Batuan painting was the use of black ink washes to produce strong images of darkness and witchcraft. The Batuan artists extended the range of subject matter created by the painters and draftsmen of Ubud and Sanur, depicting ceremonies, perfor124

15 16

Holt, op. cit., 181; Vickers, op. cit., 59–62. Hildred Geertz & Ida Bagus Madé Togog, Tales from a Charmed Life: A Balinese Painter Reminisces (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005).

mances and all aspects of village life, but mixing these with mythological subjects. As with Sanur, Batuan produced a remarkable number of artists. Only a few of these were women, one of whom was the remarkable Desak Putu Lambon (1922–1980) who came from a small family of craftsmen and artists. A member of that extended family, Dewa Putu Mura (1877–1950), was the frst artist otherwise working in the classical style based on the wayang theatre style to launch into modern art in Batuan. The stimulus towards the modern, however, was primarily inspired by an entrepreneurial commoner who had been a student of Mura, I Nyoman Ngendon (1914–1946, fg. 8.8). Ngendon followed the lead of his cousin, I Patera (1901–1935), in experimenting with art and, most importantly, in experimenting with fnding Western audiences for art. Members of Brahman families began to be involved in art with Ngendon’s encouragement. These included Ida Bagus Diding (1915–1990) and the prolifc Ida Bagus Made Bala (1920–1942), whose works ranged from fantastical magical talismanic works to depictions of aspects of village life. While not as prolifc, one of the strongest artists was the famous dancer I Nyoman Reneh (1910–1976, fg. 8.9). The artist who did the most to develop features of the Batuan style—the elaborate foliage and compositions based on abstractions from architecture and nature—was Dewa Kompiang Kandel Ruka (1916–1975, fg. 8.10). In Batuan, a signifcant number of artists

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stopped working with the advent of World War II and the ensuing social and political disruptions. Kandel Ruka was one of those who gave up art, in his case to become a furniture manufacturer. One of the few to keep producing art for many decades was Ida Bagus Made Togog (1911–1989), who switched from paper to canvas and from black-and-white to colour, but otherwise continued to develop the themes of pre-war modern art. Precedents and Promotion The basis of the work of the modernists in more ancient modes of representation shows that the new art of the 1930s was also old. The examples cited above demonstrate the continuity of art based on the wayang theatre, the highest form of which was practised by the painters of Kamasan, Klungkung, hence often known as wayang painting. The art of Kamasan, while adhering to classical standards, was always undergoing internal changes and was not immune from innovation, despite being placed in the category of “tradition.” Other forms of wayang-based art were already producing new modes of composition in the late 19th century.12 The new artists of Ubud and the related village of Peliatan were directly connected to wayang art, as their early work shows. Some of the early modernists from Peliatan, notably Cokorda Oka Gambir (1902–1975), had themselves studied with a group of traditional artists from Rangkan, to the south. Other artists report having studied with or at least seen the work of older artists, and it appears there were many working throughout the island.13 More attention has been paid to the role of Western artists on Bali than to Balinese precedents for the new. Ushiroshoji Masahiro, one of the pioneers in the study of Southeast Asia-wide art phenomena, provides a nuanced version of the conventional way of viewing the Balinese modernists’ connections to Walter

Spies (1895–1942) and Rudolf Bonnet (1895– 1978). These were respectively German (or Russian) and Dutch artists who lived in Ubud from the late 1920s. Under the infuence of Spies and Bonnet, they began using daily life and landscapes as subjects. However, that stance, which at frst glance seemed realistic, also refected the everyday spiritual world of Bali governed by magic. Original, detailed painting methods developed in Batuan as well as in Ubud. In this and other respects, Balinese art, which thoroughly digested the infuence of the West and transformed it into their own world, is truly unique in the history of modern Southeast Asian art.14 The meaning of “infuence” here remains open. There were other Western artists on Bali before Spies and Bonnet arrived, notably W.O.J. Nieuwenkamp (1874–1950), who defnitely had contact with Balinese artists. The prior existence of innovation in colour, form and media indicates that these were not elements introduced by Spies and Bonnet. Even the representation of “daily life,” which is described by Claire Holt as coming from this Western pair, was clearly present not only in the work of artists such as Mukuh, but in Kamasan paintings showing narratives such as the Brayut, the story of a commoner couple and their domestic and ceremonial activities.15 What Spies and Bonnet did was to provide materials to artists and, more importantly, to act as mediators of Western taste, since the artists who came into contact with these two were interested in selling to the tourists that were beginning to come to Bali. One of these artists, Ida Bagus Made Togog, explained later that he would try out different topics on Spies and Bonnet to see what was of interest.16 Others, notably Soberat, took advice from both and looked for elements to adapt. While Soberat’s style took on elements of Spies’ work

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in particular, the majority of Balinese artists working at the time show very little in the way of direct incorporation of elements of technique from either the modernist Spies or the conservative Bonnet. Ngendon from Batuan made contact with Spies and Bonnet, who appear not to have liked him that much personally, but who certainly provided him with ideas about marketing and different styles. This contact stimulated Ida Bagus Made Togog, the young Brahman from the same village, to go to Ubud and, in turn, encourage his own relatives to be involved in art. Via Spies and Bonnet, a pair of Western anthropologists who worked on Bali between 1936 and 1939, Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, became interested in modern art. Their collection of 1,288 paintings and drawings was dominated by works from Batuan, and they became the major patrons of the village in the late 1930s.17 More important were the promotional activities undertaken by the two, particularly by Bonnet. Both Spies and Bonnet were involved in the Bali Museum (now the Museum Bali) in Denpasar which provided a platform for artists to sell their work, with Bonnet exercising quality control. Spies took more of a back seat while Bonnet used his networks in the art world to organise exhibitions of Balinese artists on other islands in the Dutch colony. In 1936, Spies and Bonnet were involved in the establishment of an artists’ society, Pita Maha, which attempted to bring together artists and sculptors of Bali (with a focus on new artists). Pita Maha hence became synonymous with the new art of the 1930s, although it came late to the scene and lasted only four years. Bonnet, building on the precedent set by another associate of Spies, Willem Stutterheim, also published an article outlining the developments in art at the time.18 In the same year that Pita Maha was founded, Bonnet organised two exhibitions of this association in the Kunstkring or Artists’ Circles in Batavia and Bandung, as well as 126

exhibitions in other venues in Balikpapan and Yogyakarta.19 These exhibitions predate the frst exhibition by Sudjojono’s PERSAGI; its frst exhibition was held in 1938 in the publishing house Kolff in Batavia.20 Bonnet was more ambitious than this: he then organised exhibitions of Balinese modernists in Europe, beginning with a 1937 exhibition at the Museum van Aziatische Kunst in Amsterdam, the Pulchri Studio in the Hague, and then in 1938, the Kunstzaal van Lier in Amsterdam and the Gallery Calmann in London.21 Thus through Bonnet, Balinese modernism achieved international recognition. The well-known Dutch art critic Kasper Niehaus devoted a chapter of his book on modern Dutch art to the modern Balinese artists, and referred to modern Balinese art as “an ornament of our time” in a Pita Maha exhibition catalogue.22 Niehaus worked closely with the leading art dealer Carel van Lier, whose gallery sold European as well as Balinese modernists, and Bonnet clearly included both in the networks he mobilised for his exhibitions. Sudjojono would defnitely not have approved of the Dutch appropriation of Indonesian artists implicit in Niehaus’ book chapter, and some of the Balinese would also have been at best bemused by his characterisation of Balinese art. Nevertheless, in the colonial context of the 1930s, Balinese art had an easier entry into the world of modernism than the modern art of PERSAGI. This was in part due to the mediation of Bonnet and other Westerners, which created greater familiarity with Balinese art amongst Dutch audiences. This mediation was based in paternalistic colonialism that presented Balinese art as exotically “primitive,” and therefore unthreatening to Western art. PERSAGI art was, however, unmediated, and the Dutch critics perceived that its independent positioning in the realm of the modern was a direct challenge to the domestication of the colony in Mooi Indië art. PERSAGI art thus was derided as “derivative” of the West.

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17

Hildred Geertz, Images of Power: Balinese Paintings Made for Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994). 18 Bonnet, “Beeldende Kunst in Gianjar,” op. cit.; W.F. Stutterheim, “Een Nieuwe Loot Aan Een Oude Stam” [A new shoot on an old branch], Elsevier’s Geïllustreered Maandschrift XLIV, no. 6 (1934): 391–400. 19 Balische-Kunst Van “Pita-Maha” [Balinese art from “Pita-Maha”], ed. Bataviasche Kunstkring, exh. cat. (Batavia, 1936); R. Bonnet, “Pita Maha: [Tentoonstelling] 22 tot en met 28 November 1936” [Pita Maha: Exhibition, 22 to 28 November 1936], exh. cat. (Bandoeng: Bandoengsche Kunstkring, 1936); “Pitamaha: 29 Januari 1936–29 Januari 1940” [Pitamaha: 29 January 1936–29 January 1940], Mededeelingen van de Kirtya Liefrinck-van der Tuuk 11 (1940): 18–21.

A Modernist Legacy Artists such as Soberat, Lempad, Ida Bagus Rai and Ida Bagus Togog represented a strong thread of continuity between pre-war modernism and Balinese art in the post-war period, but the Japanese Occupation and the subsequent Indonesian Revolution changed the role and perception of Balinese art. Nationalist artists played a role in the Revolution and, most importantly, its representation to the nation. Ngendon travelled to Yogyakarta, received Japanese sponsorship, and apparently joined PERSAGI. He was killed by pro-Dutch forces in 1946, as was Pica of Sanur. The possibilities of connecting Balinese and national modern art were forestalled with their deaths, and subsequently the art that became best known was decorative scenes of Balinese lifestyles and landscapes, content closest to the colonial Mooi Indië mode of art. This development occurred largely because the re-establishment of what was still a tourist market required less risky, and less experimental, kinds of art. Ubud became the centre of this art, and identical with art production on the island.23

20

Holt, op. cit., 197. Holt here states that PERSAGI was founded in 1937, while most other sources give 1938, although in the original edition of Sudjojono’s book Seni Lukis, the cover note on the author gives the founding date as 1939. 21 “Pitamaha: 29 Januari 1936–29 Januari 1940,” 18. 22 Kasper Niehaus, Levende Nederlandsche Kunst, 2nd ed. (Amsterdam: Bigot & Van Rossum, 1941), 102–6; “Pitamaha: 29 Januari 1936–29 Januari 1940,” 21. 23 Adrian Vickers, “Bali Rebuilds its Tourist Industry,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 167, no. 4 (2011): 459–81. 24 Ushiroshoji Masahiro, “The Labyrinthine Search for Self-Identity—The Art of Southeast Asia from the 1980s to the 1990s,” in New Art from Southeast Asia 1992, exh. cat. (Tokyo: The Japan Foundation, 1992), 21–4.

Subsequent histories of contemporary Indonesian art, therefore, have focused on the post-war style of Balinese art as representative of the entirety of its modern history, leading to the confusing identifcation of 1930s Balinese modernism with what Balinese now call “traditional” art when referring to Ubud-dominated art. Ushiroshoji Masahiro, in a discussion of the relationship between contemporary and modern Southeast Asian art, also notes how “tradition” has become a problem for Southeast Asian art in that many writers often take it for a sentimental stereotyping veering into self-orientalising: “[T]he unique expression peculiar to Southeast Asian art,” is actually composed of many levels: superfcial depictions of Southeast Asian customs, life styles, or landscapes; representations of Islamic, Buddhist or Hindu religious episodes and views of the world; and applications of traditional art techniques or styles.24 The “traditional” in the contemporary involves, in his characterisation of this form of represen-

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tation, “uncritical repetitions of tradition or the eclecticism which introduced the frame of Western art into Oriental elements.”25 Classifying Balinese art as “exotic” has contributed to this double blockage in art discussions which exclude Bali from the rest of Indonesia. Artists from Bali, however, played two different roles in the Indonesian context. One group went to other parts of Indonesia, principally Yogyakarta, to study and become part of the national art scene. This was a trend that developed in the 1960s, with artists such as Nyoman Gunarsa (b. 1944), who taught at the Indonesian Academy of Fine Arts (Akademi Seni Rupa Indonesia, ASRI; later Institut Seni Indonesia, ISI) in Yogyakarta. Gunarsa founded the Balinese artists’ network Sanggar Dewata, which supported and facilitated the development of a number of generations of Balinese in the Yogyakarta art scene, the prime site of modern and contemporary Indonesian art. Contemporary artists such as Nyoman Erawan (b. 1958), Pande Ketut Taman (b. 1970), Putu Sutawijaya (b. 1970) and Nyoman Masriadi (b. 1972) became prominent through the Sanggar Dewata network.26 There were other Balinese who studied at the Institute of Technology Bandung (Institut Teknologi Bandung, ITB), the other major site of national art. The pioneer in this case was Nyoman Tusan (1933–2002), and later Balinese from the ITB include Willy Himawan (b. 1983). Bali has continuously been an important place for modern Indonesian art. The leading artists of Indonesia, Sudjojono amongst them, all spent various amounts of time on the island, and many artists travelled there early in their careers. Between the 1970s and 1990s, Bali was one of the only places in Indonesia where aspiring artists could see examples of major works on display, especially at prominent private galleries in Ubud, notably the Neka Museum. This experience was important for artists involved in the New Art Movement and its development of contemporary art, as attested 128

by Hardi, one of the Movement’s key fgures.27 Other important artists who have engaged with Balinese visual culture include Heri Dono, who was a member of Sanggar Dewata. Balinese visual culture has thus pervaded Indonesian modern and contemporary art. Balinese artists such as Gusti Kadek Murniasih (1966–2006) demonstrate a high level of accomplishment as contemporary artists, talent developed outside the Java-based art schools, and paradigms of national modernism. In Murni’s case there is important continuity between her art and that of her teacher Dewa Mokoh (1934–2010), a Peliatan artist whose teaching genealogy goes back to Cokorda Oka Gambir. Consequences Balinese modernism embarrasses the historiography of Indonesian art, not least because it is equally a source of important contemporary art. Attempts to explain Balinese art away as “craft,” “folk art” or even worse, “tourist art,” neglect the power of the art and its varieties of representation. The alternative to ignoring or marginalising Balinese art is to say that it is unique, as Ushiroshoji Masahiro does. But is Balinese art a “unique” modernism? While the evidence is patchy for other parts of Southeast Asia, the survival of fragments of other traditions show that forms of naturalism and novel ways of representing the world were present in other visual arts traditions from before the time of Raden Saleh. A Javaneseillustrated manuscript of the Damar Wulan text dated to the 18th century shows representations of humans and animals that depart from the wayang tradition, as does the 1804 Serat Selarasa manuscript, in particular with its representations of Dutch ships.28 European collections show fragments of adventurous Javanese art from a variety of locations. Nor is the presence of varieties of representation unique to Java. Sumatra has a strong visual tradition as evidenced by its textiles,

Adrian Vickers

25 Ibid. 26 Putu Sutawijaya, interview with Adrian Vickers, 27 August 2015.

27 Hardi, interview with Adrian Vickers, 6 September

28

2015. Later contemporary artists who have spent time on Bali include Arahmainani, interview with John Clark, T.K. Sabapathy & Adrian Vickers, 1 September 2015. Serat Damar Wulan (MSS Jav. 89) and Serat Selarasa (MSS Jav. 28) are available at the British Library. Fully digitised versions can be viewed at http://www.bl.uk/ manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=MSS_Jav_89 and http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/asian-and-

notably the ship cloths of Lampung.29 The drawings made for Sir Stamford Raffes demonstrate that there were representational artists working for the British East India Company in Bengkulu at the beginning of the 19th century, although we do not know whether they were Indian, Chinese, Malay or local.30 Most importantly, from the end of the 19th century a set of watercolours by Acehnese artist Tengku Teungoh represent festivals and other scenes of religious life in north Sumatra.31 Examples of alternative modes of representation could be multiplied for Thai, Cambodian, Lao and

african/2014/12/javanese-manuscript-art-seratselarasa.html respectively. 29 Adrian Vickers, “From Bali to Lampung by Way of the Pasisir,” Archipel 45 (1993): 55–76. 30 Annabel Teh Gallop, Early Views of Indonesia: Drawings from the British Library (London: The British Library, 1995). 31 Francine Brinkgreve & Retno Sulistianingsih, eds., Sumatra: Crossroads of Cultures (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2009), 116–7. 32 No Na Paknam, Mural Paintings of Thailand Series: Wat Somanat Wihan (Bangkok: Muang Boran, 1995).

Burmese temple mural painting, but these lack the Western patronage so integral to Balinese modernism, which may account for the relative abundance of Balinese art.32 The Balinese case reveals alternative developments of modernism that can lead directly to contemporary forms, avoiding conventionally defned pathways of modernity. Drawing attention to the role of parallel histories of art across Southeast Asia, it prompts a re-evaluation of accepted categories and prevailing trajectories. Balinese modernism, therefore, asks signifcant questions of Southeast Asian art history.

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Anak Agung Gede Meregeg Rama, Sita and Laksmana in the Forest 1934 Pen and black ink, watercolour and tempera on board 89 x 59 cm Collection of National Gallery Singapore D.G. Soberat A Cock Fight Undated Tempera on cloth laid down on cardboard 79.5 x 59.5 cm Collection of National Gallery Singapore I Gusti Nyoman Lempad Battle at Alengkapura c. 1960s Ink on paper 46.2 x 54.6 cm Collection of National Gallery Singapore

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I Gusti Made Deblog Forest Scene (Gusti Wayan?) c. 1938–1942 Ink on paper 31 x 37 cm Cetus Collection Image courtesy of Cetus Collection Ida Bagus Made Pugug Birth Ritual c. 1937 Pencil on paper 25 x 32.5 cm Collection of National Gallery Singapore I Made Sukarya The Story of Rajapala c. 1937 Tempera on paper 23 x 30.5 cm Collection of National Gallery Singapore

8.7 Ida Bagus Nyoman Rai Beached Whale at Sanur 1973 Ink and paint on paper 70 x 140 cm Cetus Collection Image courtesy of Cetus Collection 8.7

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I Nyoman Ngendon Yama, the God of Hell Punishment 1935–1939 Washed pen and ink with cinnabar and yellow on paper 33 x 49.5 cm Singapore Batuan Collection Image courtesy of Leo Haks I Nyoman Reneh, but attributed to I Ketut Ngendon Bima Rescuing his Parents c. 1928–1942 Watercolour on board 58.7 x 44 cm Collection of National Gallery Singapore Dewa Kompiang Kandel Ruka Fishing c. 1928–1942 Watercolour on paper 29.8 x 22.8 cm Collection of National Gallery Singapore

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See Jim Supangkat, “The Emergence of Indonesian Modern Art,” in The Birth of Modern Art in Southeast

Asia: Artists and Movements (Fukuoka: Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, 1997), 225–8.

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The Birth of ‘Fine Art’ in Southeast Asia, 1900–1945 Ushiroshoji Masahiro

At the beginning of the 20th century, Southeast Asia was on the cusp of the birth of ‘fne art.’ Almost all of Southeast Asia was under Western colonial rule then. The Philippines, having emerged from a long period of Spanish control at the end of the 19th century, was now under American authority. Java and the Indonesian archipelago comprised the Dutch East Indies. The peninsula states of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia formed French Indochina; Myanmar was annexed as part of British India, while Singapore became part of the British Straits Settlements along with Penang, Malacca and Labuan. The Malay Peninsula and North Borneo were also British colonies. Only Thailand escaped colonisation in the power struggle between England and France. The concept and institutions of ‘fne art’ were non-existent in Southeast Asia before this juncture, and it was amidst this political climate that the system of ‘fne art’ was frst introduced from the West and gained traction. Needless to say, diverse forms of art-making already existed in the region. The daily lives of people were coloured and adorned by a myriad of creative forms, beginning with the well-known examples of Borobudur and Angkor Wat, and ranging from murals and sculptures in Thai temples and icons in Filipino churches to folk and vernacular art. However, such objects would not 130

have been understood or produced according to the Euro-American holistic value system and concepts associated with ‘fne art.’ While the term ‘fne art,’ as used in a Western art historical context, can be largely defned as modern art, initial notions of ‘fne art’ stirring in various parts of the region were not in accord with this Western understanding. With the introduction of the system of ‘fne art’ from the West, new terms were invented and added to the lexicons of local languages, gradually taking root in each area. In Chinese, this term was meishu; in Indonesian, seni rupa; in Malay, seni lukis; in Thai, silpa; in Vietnamese, mỹ thuật; in Tagalog, sining, and so forth. These nativised terms came to be used interchangeably with the Western terms ‘art’ or ‘fne art.’ It was thus in the frst half of the 20th century that the overarching notion of ‘fne art’ came to exist in Southeast Asia, engulfng any closely related indigenous words and concepts that had previously existed in the region (as, for example, Jim Supangkat has discussed with regard to the Javanese word kagunan).1 Individuals began consciously identifying themselves as painters or artists—those who produced works as expressions of the self that were targeted towards spiritual values centred on aesthetics and beauty, and presented them at exhibitions and in other public forums to-

Charting Thoughts

gether with others who shared their aims. This phenomenon could be seen occurring in the various cities of Southeast Asia that served as colonial administrative centres from the 1920s to the 1930s. One of the earliest cities in which this was manifest was Manila. Manila, 1928 In the Philippines, where the tradition of Christian art had been cultivated under more than 300-years of Spanish colonial rule, Western-style art education was introduced relatively early. Art schools such as the Academia de Dibujo y Pintura in Manila were established in the 19th century, and local painters were producing Western-style portraits. Additionally, in the second half of the 19th century, some privileged youths in the colony who had studied at art schools in Manila also received formal art education in Europe. Of note among them was Juan Luna (1857–1899), who studied at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid and, in 1884, received a gold medal at the Madrid General Exhibition of Fine Arts. This achievement, along with Félix Resurrección Hidalgo’s (1855–1913) receipt of a silver medal, greatly inspired a sense of nationalistic pride among the people of the Philippines. In the 1920s, Fernando C. Amorsolo (1892–1972), who had also studied at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in 1919, gradually gained widespread popularity for his sweetly sentimental portrayals of pastoral landscapes and coquettish female fgures. His work, along with that of Fabián de la Rosa (1869–1937) and others, popularised the image of the Philippines as an ideal tropical paradise abroad. His paintings of rice planting scenes were charged with everything that people visiting the country could wish for (as well as anything anyone wishing to visit could dream of ): rice paddies, people planting rice, charming young women, a man playing songs of labour on a guitar and, in the far distance, an

old stone church and a brewing tropical storm. However, there was also something that was completely absent from his depictions: any sign of urban life, which was just starting to surface in the city of Manila. Victorio C. Edades (1895–1985) went to the United States in 1919 and studied architecture and painting at the University of Washington, Seattle, in the 1920s. He returned to the Philippines in 1928 and at the end of that year held a solo exhibition at the Philippine Columbian Club in Ermita, a centre for the association of students who had studied abroad in America. The show which presented highlights of Edades’ oeuvre developed during his study in America, reportedly shocked the Philippine art world. Although Amorsolo had studied in Madrid around 1920 and had also visited New York, he had not been moved by the tide of new art that was developing in 20thcentury Western Europe and, stylistically, his works never strayed from 19th-century naturalism. In contrast, although Edades’ studies were based in Seattle, which would then have been considered on the periphery of the Pariscentred art world of the day, he was exposed to Post-Impressionism and the later development of modernism in 1920s America. The works on show that Edades produced during his stay in America appeared heavily infuenced by Cézanne, but the piece that attracted the most attention was probably The Builders (1928, fg. 9.1). The painting depicts male labourers working to build a city. Where Amorsolo’s work features coquettish women bathing, Edades’ powerful image is flled with sweat-drenched men. In place of the romantic countryside, the work is set in a symbolic cityscape that represents the reality of the emerging metropolis of Manila of the time. Edades later collaborated with Galo B. Ocampo (1913–1985) and Carlos “Botong” Francisco (1914–1969)—a young prodigy who later achieved national popularity under the nickname “Botong”—to paint Art Deco-

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style murals on various modern architectural structures being built in Manila. The three came to be called the “Triumvirate of Modern Philippine Art” and together produced several murals, starting with Rising Philippines (1935), which adorned the lobby of the Capitol Theater in Manila. Unfortunately, however, almost all their representative works were entirely destroyed during the war. Later, Edades became an instructor at the University of Santo Tomas and further advanced the activities of the Triumvirate, establishing the Atelier of Modern Art in Malate, Manila, together with Ocampo and Diosdado Lorenzo by 1938. This group further expanded to become the “Thirteen Moderns,” in order, according to Edades, “to form a stronger body to promote modern art in the country.”2 They held regular meetings and were acknowledged for being “the frst to attempt to create a single, tightly knit organisation of modern Philippine artists.”3 Before long, however, the Japanese army invaded Manila and the group’s activities came to a standstill. The full-scale blossoming of their efforts, as signifcant within an art historical context, would come later in the post-war period when the group’s members resumed their pursuits via new forms of activity. As the leader of this group of modernists, Edades incited conficts with conservative painters and sculptors like Amorsolo. This too resumed after the war, specifcally in a polemical debate on modernism between Edades and the sculptor Guillermo E. Tolentino in 1948. A portion of Edades’ bitter critique against the conservative faction reads as follows: Prejudice, personal taste, and even a predilection for sentiment still govern our judgment and appreciation. We in the Philippines are still slaves to accuracy, to photographic delineation and to prettiness of surface colouring. It is a common thing to hear a landscape praised if it approaches the naturalistic appearance of its 132

subject. If one can paint a pretty girl with suffciently vivid color as to be worthy of decorating a calendar or the top of a candy box is forthwith a new “master”. If one or two of our countrymen win prizes abroad for historical knickknacks which are good only for documentary purposes, or win recognition with an alien subject-matter and style, then we are satisfed and believe we are internationally reconized [sic] for our art.4 Batavia, 1938. S. Sudjojono’s Manifesto In Batavia (now known as Jakarta), Java, the stronghold of the Dutch East India Company in the Dutch East Indies, S. Sudjojono (1917– 1986) was attempting to perform the role of a midwife in assisting the birth of modern art. During the frst half of the 20th century in the Dutch East Indies, artisan painters were producing tropical landscapes suffused with exotic sensibilities. To Sudjojono, such landscapes represented no more than meaningless pandering to the tastes of the Dutch and other travellers from Europe. He called these landscapes Mooi Indië (beautiful Indies in Dutch) paintings and fercely criticised them: The paintings we see nowadays are mostly landscapes: rice felds being plowed, rice felds inundated by clear and calm water […] with the inevitable coconut palms […] or bamboo groves with blue-shimmering mountains in the background. Similarly there are paintings of women who must have red shawls futtering in the wind, or, shaded by an umbrella, wear a blue jacket—everyday lebaran [celebrations following Ramadan] poetry. Everything is very beautiful and romantic, paradisical, everything is very pleasing, calm, and peaceful. Such paintings carry only one meaning: the beautiful Indies.5

Ushiroshoji Masahiro

2

3

4

The members of the Thirteen Moderns were: Arsenio Capili, Bonifacio Cristobal, Demetrio Diego, Victorio C. Edades, Carlos “Botong” Francisco, Cesar Legaspi, Diosdado Lorenzo, Anita Magsaysay-Ho, Vicente Manansala, Galo B. Ocampo, Hernando R. Ocampo, Jose Pardo and Ricarte Purugganan. Edades’ views are taken from Cid Reyes, “Victorio Edades,” in Conversations on Philippine Art: Interviews by Cid Reyes (Manila: CCP, 1989), 7–8. Purita Kalaw-Ledesma & Amadis Ma Guerrero, Edades: National Artist (Manila: Security Bank and Trust Company and Filipinas Foundation, 1979). Victorio C. Edades, “Liberating ourselves from Acad-

Sudjojono began his essay titled “Seni Loekis di Indonesia Sekarang dan jang Akan Datang” with the aforementioned quote, which could be considered a manifesto of modern art in Indonesia. Following this opening salvo, he vehemently attacked contemporary Indonesian painting—represented by Mooi Indië landscape painting—as hollow images “devoid of spirit,” of “people who live outside our real life sphere,” images that only indulge the expectations of foreigners who “have never seen a coconut palm or a rice feld.” Moreover, he rejoiced in the fact that a new generation was fnally being born and that they were moving away from this tourist-oriented souvenir-type art. In its stead, he advocated the necessity of paintings “that look reality straight in the eye,” enjoining the artist to “not seek beauty […] in the mental world of the tourist,” but simply to paint the world as it exists: Because high art is work based on our daily life transmuted by the artist who is himself immersed in it, and then creates. […] Art may not follow some group of moralizers or become the handmaid of this or that party. It must be absolutely free, liberated from all moral bonds or tradition in order to be fertile and vital.6

5

6

emism,” This Week, 19 September 1948, as published in Rod. Paras-Perez, Edades and the 13 Moderns (Manila: Cultural Center of the Philippines, 1995), 35. S. Sudjojono, “Seni Loekis di Indonesia Sekarang dan Jang Akan Datang” [The art of painting in Indonesia now and in the future], in Keboedayaan dan Masjarakat, October 1939 in Seni Loekis, Kesenian dan Seniman [Painting, the arts and the artist] (Yogykarta: Indonesia Sekarang, 1946), as cited in Claire Holt, Art in Indonesia: Continuities and Change (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 195. Abstracts translated by Claire Holt. Ibid., 196.

This statement by Sudjojono reveals an extremely modern image of the artist and a philosophical understanding of art, staring hard at the reality of one’s own foundation and creating an individualised aesthetic of beauty inspired by one’s own internal beliefs and feelings. The essay in which these statements were made was released in Keboedayaan dan Masjarakat magazine in October 1939. However, this was not simply an attempt to incite the younger generation. In October of the previous year, he had already rallied what he called a “new generation of artists” (consisting of about 15 people, including Ramli, Otto Djaya, S. Tutur, Emiria Sunassa and Suromo) in Jakarta, positioning Agus Djaya Suminta as the chairman and assuming for himself the position of secretary in the formation of a group of Indonesian painters known as the Association of Indonesian Drawing Masters (Persatuan Ahli-Ahli Gambar Indonesia, PERSAGI, fg. 9.2). It was through this group that Sudjojono strove to realise his own artistic philosophy. PERSAGI has been positioned as the frst modern art movement in the history of Indonesian art, although we do not know with certainty much about the works that were likely to have been presented at PERSAGI exhibitions at the time. Exactly how well the members’

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7

Barli Sasmitawinata, interview with Ushiroshoji Masahiro, 24 September 2004. 8 Ibid.

Wahdi, interview with Ushiroshoji Masahiro, 22 January 1995. 10 Sudjojono, as quoted in Holt, op. cit., 196. 11 Ibid.

works satisfed Sudjojono’s expectations or to what extent the artists comprehended his harsh words and took them to heart is uncertain. Regardless, Sudjojono called for painting to be a medium of personal expression that looked reality straight in the eye, even if one’s reality was a poor and pitiful one, painting it as it was rather than producing lifeless souvenirs that catered to foreign tastes. In his own work, he attempted to put his ideas into practice as well.

This group did not wield the same infuence as PERSAGI, but at a time when landscape paintings had always been painted from memory by artists indoors, they introduced to Indonesia for the frst time an Impressioniststyle plein-air painting practice. According to Barli, they sought to capture reality in their works by going to the actual location they were painting.7 They were also said to have been the frst to paint not only landscapes but fgures as well.8 In fact, many fgure paintings by Affandi survive from the years 1938 and 1939. One could argue that the efforts of the Bandung Group of Five to pursue a real connection with the ground beneath their feet, rather than paint idealised romantic scenery, could be seen as the stirrings of modern art. Because they had no spokesman like Sudjojono was for PERSAGI, their names were not etched as deeply into the narrative of art history. Nonetheless, it is worth refecting on their activities which preceded those of PERSAGI, even if in a limited way. In light of the group’s contribution to modern art in Indonesia, however, Wahdi’s presence as its member is curious. Wahdi (fg. 9.3) is an artist whose oeuvre was known to be dominated, almost in its entirety, by Mooi Indië paintings. From conversations with him, it is clear that Wahdi originally considered himself a tukang gambar (artisan draughtsman), and it was only when the term pelukis (painter) was coined during Japanese military rule (1942–1945) that

The Bandung Group of Five Bandung, a city in the western part of Java in the Dutch East Indies, was a highland metropolis developed by the Dutch and one of Southeast Asia’s leading modern cities. A department store was established in 1910, and other modern buildings designed by Dutch architects in the Art Deco style stood side by side on its streets. A group of artists known as the Bandung Group of Five (Kelompok Lima Bandung) formed and established their base here in 1935, three years before the formation of PERSAGI. The fve members were Affandi (1907–1990), who would later gain national popularity for his “tropical expressionism,” Hendra Gunawan (1918–1983), the milkman Sudarso (1914/1916–2006), Wahdi Sumanta (1917–1996) and Barli Sasmitawinata (1921–2007). Affandi was the eldest member at 28, and the youngest, Barli, was just 14 years old. 134

9

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he came to see himself, for the frst time, as an artist.9 Wahdi had trained for fve months under Abdullah Suriosubroto (1878–1941), an established painter of Mooi Indië landscapes, before striking out on his own. At an open-call exhibition under the Japanese military government, Wahdi claimed that his master’s son, Basoeki Abdullah (1915–1993), who had recently returned from his studies abroad in Europe, had denounced him as a thief and accused him of stealing his father’s style. Wahdi’s paintings were sometimes also mistaken as Affandi’s: Having collaborated with Affandi on several projects, Wahdi seemed to have also absorbed his partner’s style. From these examples it seems apparent that to Wahdi, who held the perspective of a tukang gambar, paintings were artisanal crafts that could be copied. However, to Basoeki, who had just returned from Europe, and to Sudjojono, who extolled the aesthetic individualism of the artist, paintings were executed in a style unique to the individual artist. It is here that we can perhaps identify a historical turning point. The Pledge of Youth Let us return to Sudjojono’s manifesto. In its last paragraph, Sudjojono’s words take on a still more impassioned tone: Painters of Indonesia! If there is still any of your own blood in your breast, carrying seeds of visions from your Goddess of Art, leave your tourist-like sphere, break the chains that restrain the freedom of your blood, so that the seeds I have spoken of become a large Garuda with strong wings who can carry you up to the blue sky.10 He then closes his essay with this: “Probably you will suffer, be burned by the heat of the sun […] but when you die you’ll not journey in vain to the palace of the Goddess of Art in the

land of eternity […] the Goddess will open the door and joyfully invite you herself to enter.”11 I would like to call attention to the fact that Sudjojono addressed his fervent call to the painters of “Indonesia,” because the Republic of Indonesia did not yet exist at this point in time. In fact, at the time in the Dutch East Indies, the faint shadow of a sovereign Indonesia was just raising its head, defning itself in opposition to the exoticised East Indies of the Western imagination. In 1928, a group of nationalist youth leaders (including Sukarno, who would later become the nation’s frst president) declared the Youth Pledge (Sumpah Pemuda), vowing to uphold an Indonesia of “one motherland, one people, and one language.” It was an indubitably symbolic event, using the term “Indonesia” as a slogan signifying independence from Dutch colonisation. Sudjojono’s call, then, made pointed reference to this slogan in anticipation of the future state that was beginning to emerge even amidst colonial rule. The establishment and activities of PERSAGI represented an artistic movement and, at the same time, signifed a form of activism that looked proudly towards national independence. Bangkok, 1933 In Thailand, which had preserved its independence from the aggressions of major powers, ‘fne art’ was a system to be institutionalised by the government. Thailand had pursued modernisation since the second half of the 19th century, during the reigns of King Mongkut (Rama IV) and King Chulalongkorn (Rama V). As criticism of the autocratic monarchy intensifed, a constitutional revolution was sparked in 1932, changing the political system from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy. As modernisation through Westernisation advanced, the government invited Europeans to Thailand and tried to import various Western institutions, including that of ‘fne art.’ The fgure who came to play a major role in this

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feld was Corrado Feroci (1892–1962), an Italian national who adopted Thai citizenship in 1944 and took the Thai name Silpa Bhirasri. Feroci was brought in by the Thai government in 1923 to teach Western sculpture at the Fine Arts Department; in 1933 he established the School of Fine Arts (reorganised as the Praneet Silpakam School the following year). In 1943, the status of the school was elevated and it became Silpakorn University. Unlike other colonial regions, ‘fne art’ in Thailand was, more than anything, introduced in emulation of the West and a means of reinforcing national authority through the creation of national monuments and sculpture. For this reason, sculptors were more essential than painters. Feroci, together with the frst generation of students of the Silpakam School, were responsible for the production of statues of the King, such as Rama I (1932), and national monuments, such as the Democracy Monument (1939) and the Victory Monument (1941, fg. 9.4). Before long, Feroci was nurturing young artists who would go on to write the history of modern art in Thailand. After the war, Feroci inaugurated a nationwide open-call competition that culminated in the National Exhibition of Art in 1949, expanded the provisions of Silpakorn University, and authored many books on the history of Thai art. Through such initiatives, he played a major role in forming the concept of and establishing a basis for ‘fne art’ institutions in Thailand. Early graduates of his school came to be heralded as pioneers of Thai modern art. National demand dictated that many of them, unlike artists in most other Southeast Asian countries, be sculptors. In addition to the Western-style art curriculum, learning from nature and studying traditional Thai arts were encouraged at the school. Feroci taught that originality was of foremost importance to a modern artist, although he did not advocate formalism or strict universalism: 136

The laymen who are usually so attached to traditional art do not accept new forms easily; it is an understandable sentimentalism which is gradually overcome only through new aesthetic appreciation arising from the same modern surroundings as those of the artist. To appease the layman’s anxiety, it is important to understand that if a Thai (or any artist belonging to a distinct ethnic group) does not purposely imitate works of foreign artists, he will always express, under any new style, the individuality of his race, which is formed by peculiar natural temperament, climate, religion, atavistic feelings and thoughts, and other factors.12 Feroci’s tutelage produced exceptional sculptors such as Khien Yimsiri (1922–1971), who fused the grace and refnement of Sukhothai Buddhist statuary with the rational realism of Western sculpture. Hanoi, 1925 In 1921, French painter Victor Tardieu (1870– 1937) visited French Indochina, an entity which at the beginning of the 20th century comprised Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Tardieu’s entry to the Paris Salon had received the colonial art prize, the Prix de l’Indochine, in 1920, awarding him a stipend for his deployment to Indochina. Recipients of the prize received free passage between Paris and Indochina and travel within the French territory, but the allowance for expenses incurred during travel was fairly limited, so it was customary for stays to be cut relatively short. In Tardieu’s case, construction of the University of Indochina (l’Université Indochinoise) was being planned at the time of his visit and he took on the project of producing a large mural for one of the buildings immediately after arriving in Hanoi, allowing him an extended stay. As a result, he was able to gain an understanding of the state of Viet-

Ushiroshoji Masahiro

12

Silpa Bhirasri, Contemporary Art in Thailand (Bangkok: Promotion and Public Relations Sub-Division, Fine Arts Department, 2001), 11, frst published in 1959–1960.

namese art and come into contact with local artists (fg. 9.5). Tardieu commented: “I had the opportunity to interact with eager young Vietnamese artists who wished to revive traditional Vietnamese arts and at the same time sought ongoing instruction in Western arts.”13 Tardieu must have cherished the same hope himself, because he later received approval from the colonial government to establish the School of Fine Arts of Indochina (l’École des beaux-arts de l’Indochine) in 1925 with the support of the painter Nguyễn Nam Sơn (1890–1973). The stated objective was to train locals to produce handicraft items for export, but the school provided an art education that followed a standard Western-style curriculum. The frst batch of students graduated from the school in 1930 and over the course of the 1930s, alumni of the programme established the institution of ‘fne art’ in Indochina. At the same time, a form of “tradition” inherent to Vietnam was discovered and forged under the guidance of their French instructor. Nguyễn Phan Chánh (1892–1984) and Nguyễn Gia Trí (1908–1993) were both instrumental in negotiating this strand of “tradition” in the mediums of silk and lacquer painting respectively. Singapore, 1935 While there were oil and watercolour paintings produced by European artists who travelled the Malay Peninsula in the 19th century, the transfer of ‘fne art’ from the West to the local com-

13

See “Futsuin no Bijutsu Gakko—Sandai Bijutsu Gakko no Enkaku to Soshiki—” [Art schools of French Indochina: History and organisation of the three major art schools], in Kokumin Bijitsu [National art], trans. Horiuchi Masakazu, 2, no. 1 (January 1942).

munity came late. Apart from the traditional paintings and calligraphies produced by the Chinese in the British Straits Settlements of Singapore, Malacca and Penang, only a minimal number of oil paintings were made. By the 1930s, however, Chinese who had studied art in France and China came to settle in the Straits Settlements, and others journeyed to Shanghai to further their education in art. As more artists gathered in Singapore, the Society of Chinese Artists (formerly the Salon Art Society) was formed in 1935 (fg. 9.6) and began to hold annual exhibitions the following year. In 1938, the frst tertiary art school in the British territory of Malaya, the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, was founded for the purpose of educating young immigrant Chinese in the arts. Lim Hak Tai (1893–1963) served as the frst principal of the school, and its establishment further stimulated other artistic activity in Malaya. The oil paintings by members of the Society of Chinese Artists were heavily infuenced by Post-Impressionism and the School of Paris, due to the large number of members who had studied in France and Shanghai. They, alongside other ethnic Chinese artists in Malaya, were sometimes categorised as belonging to the Nanyang School of art. “Nanyang” (South Seas) was the Chinese term for the Southeast Asian region, suggesting that those living there did not yet consider Singapore their homeland. Lim leveraged this condition unique to Singapore to create a Nanyang art that was neither wholly dongfang (Eastern) or xifang (Western).

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The Greater East Asia War, 1941–1945 At the end of 1941, when ‘fne art’ was germinating and on the very verge of blossoming in Southeast Asia, the Japanese Army invaded. The army rapidly occupied the greater part of the region, laying down military governments and exerting Japanese infuence. Although this occupation lasted for a relatively short period of time—it was slightly over three years before the war ended in Japan’s defeat—it nonetheless created great disturbances within the region. The Japanese occupation policy was not consistent in all localities due to the differing objectives of each of the occupation armies as well as the distinctive features of each area, and it is not beftting to speak of them together in general. However, it is safe to say that throughout the region the Japanese enlisted the cooperation of residents in the military government and deployed “pacifcation strategies” (or less euphemistically, propaganda) with the goal of mobilising locals in the war effort. In addition to the establishment of the Keimin Bunka Shidosho (Cultural Centre, Poesat Kebdedajaan, fg. 9.7) in Java, where art classes were also held, regular open-call art competitions and other kinds of exhibitions were organised. In Manila and Hanoi, the Japanese sponsored nationwide public art exhibitions and competitions, and exhibitions of local artists were held in Singapore as well. Japanese cultural centres were also established in various parts of Southeast Asia and Japanese artists were dispatched to staff them. While such cultural components of occupation policies made certain contributions to the process by which ‘fne art’ was able to take root in Southeast Asia, it is undeniable that there were also ways in which the Japanese Army and its occupation crushed the germinating seeds of ‘fne art’ and largely inhibited its growth. One obvious example of this was the execution of the central fgure of the Society of Chinese Artists in Singapore, Tchang Ju Chi (1905–1944) and his associates. 138

Importing ‘Fine Art’ and the Search for Individuality, then Redefning ‘Fine Art’ Victor Tardieu wrote the following on the occasion of the construction of the l’École des beaux-arts de l’Indochine: The most urgent task for the founder of this school and his collaborators is to assist the artists and handicraftsmen of Annam to discover the deep meaning of their own tradition and fnding [sic] fundamental inspiration. In order to achieve these ends, numerous models of old Annamese art should be displayed before their eyes. This return to the past, however, can be productive only if it serves as a departure point to new researches and only when we confront the present exigency to cultivate a path leading to future developments. In short, the issue lies at how we are going to achieve a modern development along the continuing line of tradition.14 This question of “how we are going to achieve a modern development along the continuing line of tradition” was a common concern throughout Southeast Asia and, undoubtedly, the Asian continent as a whole. For example, although at a slightly later date than Tardieu, the aforementioned Feroci, who established the School of Fine Arts in Bangkok under the national policy of the Thai government and worked tirelessly to establish the system of ‘fne art,’ similarly stressed the importance of Western-style art education while also encouraging learning from nature and the traditional arts. He asserted that “If sincerely expressed, a work done by a Thai or by any other Eastern artist must be different from one made by a European. The difference will correspond to the individuality of race.”15 While respecting the originality of the artist, he called for art that refected the traditions and characteristics of the artist’s own people. Even Edades, the quintessential Philip-

Ushiroshoji Masahiro

14 Quang Phong & Quang Viet, The Fine Arts of the Capital Hanoi in the 20 th Century (Hanoi: Editions des Beaux Arts, 2000), 407.

pine modernist who studied in America, advocated “fnd[ing] pleasure in the visible qualities of even the commonest objects of everyday life” and the importance of “integrat[ing] all of our impressions with our own Oriental heritage and our traditional Christian culture.”16 Meanwhile in Indonesia, Sudjojono fervently insisted upon beauty that conformed to the personal aesthetic of the individual artist while maintaining a spirit that looked reality straight in the eye, to achieve artworks that are based on our daily life as transmuted by the artist and that must be absolutely free.17 In the frst half of the 20th century, under the colonial rule or strong infuence of European powers, Southeast Asian artists learnt about the new concept and medium of ‘fne art’ as imported from the West and used it within the context of rising nationalism to fx their gaze upon their individual reality, tradition and cultural heritage, seeking to discover their own ‘fne art’ in the process. The birth of ‘fne art’ also engendered defnitions of what was not considered ‘fne art.’ The process by which ‘fne art’ was imported from the West and became entrenched in the

15 16 17

Bhirasri, op. cit., 16. Edades, as published in Paras-Perez, op. cit., 36. Sudjojono, as cited in Holt, op. cit., 195.

various localities was, by the same token, also a process of marginalising and disqualifying the diverse creative arts that had previously existed in this region and fell outside the umbrella of ‘fne art.’ Any discussion of the concept of ‘fne art’ today in the 21st century is also necessarily an act of re-examining these marginalised forms of creation, in order to redefne once more what constitutes ‘fne art.’ This essay has provided an overview of the process by which ‘fne art’ was imported to Southeast Asia, but I believe that the ultimate task for National Gallery Singapore and those of us concerned with the art of this region is, more importantly, to re-examine that which has been discarded and forgotten in the process of defning ‘fne art’ in this region.

This essay was originally written in Japanese, translated by Maiko Behr and assisted by Horikawa Lisa. This essay uses single quotation marks to highlight the term ‘fne art,’ as an equivalent of the Japanese punctuation 「」 ( ) used by the author.

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9.1 Victorio C. Edades The Builders 1928 Oil on fbreboard 128 × 321 cm Collection of the Cultural Center of the Philippines Image courtesy of the Cultural Center of the Philippines 9.2

Association of Indonesian Drawing Masters (Persatuan Ahli-Ahli Gambar Indonesia, PERSAGI) Image courtesy of Indonesian Visual Art Archive

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Wahdi in his studio 22 January 1995 Photo © Ushiroshoji Masahiro



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Victory Monument, Bangkok, Thailand Photo © Ushiroshoji Masahiro Victor Tardieu, seated in the centre, pictured with the staff and students of l’École des beaux-arts de l’Indochine (School of Fine Arts of Indochina). Photo courtesy of Institut national d’histoire de l’art (Paris), fonds Victor Tardieu (Archives 125, 9)

Members of the Society of Chinese Artists 1935 Image courtesy of the Society of Chinese Artists 9.6

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First meeting between the Japanese and Indonesian members of Keimin Bunka Shidosho (Cultural Centre, Poesat Kebdedajaan) in Java, April 1943. Image courtesy of Indonesian Visual Art Archive

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2

Paul Zafaralla, “Genesis,” in A Portfolio of 60 Philippine Art Masterpieces (Manila: Instructional Materials Corporation, 1986), 175. Department of Fine Art and Photography, the Ministry of Culture and Information, Vietnam & The Sankei

Shimbun, Cultural Promotion Division, 50 Years of Modern Vietnamese Paintings: 1925–75, exh. cat., ed. Ushiroshoji Masahiro (Tokyo: The Sankei Shimbun, 2005), 190.

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Conditions of Freedom, Contingencies of Art Patrick D. Flores

If war were to mark a turn in the history of art in Southeast Asia, what would it wage? And how might it turn art-historically in a locality of countries that contrives a region? It would perhaps provoke at the outset a confrontation with the oftentimes ruthless, though supposedly civilising, colonial force that had mapped out the territories of nation and culture, and the geographies of art and its histories. These formations were carved out from islands, archipelagoes, trade routes, kingdoms, land masses, and border crossings spanning Taiwan to the Pacifc. It would reveal the fragility of this world, torn asunder by the radical evil of the Holocaust and the atomic bomb. It would also nearly in the same breath sense the expectations of reconstruction, a reconstitution of the world, and a world order, under the auspices of the United Nations and the Bretton Woods Conference— these instruments that conceived of a world after war with sweeping visions of change. The Philippine painter Hernando R. Ocampo (1911–1978), also a distinguished poet and fctionist, was one artist who was able to scan the shifting landscape of art and society after World War II and through the other wars 140

later. As early as 1940 he did The Contrast (fg. 10.1), a scene in which a man on his hunches scoops out what appears to be a measly meal from a nearly empty plate. A kerosene lamp shapes his sunken and rawboned body that is set against the severe silhouette of buildings, high-rise and hard-edged. In 1946, a similar solitary fgure reappears, composed as a stark contrast to a looming city in the work Ang Pulubi [The Beggar]. In Calvary (Three Crosses), the same dispossessed body surfaces across three crucifed fgures as if in Christ’s scene of death but are actually amid the smoke stacks of factories. From this phase characterised by historians and critics as “proletarian,” Ocampo would venture into abstraction, the kind that was keen on formal rhythm and the changing constitution of natural and human life. He is believed to have seen The Beginning or the End (1947), a “documentary flm on the explosion of a hydrogen bomb at the Bikini atoll” and was haunted by its memory: After the atomic explosion, the fsh from the nearby ocean crawled their way on land and climbed trees, and then died due

Charting Thoughts

to asphyxiation. Turtles, instead of going to the ocean, walked toward the desert and also died. The flm disturbed me and made me apprehensive about the future. On the other hand, I was convinced that humanity will persist in spite of any number of atomic or hydrogen wars, but perhaps no longer in our present form and lifestyle, but in some other mutant forms.1 From this experience arose his mutant series (fg. 10.2). This suite of abject fgures testifes to the grisly and morbid time of the post-war era that also evoked a heady climate of thrilling mutations. This essay seeks to explore the period of the 1950s and 1960s in Southeast Asia through three themes: the struggle with successive colonialisms, the coming to terms with independence, and the process of belonging to the international world. These travails, subtended by three wars (the Pacifc War, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War), will be feshed out by transformations in the production of art through particular stylistic rubrics that tangentially speak to them: Post-Impressionism to School of Paris, including Art Nouveau and Art Deco, and the various realisms in the 1950s and internationalism in different registers (abstraction, social realism, Pop Art, and an incipient avantgarde) in the 1960s. While these styles may be viewed as derived from the West, their mediation in localities across Southeast Asia gave rise to idiosyncrasies of expression; alternatively, some artists in the region also thought that these so-called Western styles had been shaped by a certain turn towards Eastern philosophy, however this notion of the Eastern was reckoned. To be discussed alongside these themes and styles are encompassing formations that tried to bind the region through the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in 1940; the Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955; and the formation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in 1967.

Broadly, the essay contributes to the conversation on art after war; the investment in the imagination of nation-states through nationmaking in the form of revolution or nationbuilding in the name of modern development; and the mapping of a region, a collective moment in an increasingly international system. The procedure of this refection takes the form of an analysis of the practical logic of the artistic proposition. It tries to identify tendencies in how form would congeal through certain modes of depiction and focuses on tropes or ways of imagining reality in the sphere or ecology of art. This relationship between medium and trope may be able to draft the basis of a method of making the modern beyond its protean phases. War In the explication of the lifeworld of war, three tropes are salient: reconstruction, revolution, and independence. These three modes of remaking the country that was a colony also shaped the production of art that responded to the devastation of war in the Pacifc, the need to found a nation through a revolution, and the assertion of sovereignty in the form of an independent nation-state. Even if a country had not gone through colonisation in the strict sense, it might have had to mimic colonial devices if it had desired to become postcolonial in relation to other places in the region. War, therefore, was a pervasive presence in this period in art history. In fact, in Vietnam, the arts “during the ten-year period between the two wars (anti-France resistance and anti-US resistance) initially depicted memories of anti-France resistance war, which helped the citizens share their common history […]. At the same time, the town undergoing development was another popular subject. Both subjects refected the ambience of those days in Vietnam where people strived to build the country by overcoming the damages of war.”2

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In this scheme of the war, the “reality” of the social world became a contentious condition. How to embody such a reality that was disfgured by war and was being transformed into a certain level of wholeness through the nation structured an aesthetic problematique. The shifts in the mind of S. Sudjojono (1913–1986), who was a philosopher and polemicist as much as he was a painter, may be a good place to start discussing this energy called the real. Amir Sidharta tracks the changes of the artist’s calibration of the “real” from the Dutch term realiteit, which Sudjojono transposed as realitas, to realism. Sidharta quotes him during his years as part of the Association of Indonesian Drawing Masters (Persatuan Ahli-Ahli Gambar Indonesia, PERSAGI), saying: “This is our life condition and what we want at this present time,” which is by turns ethnographic and programmatic.3 In 1949, however, through the painting Sekko (Perintis Gerilya) in which a guerrilla fghter roams the ruins of a Prambanan village, Sudjojono revealed “a marked difference from his previous works” that aspired to the truth through the depiction of the beautiful. In the said painting, painstaking attention was “given to paint the fgure and the surrounding realistically.”4 From the quest for truth, it thus became a quest for verisimilitude, confating realism with naturalism: “Draw a spoon as a spoon, a bamboo bench as a bamboo bench,” Sudjojono would preach. In the course of time, Sidharta interjects, Sudjojono would feel trapped in this kind of realism. Key in this swerve of thought would be the painting Perusing a Poster (fg. 10.3) in 1956 the background of which is left incomplete, even inchoate, marked with “sketches and strokes that It indicated his desire to express himself.”5 was the critic Trisno Sumardjo who acutely discerned the tension in Sudjojono’s impasse, and therefore an opportunity to revise in the face of the real; it is worth quoting him copiously as his comments are emblematic of the predicaments of Southeast Asian artists who have had to grapple with the vexed condition of the real: 142

Sudjojono wants to express a realistic attitude to life (for example, to see and experience the struggle, suffering of the people) with realistic paintings. But it turns out that what is meant is just a method of drawing (a spoon precisely as a spoon) and not an inner sense (for example: colonisation is evil, the fatherland is fertile, I’m sad, the guerrilla is brave), even though these too are realistic sensations […]. Such a method is actually naturalistic; although realism can in fact borrow this method from naturalism, it is not necessary for a realist to have to use that method […]. So what Sudjojono propagandizes as realism is to take motifs from what exists based on the fve senses, and to paint them in a naturalistic manner. He forgets that a person can be a realist by painting what is felt by the inner self and with any method at all, as long as its content remains realistic. He is also unaware that in so doing becomes an advocate for people to become slave of the lincak, slaves to the spoon, by thoughtlessly copying whatever nature and circumstances present. He is unaware that this too is contrary to the psychological development of Indonesians today.6 While Sumardjo’s critique may be astute, it can also be argued, on the other hand, that Sudjojono’s realism or instinct for the real was ethically requisite, prompted by what he was witnessing around him and how he thought his people grasped reality. Speaking of his paradigmatic Indonesian: “His reality is the reality of rice. He also perhaps understands when it is a vision, but if his family is hungry, he plunders. Modern theory remains theory, it is rice that’s needed.”7 For sure, various means of realism indexed a world after war amid all the rubble. But such a realism was not suffcient. There was the demand to prefgure as well a new world being mustered and swept away by revolutionary passion

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Amir Sidharta, “S. Sudjojono: The Artist, Realiteit and Truth,” in Strategies Towards the Real: S. Sudjojono and Contemporary Indonesian Art (Singapore: National University of Singapore Museum, 2008), 42. 4 Ibid., 43. 5 Ibid.

6

and a fulsome commitment to independence. This relay generated an aesthetic that revealed the limits of “realism” as a legacy of the colonial academy and contacts with Western paradigms of art-making and its concomitant pedagogies. With the limit ex-posed, as it were, the artists strove to trans-pose it through variations beyond the language of realism. It is at this point that “realism” would be surmounted, sometimes belabouredly so, and was redefned through a problematisation of thought, so transforming inevitably into a problematique. Finally, realism had to shed off its supposedly preordained skin to reveal the layers of “reality” and perhaps the “real.” It was at this punctum that the visual space opened up to other ways of organising space, delineating form, and so on. The dimension of the canvas, therefore, was challenged, its plasticity demystifed, and its fatness relieved of its illusions. The war would be simultaneously remembered in art as an event and a morality tale. The 1950s offered the chance for artists to revisit the consequences of this moment and the lives that it changed in the course of time. Here, realism persisted but only to the degree that it challenged the idealisation of both land and people. A vital part of this critique of the ideal is the representation of people, specifcally rendered as characters and even as partisans, coming together to form a common culture or a political consensus. Certain intersections in social life would be marked like the village, for instance, or the street corner as generative of a shared sentiment or a responsibility to act

upon the world. The heterogeneity of the social then condenses, incarnated by types and typifcations, signifed by recognisable codes of ethnicity and gender, and made to comprise a polity or a culture. The realism extracting the “type” or the “typical” is ethnographic in orientation, but its relationship with other types becomes allegorical, transcending the anecdotal and conveying an ethical attitude towards a cause or a predicament in the socius. This condensation of the type fnally promises a nexus into the possibility of social comment in which the type could be appropriated to intimate contradiction, confict, sympathy, solidarity, and the other utterances of (dis) identifcations. An exemplary instance is how the Nanyang artists in Malaya endeavored to construe the mélange of methods as a “sophisticated” and “syncretic” approach to the reality of the place and the culture of the “Southeast” by way of Bali, a trope for both culture and geography, at once orientalist and nativist, describing an ethnographic terrain and staking out a plot of utopian paradise. For the artist–curator–historian Redza Piyadasa, for instance, the 1959 work Tropical Life (fg. 10.4) by Cheong Soo Pieng betrays the layers of this palimpsest: Chinese ink, gouache techniques, rice paper as ground, Cubism as style, hand-scroll orientation, and peripheral vision. Piyadasa fnds this admixture “truly innovative,” refecting “considerations that were peculiar to a group of Chinese artists attempting to arrive at modern art productions that were linked to the place itself.”8

3

7 8

Aminudin TH Siregar, “S. Sudjojono’s Pendulum,” in Strategies towards the Real, 76–7. Ibid., 79. Redza Piyadasa, “Modernist and Post-Modernist Developments in Malaysian Art in the Post-Independence Period,” in Modernity in Asian Art, ed. John Clark (Sydney: Wild Peony Press, 1993), 172.

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9

Kevin Chua, “Painting the Nanyang’s Public: Notes toward a Reassessment,” in Eye of the Beholder: Reception, Audience, and Practice of Modern Asian Art:

This notion of the “place itself ” is undoubtedly complicated primarily because it reinserts into the discourse of another form of idealisation that supplants the colonial idealisation. That being said, this new form is at the same time a negation, but one that requires a third moment to fulfll its potential as a critique. The critique, therefore, bears multiple codes of the normative and the alternative. The historian Kevin Chua deepens this dialectic when he raises the issue of the public of the Nanyang artists in relation to their insistence on place. In this equation, the place gains rondure because the agency of a public inhabits it and this agency fnally becomes a mode of address: locative and demonstrative. According to Chua, the realism of the Nanyang coterie was critical to the degree that it implicated the people to which they supposedly belonged and for which the pictures were meant either to raise the consciousness of or to affrm their birthright. It was in the same vein critical because it risked its artistic vocation for the “will of the popular.” And fnally, it was critical because it dared to insist on a dream of a “better future, with the word ‘Malayan’ written on the sands of a lost island.”9 Tracking such a public is tricky because it is in fux and, as a social formation, it is constantly restyled by forces around it; also, it refuses to be monolithic. Rather, it is suffused with disparate subjectivities that relate to each other in a highly volatile, intersubjective space. When contingency demands it, the public becomes a critical mediation of the form. The situation in Vietnam during the war with the United States yields some insights in terms of how both the 144

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Reception and Audience for Modern Asian Art (Sydney: Wild Peony Press, 2007), 86. 50 Years of Modern Vietnamese Paintings, 198.

traditional and the reprographic would reference the folk and the popular through media like lacquer, silk and the print. As theme or subject matter, the public fgures prominently as labour force in the trenches of resistance and in work places. As material, the public is interpellated through a technology that reaches its mass. A cogent example would be antiAmerican posters that were “put up deep behind the frontlines. Flyers were also distributed […]. Those artists engaged in actual guerrilla fghting also drew paintings and sketches when they had time in the battle feld.”10 Painter and painted are, therefore, enmeshed. In this contemplation of people and the uncertain but also decisive times they fnd themselves in, the work of Sudibio (1912– 1981) and Ricarte Puruganan (1912–1998) prove germane. While the people are evoked quite compellingly, they are also troubled by some kind of phantasm and agitated by an immediate or impending turmoil of sorts; in other words, they are restive. This feeling underlies as well the series of Galo B. Ocampo (1913–1983) on the fagellants, in which hooded fgures wander into a wasteland of discrepant detritus. Sudibio, for instance, would integrate characters from Javanese and wayang (shadow puppet theatre) mythology to infect social commentary in Kekau Penduduk Jogja (To You People of Jogja) (1949, fg. 10.5). And in Purugunan’s Give Us This Day (c. 1974, fg. 10.6), the class structure of society lays itself bare in the face of imminent catastrophe. It is in this nerve-wracking context that we can propose a second phase of modernism that was largely wrought by the War and the

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world that survived it. This phase moved away from academic realism and the critique of the idyll. The distinction of this critical moment was further honed by the experience with Japanese rule in the region that introduced modern art, orientalism, and nationalism as part of a wider refusal of the “Western,” the “American,” or the “European.” While the latter were not entirely forsaken, they were to be mediated by an Asian moment via the Japanese and its own investments in the modern. In the Philippines, for instance, there was a marked shift from the Post-Impressionism of Cezanne and Gauguin to the Fauvism of Matisse, Cubism, the experiments of the School of Paris, and Surrealism. These artistic movements are invoked as ciphers and should not be construed as direct sources of the local aesthetic. In the wake of the War and the frenzy of reconstruction, there was a recollection of the past as a dream and a fantasy. The impulse of this form was fragmentation, thus the prevalence of the Cubistic form in Southeast Asia as a vector of the effect of the war on a place and a polity. This fragmentation, however, would not lead to the total disintegration of the fgure. Instead, the latter would be dramatically and lyrically enhanced by rhythm so that the fragments would cohere at a certain level through a design that dramatises the ambiguity of the fgure and the possibility of its recomposition into a vacillating synthesis akin to a kaleidoscope. The fantasy of nation was further manifested in the mythology of history and the folklore of nationalism through the mural of flmic aspirations as may be discerned in Carlos “Botong” Francisco’s (1912–1969) efforts to depict the foundations of modernist discourses like history, nation, culture, medicine, and commerce. This imagination that crystallised in the mural and extended to the cinema is best gleaned in his collaboration with the flmmaker Manuel Conde. Among their projects, the flm Genghis Khan (fg. 10.7) stands out. Done in 1950, it was screened at the Venice Film Fes-

tival and the Museum of Modern Art in 1950, annotated by the American playwright-critic James Agee, and translated into around 16 languages. It speaks of a fedgling but resolute Temujin who would transmogrify into Genghis Khan, the overlord whose dominion stretched from the Pacifc to the Danube; it mingles the epic, the metrical romance and Russian flmmaking techniques, among others, to limn the saga of a stalwart conqueror, architect of much of the modern world. Furthermore, the post-war period meant a further engagement with the West, underwritten by the yearning to belong to a more ample ambit of art. Such an aspiration may be characterised as internationalist: to move beyond the nation and to relate with other nations with their own histories of art-making. This meant that artists from the region would partake of the tutelage in Western institutions and seek validation through critique, exhibition, and the acknowledgment of peers. From the purview of the geopolitical, the post-war was the scene of the postcolonial theatre of nation-states in Southeast Asia; they tried to confgure themselves into a region in more or less the same season that the “contemporary” in Western art history was cohering as a corpus of practice, a break from the modern and the formalist. The emergence of Southeast Asia geopolitically and of contemporary art historically created a hospitable climate for both the form of creative life and the form of the post-independent nationstate. In this respect, it must be mentioned that the Cold War may have enhanced aspirations to belated modernisms in some parts of the region. For while in the Philippines and Indonesia, for instance, the modernist aesthetic found frm ground beginning in the frst half of the 20th century, it was only after the Pacifc War that the modern secured a more stable space in places like Cambodia and Burma. What should be of interest in this aspect of the modern in the region was the role of America in fostering the conditions for modernism to thrive. In

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Burma, the Burma-American Institute in 1963 underwrote the one-person exhibition of Paw Oo Thet, spurring what may well have been the “modern art movement” in the country.11 Such an initiative followed through similar efforts as early as 1952 when the United States Information Service (USIS) supported the All Burma Competition, which was won by the painter Aung Khin, regarded as one of the pioneers of modernism in Burma. In Cambodia, the exhibition titled Scenes de la Vie Cambodgienne under the auspices of the USIS at the American Library in Phnom Penh around 1960 was pivotal in putting up a platform for Cambodian painters. Another iteration of this mode of exposure came by way of Peintre Cambodgiens, described as the third annual exhibition of Khmer Artists presented by the USIS at the American Library around 1962. The artist Nhek Dim was also sent to the United States through USIS and studied cartooning with Walt Disney. In 1965, the Royal University of Fine Arts was established under the patronage of King Norodom Sihanouk (then Head of State) with the architect Vann Molyvann as its founding Rector. The mandate of the institution oscillated between heritage and the contemporary, tradition and renewal. According to Molyvann in an essay in 1965: The method adopted is to introduce the student to examples of classic art, and to instruct him in the conventions observed in their production, while opportunities are given him—concurrently—to familiarize himself with modern research methods. Thus the forms evolved by the potter and metal-worker in ancient times are examined by the student with a view to releasing his creative instinct, and enabling him to devise forms of his own invention.12 In Thailand, artists like Fua Haribhitak and Sawasdi Tantisuk “endowed Western methods of painting with local themes to ex146

press their impressions of modern Thai life and environment.”13 The Silpakorn school of modernism, in fact, encouraged students to weave strands of the local tradition into the larger fabric of modern art. Its frst Thai student to receive an undergraduate degree from the university, Chalood Nimsamer, was sensitive to both “national identity” and the lure of experiment. He later nurtured an oeuvre around environmental art, outdoor sculpture, and installation. What is overlooked in this phase of contracting Western style and methodology is the contribution of design in the mediation of the contract. An argument can be made that design mediated the dominant Western styles and reinvented their forms for the local contexts. Design was a pliant modality, addressing the broader sphere of popular culture and the industrial complex. On the other hand, it was cognisant of the traditions of ornament in customary forms. Design, therefore, widened the audience of modernism, assimilating it into the schema of objects beyond the privilege of the academy. The other vital element in the mixture that shaped the mediation of the Western and the international was the urgency of context, regardless of how this context would be interpreted in terms of radical action or the remembrance through art of a symptom of a historical moment. In the context of the recollection of art, or its historicisation, the process of memory would fnd a cogent expression in the aestheticisation of heroism, the iconography of independence, and the commemoration of what is deemed, cherished, and overinvested as a rupture from a panoply of dominations that had brought forth monuments and its offcial rituals. The strain between the two legacies of pedagogy in Jogjakarta and Bandung heightens a productive difference between subscribing to or resisting the Western, sustained by the festering debates between the Insitute of

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11

Andrew Ranard, Burmese Painting: A Linear and Lateral History (Chiangmai: Silkworm Books, 2009), 215. 12 Vann Molyvann, “New Life Infused into the Arts in Cambodia,” in Cultures of Independence: An Introduction to Cambodian Arts and Culture in the 1950’s and 1960’s, eds. Ly Daravuth & Ingrid Muan (Phnom Penh: Reyum Publishing, 2001), 330. 13 Apinan Poshyananda, Modern Art in Thailand: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 84.

14 Safrizal Shahir, “Abstract Themes in Malaysian

People’s Culture (Lembaga Kebudayaan Rakyat, LEKRA, 1950) and the Manifes Kebudayaan (Cultural Manifesto, 1963) and, by extension, between abstraction and realism. Tradition would also become a crucial aspect of the facture of the modern by way of the appropriation of batik in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, and lacquer and silk in Vietnam. The presence of Fua Haribhitak and Affandi in Śāntiniketan provides another trajectory or lineage of modernity and tradition quite independent of the Western academic institution or the modern art museum. As the form moved away from “reality” and to a certain extent freed itself from the overwhelming burden of social context, it was able to articulate something that slipped away from the demands of realism and the fgurative. This turn towards the abstract may have been incited by the search for the elusive essence, which may in turn recursively reference the social context that has become so over determining when translated in terms of realism and the fgurative. It is at these points of contact that the desire for autonomy touches the unconscious of culture, engendering the thought that Abstract Expressionism, to cite a case, is not alien to the local artist; rather, it is intrinsic. According to Syed Ahmad Jamal: “The main impact of Abstract Expressionism, that of the emotive and mystical qualities of the exteriorisation of the feelings and the senses, as a kind of direct form of mediation which

telegraph the intenseness of feeling, of thought and imagination through plastic means.”14 This investment in feeling and intensity, as well as in directness and mysticism, would be elaborated on by the New Scene artists in 1969 when they frst held their exhibitions. This cohort, which included Redza Piyadasa and Sulaiman Esa who later co-organised the Towards a Mystical Reality project in 1974, was “concerned with making original contributions to the existing international movement in art which aims at an intellectual, impersonal, nonsymbolic approach.”15 The motivation to be simultaneously “original” and “international,” whether in the vein of Abstract Expressionism or conceptualism, could only be reinforced by a double movement of being distant and being intensely true to intuition. Jamal continues that the Malaysian artists gravitated around Abstract Expressionism because its “immediacy and mystical quality” suited what he formulated as the “Malaysian temperament, sensitivity and cultural heritage, and with the tradition of calligraphy found the idiom the ideal means of pictorial individuation.”16 He would mention Kline, Soulages, Hartung, among others, and say that the “gestural quality of their works have obvious affnity with the traditional art of calligraphy, which is a cultural heritage of Malays and Chinese; a visual language immediately felt and perceived by Malaysians.”17 He considered Abstract Expressionism a “catharsis, a direct form of release” and that it was not a

Modern Art,” in Narratives in Malaysian Art, Volume 1: Imagining Identities, eds. Nur Hanim Khairuddin & Beverly Yong with T.K. Sabapathy (Kuala Lumpur: RogueArt, 2012), 244–5. 15 Ibid., 245. 16 Syed Ahmad Jamal, Senilukis Malaysia—25 Tahun (Malaysian Art—25 Years) (Kuala Lumpur: Balai Seni Lukis Negara, 1982), unpaginated. 17 Ibid.

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18 Ibid. 19 See Yin Ker, “Unpacking the Legacy of an Exceptional

20 21

Artist from Myanmar: Bagyi Aung Soe (1923–1990),” published in this anthology. “A Conversation with Vann Molyvann,” in Cultures of Independence, 15. Ken Tadashi Oshima & William Whitaker, “Characters of Concrete,” in Crafting a Modern World: The Architecture and Design of Antonin and Noémi Raymond, ed. Kurt G.F. Helfrich & William Whitaker (New York:

“borrowed idiom” but rather a “natural means […] a natural development from the loose atmospheric forms of the early water-colours.”18 Such a back and forth between sympathies, and the internalisation of what previously was seen as extraneous or foreign, may have generated a certain kind of exceptionality, the sense of the native and the natural, as distilled in the wondrous oeuvre and practice of the Burmese Bagyi Aung Soe. Three years after bursting into the scene in Yangon in 1951, the eccentric artist was sent to Śāntiniketan to infuse liveliness into Burmese traditional art. The artist’s commitment to manaw maheikdi dat (painting of the fundamental elements through heightened mental concentration) was thoroughgoing; it was an art achieved in terms of spiritual transformation through mental nurturing.19 In this pursuit of the ineffable in the artifce of art, the attraction to the term “nonobjective” of Philippine artists may have been instructive. Early abstraction may have cohered around this disposition, spelled out concretely in an exhibition in 1953 titled First Non-Objective Art Exhibition in the Philippines and later annotated in a monograph by Aurelio Alvero titled The First Exhibition of Non-Objective Art in Tagala. This sense of the non-objective was a mediation of the abstract, informed by the requirements of plasticity and intuition independent of literature and the reference to re148

22

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Princeton Architectural Press, 2006), 66. Carlos Romulo, “Full Text of the Final Communiqué of the Conference,” in The Meaning of Bandung (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1956), 98. George McTurnan Kahin, The Asian-African Conference Bandung, Indonesia, April 1955 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1956), 39. Jean de Baroncelli et al., The Performing Arts in Asia, ed. James Brandon (Paris: Unesco, 1971), 10–1.

ality. What supplements the so-called natural state of the “non-objective” is its cognate condition in the “native” as indexed by the position of Alvero to rename the Philippines to Tagala, perhaps a postcolonial critique of the enduring colonialism embedded in the appellation “Philippines.” Aside from the non-objective, the other mode of mediation that had the capacity to address the imperatives of the local and the worldly was the material of concrete. The latter was the main material that built two important Catholic churches in the Philippines: the Chapel of St Joseph the Worker at the Victorias Milling in Negros Occidental in the Visayas in 1950 and the Parish of the Holy Sacrifce at the University of the Philippines in 1955 in Quezon City outside the old city of Manila. In Cambodia, Vann Molyvann (fg. 10.8) relates that he used “cement so that the houses would last longer. When I made molds for the cement columns and posts, I used wooden boards so that the grain of the wood is imprinted in the cement […] I used a wooden mold and poured cement into it. What results is true to the nature of the two materials.”20 As an architectural critic would put it: “Concrete is a truly international material used worldwide. From another perspective, it is a regional material through the use of locally found aggregate and the techniques and ideals of its builders. Concrete, as a liquid that becomes a

Patrick D. Flores

solid, can be further considered ‘more a process than a building material.’”21 Levels of the Collective Besides war as a defning condition and contingency of artistic production, the formation of a collective was vital in ensuring that “art” achieved the competence to critique a sense of totality that was dominating the world. In many ways, this form of domination was confgured as a result of a history of resistances that ultimately led to wars. An exceptional moment in this regard was the 1955 Asian-African Conference held in Bandung. This conference was organised by Burma, Ceylon, India, Indonesia, and Pakistan, and attended by 29 countries including Afghanistan, China, Ethiopia, Liberia, Libya, Sudan, South Vietnam and Yemen, among others. It brought together fgures like Nasser of Egypt, Chou En-Lai of China, Sihanouk of Cambodia, and Nehru of India. It was a seminal moment for what would later be called the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade in 1961. The Conference agreed “frst, in declaring that colonialism in all its manifestations is an evil which should be speedily be brought to an end; Second, in affrming that the subjection of peoples to alien subjugation, domination and exploitation constitutes a denial of fundamental rights.”22 Sukarno, the President of Indonesia, said in his speech that: “This is the frst intercontinental conference of colored peoples in the history of mankind.” He talked of the lifeline of imperialism: “This line runs from the Straits of Gibraltar, through the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea and the Sea of Japan. For most of that enormous distance, the territories on both sides of this lifeline were colonies, the peoples were unfree, their futures mortgaged to an alien system.”23 With this event convened in Southeast Asia, the region found itself at the forefront of

a third force beyond the bipolar hegemony of the United States and the Soviet Union. This geopolitical collective would be articulated as a geo-poetic as well through gatherings of artistic agents, for instance, in Manila. Testaments to this were the First Asian Music Conference (or the First Southeast Asian Regional Music Conference) and the First Southeast Asia Art Conference and Competition in 1956 and 1957 respectively. In these instances, music and visual art across Asia were mapped out and made to cohere at some level of belonging. In 1966, the conference Musics of Asia was organised in Manila, with the Philippine musical artist and scholar Jose Maceda working with the likes of Iannis Xenakis, Ravi Shankar, and Prasidh Silapabanleng, among others. In 1969, a conference on the performing arts in Asia took place in Beirut. According to the organisers, the major question before the Beirut Round Table was “the relationship between the indigenous performing arts and the new mass arts of flm, radio and television […] and the response of the artist to the needs of an evergrowing public which is no longer bounded by national cultures or frontiers.”24 The more systematic formation of a regional consciousness was undertaken by the founding of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations or ASEAN in 1967. Its precursors included the Southeast Asian League (an informal organisation of Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Burma, Malaya, Indonesia, and the Philippines) in 1947; the Southeast Asia Collective Defence Treaty (which included the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, France, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand) and the Manila Pact in 1954, which was the basis of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) in 1962; and fnally the Maphilindo (Malaya, Philippines, Indonesia) in 1963). The geopolitical impulse of these initiatives was clear. For instance, SEATO’s central purpose was to “to halt China’s long-term as-

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pirations for the domination of Asia.”25 Before China became a threat, the formidable hegemon was Japan. Goscha and Ostermann write: The Japanese overthrow of Western empires across Southeast Asia during World War II meant that the historical process of decolonization started in Asia before spreading across the South along a horizontal axis to Africa. Ho Chi Minh and Sukarno both announced the independence of their countries in August 1945 as the Japanese empire crumbled but before the French and the Dutch could reassert theirs.26 In this climate of cooperation, two fgures from the Philippines helped sharpen the focus on Southeast Asia as a regional node that was capable of an extensity: the soldier–diplomat Carlos P. Romulo who was a signatory of the founding documents of the United Nations and the politician Diosdado Macapagal who became President of the Philippines in 1961. Both Romulo and Macapagal were delegates to the Asian-African Conference in 1955. In 1964, Romulo visited Indonesia, Thailand, and India as a university president to pursue “a new concentration on Asia” and “Asian Studies” across the region. In a speech at the University of Indonesia, he quoted the Indonesian President Sukarno: “Our Motherland is a continuity and we are laborers toiling for its greatness. Malaya is a continuity, Indonesia is a continuity, the Philippines is a continuity and we are laboring to make them great.” In 1968, he was a scholar-in-residence at the State University of New York where he presented 11 lectures. In the lecture “Asia in the American Mind,” he spoke of an enigmatic notion of Asia as Time: Asia is Time. I do not mean clock of calendar time. I mean Time as a kind of passing, a movement as well as a process, 150

a growth that has in it the ingredients of decay. It is likewise a response to seasons of change, at once passive and impassive, the outcome of which is Age […]. How old is the Filipino nation? An impossible age, and certainly unacceptable to our national pride, if the answer goes back only to Magellan […]. Thus the truism that we in Asia live in a number of centuries simultaneously […] at the Conservatory of Music of the University of the Philippines, we offer studies in Mozart as well as in the ancient instrument of community and religious life, the brass gong.27 He would then propose: “What the Asian wishes to achieve is a contemporaneity and an urgency of expression preferably in his native tongue.”28 For his part, the Philippine President Diosdado Macapagal coalesced with Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman of Malaysia and President Sukarno of Indonesia to confgure Maphilindo (a contraction of Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia) in 1963. In Manila, the three leaders declared: “The Manila Declaration is a declaration of Asian independence. It expresses the determination of our three countries to safeguard this area from subversion in any form or manifestation […] in the common struggle against colonialism and imperialism.”29 Macapagal summoned the spirit of Wenceslao Vinzons’s “Malaysia Irredenta” in 1932 and the Bandung Conference in 1955 to carry on with “fraternal cooperation […] to intensify their efforts to help build a peaceful new world dedicated to freedom and justice.” He spoke of a storied past and a radiant future: The decision to establish Maphilindo looks backward as well as forward. It looks to the past of frustration and shame of the Malay peoples, their fragmented history and incoherent destiny. But it also looks

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25 Brian Farrell, “Alphabet Soup and Nuclear War: SEATO, China and the Cold War in Southeast Asia,” in Cold War Southeast Asia, ed. Malcolm H. Murfett (Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Editions, 2012), 81. 26 Christopher E. Goscha & Christian F. Ostermann, “Introduction: Connecting Decolonization and the Cold War in Southeast Asia,” in Connecting Histories: Decolonization and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, 1945–1962, eds. Christopher E. Goscha & Christian F. Ostermann (Washington: Woodrow

forward to the reunion of brothers after their prolonged and tragic dispersal […] to the rebirth of a region which an aggressive and adventurous colonialism had long considered as its exclusive preserve.30 He cited as precursors the Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi in 1947; the Baguio Conference in 1950 attended by representatives from India, Pakistan, then Ceylon, Indonesia, Thailand, and Australia; and the Association of Southeast Asia in 1961. The other level of the collective pertains to the practice of collecting, or the accumulation of objects thought to be invested with values and the capacity to signify the identity of a historical moment or moment of culture. In other words, they were deemed capable of representing a place and a time, a possibility availed of nation-states or their elite who postured as vanguards of certain totalities, or better still, of their dominions. The process through which in the Philippines Jorge B. Vargas, Fernando Zóbel, Eugenio López, Leandro Locsin, and Arturo Luz, to name only the most assiduous, built up their collections of objects of different kinds (from art to archaeology to books) had been instrumental in shaping the narrative of art history, curatorship, and museology. These collections also ratifed the hubris of the elite to ordain the heritage of the Philippine nation, effectively blurring the lines between the patri-

Wilson Center Press; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 2. 27 Carlos Romulo, Clarifying the Asian Mystique (Manila: Solidaridad Publishing House, 1970), 64. 28 Ibid. 29 Diosdado Macapagal, The Philippines Turns East (Quezon City: Mac Publishing House, 1970), 34. 30 Ibid., 39. 31 The quote is taken from an original manuscript at the Jorge B. Vargas Museum, dated 1948.

monial and the paternalist. It is indispensable for an art history of Southeast Asia to draw up as well a history of collecting, a practice that was central in the reconstruction of the postcolony after the Pacifc War. It must be mentioned that Jorge B. Vargas, a political fgure who served the American and Japanese colonial governments, imagined his collection of Filipiniana as an allegorical testament to and a recuperation of a shattered Philippine culture: “In the days ahead of the young Republic of the Philippines, there will be undoubtedly a growing desire for emphasis on the appreciation of our cultural heritage.”31 This cultural heritage was in fact asserted in the revolution against Spain beginning in 1896, but then usurped by the Americans. It was the aftermath of war that reignited this passion for culture as an index of wholeness in the wake of war’s fragmentation. The consolidation of the collective in the 1950s generated a sense of adequacy on the part of the post-war, postcolonial nation-state, securing for itself a foundation of the “national” with which to relate to other nations on the same level; thus the quest for the “international” that was feathered in the nest of the 1960s. Finally, the collective, as intimated by the longing to be part of a more expansive sphere of a history of sensible life, could be referenced through the participation of Southeast Asian artists in art exhibitions with an international or global profle. Affandi, for instance, was at

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Emmanuel Torres, “‘Because It Is There’ … The Philippines at the 32nd Venice Biennale: A Close Look,” Philippine Studies 13, no. 2 (1965): 341. 33 Hiroko Ikegami, The Great Migrator: Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2010), 205. 34 Poshyananda, op. cit., 117. 35 Guy Brett, Exploding Galaxies: The Art of David Medalla (London: Kala Press, 1995).

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the Venice Biennale in 1954. In 1964, the Philippines set up its frst national pavilion in Venice, represented by Napoleon Abueva and Jose Joya, with the poet-art critic Emmanuel Torres as commissioner. Torres lamented the belatedness of the conservative artistic gesture of the two Philippine abstractionists, “remote from the critical storm centers, the titillating novelties of ‘pop’ […] and the nervy, jumpy excitements of the even bolder works of the ‘kintetic’ artists whose whirling, vibrating, noise-making machines looking like complicated toys.”32 This was the year when the American Robert Rauschenberg was conferred the grand prize for painting, an achievement that was styled and staged by American foreign policy and the art market, and marked the American turn in global art. Cities such as Stockholm and Tokyo struggled simultaneously, according to the art historian Hiroko Ikegami, “to articulate […] cultural identity within the increasingly Americanizing art scene” and to “capitalize on the force of American art in order to become an active and unique participant in the world art scene.”33 In Thailand, Prawat Laucharoen (b. 1941) widened the repertoire of abstraction by way of reprographic techniques as well as references to Pop Art. Apinan Poshyananda singles out a mixed media series titled Collage No. 3 as “impressive.” It consisted of lettering, raw canvas, oil and sand, among other materials. Prawat

engaged in combines and in abstraction that looked to action painting for processes; he also innovated in the feld of etching and collage. In New York, he later collaborated with artists like Adolph Gottlieb, Alex Katz, Larry Rivers, Philip Pearlstein and David Hockney.34

Galo B. Ocampo, Aspects of Philippine Culture: Contemporary Painting of the Philippines (Manila: National Museum, 1968), 4. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., 16. 39 See Aminudin TH Siregar, “Confict and Denial: The Discourse of Identity in Indonesian Art, 1950s to 1980s,” published in this anthology.

Critique of the Modern, or the Modernist Critique The critique of the modern at the end of the 1960s and at the threshold of the 1970s would, at a signifcant level, overcome the binary of the local and the Western. This required a complicated procedure, prompted by the analysis of contradictions within the discourses and institutions of modernity, foremost of which was the “nation-state” that aspired to an “ethnic totality” across differences in subjectivities shaped by class, race, gender, and so on. This transfgured, for instance, in the evocation of land and the depiction of how it was contested, claimed by discrepant forces and visions of the future. The distance between patrimony and dispossession arising from the said contradictions would be navigated quite markedly in art, with land invested with allegorical potential and even the sublime. On the other hand, an anecdotal delineation of everyday struggle would also be registered, as in the description of scenes in the street like the confrontation of different personae and in riots.

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It is this claim to space and its habitation as a historical responsibility, and a critique of other claims to it, that delineated efforts in the 1960s. When Imelda Marcos reclaimed a part of Manila Bay to transform it into land for a complex of buildings dedicated to cultural presentations and conventions, it was a sign that space was being contoured for something modern. This development was also the basis of intense critique. Alongside this depiction of urgency was a more performative rendering of the material condition itself. David Medalla’s (b. 1942) compelling protest on the inaugural night of the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 1969 spoke of the instinct of artists to take over space when the situation warranted it (fg. 10.9). Medalla’s practice harnessed this potential. He was an acutely politicised artist; at the same time, he was keenly aware of his environment. He did not only describe this environment; he recreated it as condition in which an alternate life could transpire, evoking the atmosphere of the social in the intuition of the natural. It is in this context that his pioneering work in land, kinetic, and performance art gains exceptional stature of global magnitude.35 At the end of the 1960s, art in Southeast Asia was “attuned to the frenzied escalation of events in the world scene.” These were the words of Galo B. Ocampo in his remarks on Philippine art. He continues: “The development of contemporary art in the Philippines has paralleled that same movement in other parts of the world. So continuous is this movement that it would be impossible to defne the limits indicating where pure Philippine art begins, as improbable perhaps as to state exactly what is pure Filipino, or pure American.”36 He would conclude that this idea of Philippine art could never be singular: Contemporary art is therefore an admixture of developing and shifting cultures. It is no sudden thing that one man conjured in the moment of greatness; it is some-

thing borne upon him by social conditions and upon which he, as an individual artist, imposes on his own society. It belongs to a developing scale of social values, values which have been assimilated and summed up in the adult individual—and to which the artist in turn adds his own values to be accepted by others. The history of contemporary Philippine art cannot be disassociated from the contemporary history of the country and its social context.37 Still, Ocampo found this toil wanting: While Philippine arts are able and competent in the craft […] there has been no indication so far […] of the contemporary artists in conceptualizing a new art form that would serve as a model for a convention that could possibly infuence the world of art […] no progressive thought in painting has developed which could serve as the springboard for a new cultural invention that would add to the present scale of values. No one has yet in the local feld attempted or dared to enter the feld of a new form, timidly daring to exploit the only feld which has been previously worked over.38 In 1969, Oesman Effendi in Indonesia would express his apprehension about the existence of Indonesian painting, or to be more specifc, of the Indonesian mark in Indonesian painting. “Therefore, I believe, Indonesian painting is still growing, but does not exist yet, as it is in the process of discovering its unique form.”39 This sense of incommensuration and indistinction, this political feeling of at once not measuring up and of super-adequating, as expressed by Ocampo and Effendi, is key in thinking through the modern in the region in the 1950s and 1960s, a modern on the cusp of the contemporary that would in the 1970s be addressed with more temerity and resolve.

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10.1 Hernando R. Ocampo The Contrast 1940 Oil on canvasboard 58 x 41.5 cm Collection of Jorge B. Vargas Museum and Filipiniana Research Center, University of the Philippines 10.2 Hernando R. Ocampo Dancing Mutants 1965 Oil on canvas 101.8 x 76 cm Collection of National Gallery Singapore 10.3 S. Sudjojono Perusing a Poster 1956 Oil on canvas 109 x 140 cm Collection of OHD Museum

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10.4 Cheong Soo Pieng Tropical Life 1959 Chinese ink and gouache on Chinese rice paper 43.6 x 92 cm Collection of National Visual Arts Gallery of Malaysia

Sudibio Kekau Penduduk Jogja (To You People of Jogja) 1949 Oil on canvas 200 x 136 cm Collection of OHD Museum 10.5



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Ricarte Puruganan Give Us This Day c. 1974 Oil on canvas 152 x 211 cm Collection of National Gallery Singapore

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Manuel Conde as the eponymous overlord in his flm, Genghis Khan 1950 Image courtesy of Cesar Hernando 10.7

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Vann Molyvann, architect Jean Mohr, photographer Chatomuk Theatre, Phnom Penh, Cambodia Original photograph c. 1960s, digital reprint 2015 Image courtesy of Vann Molyvann David Medalla (second from the right) protesting at the inauguration of the Cultural Center of the Phillippines, 1969

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2

Wiyada Thongmitr, Khrua In Khong’s Westernized School of Thai Painting (Bangkok: Aksorn Sampan Press, 1979), 127.

Piriya Krairiksh, Art since 1932 (Bangkok: Thammasat University, 1982), 65.

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The Transition of Thai Traditional Art to Modern Art in the 1950s and 1960s Somporn Rodboon

People have long misunderstood that the dominance of Western art caused the decline of traditional Thai art. To clarify the situation, this essay will explain how modern Thai art began, and how traditional art was revived and developed in parallel to modern art during the late 1940s to the 1960s in Thailand. Traditional Thai art did experience an initial decline, however. This began with the opening of the Thai Kingdom to Western infuences in the reign of King Rama IV or King Mongkut (r. 1851–1868) and his successor King Rama V, also known as King Chulalongkorn (r. 1868–1910). Modernisation policies and the adoption of Western culture brought about the decline; consequently, Thai art gradually transitioned from traditional to modern. But even though traditional art declined, it was included in the curriculum of Thailand’s frst art school (founded in the 1930s), along with Western academic training. The Rise of Western Infuence in Traditional Art Western infuence in Thai art can be seen in paintings by Khrua In Khong, the most celebrated monk in Thailand and court painter of King Mongkut. Khrua In Khong was ac154

tually a traditional painter who had been exposed to Western prints and photographs, and started to incorporate Western elements such as three-dimensional perspective techniques and chiaroscuro rendering in his mural paintings. Elements of Thai traditional paintings can also be found in his works, for instance the use of two-dimensional space, parallel perspective, Thai ornament and sharp contour lines to delineate different motifs. In addition, Khrua In Khong also applied gold leaf to his works. Combining Western and traditional Thai painting techniques, Khrua In Khong became the frst painter to break away from tradition to paint in a new way. At the time, painters who executed their paintings in the same manner were said to belong to the Khrua In Khong School of Painting. Through their approach to painting, Khrua In Khong and his followers contributed to the evolution of Thai art in the 19th century.1 Western culture became more infuential during the reign of King Chulalongkorn because foreign painters and architects were increasingly commissioned for royal projects. During this period, various colonial powers were establishing territories in Southeast Asia. To save Thailand from the same fate, King Chulalongkorn tried to modernise the country

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as a show to the West that Thailand was not a primitive and uncivilised country. The King modelled Thailand after Western countries and developed public welfare infrastructure by building hospitals and schools, constructing roads and railways as well as installing electricity and water systems. In addition, he also employed architects and artists to work on architectural projects, mural paintings and royal portraits in Western techniques and styles. These foreign artists and architects were only employed to design and create works that had never existed in a traditional Thai context, such as monuments, statues, portraits and medals. In 1904, the frst court painter from Europe, Cesare Ferro, an Italian, was commissioned to paint the King’s portrait. Subsequently, more painters, sculptors and architects from Italy were brought to Thailand under the King’s patronage, resulting in clear affnities between the art of Thailand and Italy. Art from the European academic tradition and realism, for instance, were highly infuential in Thailand; notably, Phra Soralaklikhit (1875–1958), who was well known for his academic-style portraits of the royal families, became the frst Thai painter to train in Italy in the reign of King Chulalongkorn. During the reign of King Vajiravudh (r. 1910–1925), it was realised that traditional Thai art needed to be revived to build a national identity. Thai culture had seemed to be in decline in the preceding period of King Chulalongkorn, and this concerned King Vajiravudh. As a result, the Fine Arts Department as well as the Arts and Crafts School were founded in 1912 and 1913 respectively, to train artisans in traditional arts and crafts to serve the royal projects as well as to preserve Thai national uniqueness. King Vajiravudh was so supportive of the arts that he sponsored annual arts and crafts exhibitions. The King also wanted to revive the use of traditional architecture in designing educational institutions, and appointed Somdet Chaofa Krom Phraya Narisa-

ranuwattiwong, also known as Prince Naris, as the royal chief architect of Vajiravudh College and Chulalongkorn University. The prince’s architecture projects include the Royal Institute building and the Assembly Hall of Wat Benchamabophit (The Marble Temple). Interestingly, however, public and private buildings were built in a Western style as a result of the country’s policy of modernisation. Institutionalisation of Modern Thai Art The aim of the Arts and Crafts School (Rongrien Poh Chang), presently known as Rajamangala University of Technology Rattanakosin (Poh Chang Campus) was to train students in design and traditional craft techniques to keep these practices alive as well as to groom them to be the next generation of teachers. The subjects taught were, for example, traditional painting, inlaying and embossing, niello, and wood and ivory carving. One of Thailand’s most distinguished artists, Jitr Buabusaya (1911–2010), contributed a great deal to the Arts and Crafts School. He introduced modern methods of teaching, drew up a new curriculum for painting and sculpture, and raised the standard of art education. In 1947, the school held its frst art exhibition under Jitr’s supervision, and in the following year, a group of art instructors formed the Thai Fine Art Association. The association successfully held the frst exhibition of oil paintings in Thailand and continued thereafter to organise biennial exhibitions of artworks by their members. According to Piriya Krairiksh, the transference of power from the monarchy to the state after the revolution of 24 June 1932 resulted in the state assuming the role of patron of the arts. As a result, the Fine Arts Department, which came under the Ratchabanditsabha (The Offce of the Royal Society) and was later renamed as Silpakorn Sathan, was transferred to the Ministry of Education in 1933 under the directorship of Luang Wichit Wathakan.2

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In 1923, an Italian sculptor from Florence, Corrado Feroci (1892–1962), was employed by the Thai government as an offcial sculptor of the Fine Arts Department to undertake commissioned works. His frst works include a bust of King Vajiravudh, which he made by referring to photographs, and later, a bust of Prince Naris that was sculpted from life. He also executed remarkable portraits and monuments of important fgures such as the members of the royal family. After Feroci became a Thai citizen in 1944, he adopted the Thai name Silpa Bhirasri; he was also known as the father of Thai modern art. Establishment of the School of Fine Arts The founding of the School of Fine Arts in 1934 by the Fine Arts Department gave Bhirasri a chance to introduce teaching methods and curricula that were used in most European art academies to the Thai art education system. The school offered a four-year course, taught by Bhirasri himself, Phra Prom Pichitr and Phra Soralaklikhit. For the frst two years, students received academic training in fne arts, which was divided into two sections: painting and sculpture. Later, industrial art and music were added to its programme. Bhirasri was in charge of the fne arts curriculum, which included painting, sculpture, drawing, theory of composition, perspective and shadow, human anatomy, art history, art criticism, geometry and English. Under Bhirasri’s academic training, the students also painted and sculpted from nature and life, and as a result, the style of the graduates was generally described as realist. The School of Fine Arts gave its students a sound foundation in art practice. The frst class of students in the School of Fine Arts graduated in 1937; some of whom have since become well-known artists, such as painter Fua Haribhitak and sculptors Piman Mulpramuk and Sitthidet Sanghiran. In 1938, Thailand replaced the European artists who had 156

until then worked on offcial projects, with its frst group of local painters and sculptors. According to Bhirasri, the frst group of students who had graduated from the School of Fine Arts were employed as painters and sculptors at the Fine Arts Department and as art teachers.3 Many of them modelled fgures for the Victory Monument of 1941 with Silpa Bhirasri. Impact of Political Change on Thai Art and the Establishment of Silpakorn University It is worth noting that an annual Constitutional Fair supported by the Thai government was frst held in 1937 to promote cultural nationalism and modernisation. It was also held in celebration of the Thai national day, on 24 October, when a revolution in 1932 successfully overthrew the absolute monarchy and installed a constitutional one instead. It was then that the country’s name was changed from Siam to Thailand. The fair was organised annually until 1941, when it was interrupted by the Japanese invasion of Thailand. The art exhibitions and competitions organised by various cultural institutions in conjunction with the fair featured artworks of different forms. Most of the entries were submitted by the students and staff of the School of Fine Arts and the Arts and Crafts School. Notably, the Constitutional Fair brought modern art to the public and could have been the frst time the public saw Thai traditional art alongside new artistic expressions that were infuenced by the West. The Constitutional Fair is considered important in the history of modern Thai art because it is the frst art competition in Thailand of this theme. Moreover, as the frst public art exhibition and competition supported by the government, the Constitutional Fair also signifed a change in Thai art. When Phibun Songkhram became Prime Minister of Thailand in 1938, he continued to use art as propaganda to promote nationalism. He was very impressed

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3

Nihon Bunka Foramu, Modern Art of Asia, New Movements and Old Traditions (Tokyo: Toto Shuppan Company Limited, 1961), 79.

by the progressive and modern artworks by students from the School of Fine Arts. Thus, in 1943, Phibun Songkhram raised the status of the School of Fine Arts to that of a university, and it was renamed Silpakorn University, the frst university of fne arts in Thailand. Bhirasri was appointed as its frst dean. At the time, there was only one faculty consisting of two departments, the Department of Painting and of Sculpture. The school offered fve-year courses, in which students had to complete three years of academic training, and spend the fnal two years developing individual artistic expression. All of the modern subjects taken from a Western academic curriculum and taught at the school were introduced by Bhirasri. The earliest extant record of the curriculum of Silpakorn University is a 1953 exhibition catalogue published by the university.4 Subjects taught then could be grouped into two categories, practical and theoretical aspects of art. Modules such as drawing, painting, modelling, introduction to architecture, Thai architecture, Thai ornamentation, research on old Thai art, composition and decorative art belonged to the frst category, while the subjects in the latter category were history of art (Western and Asian art), styles of art, theory of colour, theory of composition, human and animal anatomy, geometry as well as projection and shadow. There were also compulsory courses for all students such as aesthetics, art criticism, English and literature. In addition, students who majored in painting were required to master subjects such as portraiture, fgures, land-

4

The catalogue was published by the Faculty of Painting and Sculpture, Silpakorn University, in conjunction with an exhibition held from 15 to 31 May 1953.

scapes and seascapes, as well as art composition; whereas students who specialised in sculpture were taught portraiture, to sculpt bas-reliefs of live models and human fgures in the round, medal design, copper casting, wood carving, stone carving and modern composition. Students who majored in painting had to learn painting techniques using a variety of media, such as watercolour, tempera and oils. Bhirasri also taught fresco, which was entirely new to Thailand, let alone to these art students. These students had to practise and experiment with the medium in order to master it. Fresco was taught because Western buildings were popular in Thailand and the material featured prominently as decorative elements in Western architecture. In addition, Bhirasri was concerned about professions that the students might take up after fnishing their studies. So he designed practical courses that will equip them with skills that could be pursued in their careers after they graduate. The art curriculum of the faculty was revised after the death of Bhirasri in 1962. Khien Yimsiri (1922–1971), who was serving the Fine Arts Department as a civil servant then, was offcially appointed as the faculty’s Acting Dean in 1964. The faculty at the time expanded from the Departments of Painting and Sculpture to include the Department of Drawing. Fua Haribhitak (1910–1993), Khien Yimsiri and Chalood Nimsamer (1929–2015) were in charge of these departments respectively. In 1966, the curriculum was revised yet again. This time, the Department of Drawing

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5

See “Notes on the Establishment of the University of Fine Arts,” in Eleventh National Exhibition of Art, exh. cat. (Bangkok: Fine Arts Department, 1960), unpaginated.

was changed to the Department of Printmaking under the supervision of Chalood Nimsamer who had studied printmaking (in particular, lithography) at Pratt Graphic Art Center in the United States in 1963. After returning to Thailand to work at Silpakorn University, he set up this new feld of study in which various printmaking techniques were taught. It is known that Bhirasri was the frst to introduce the method of teaching modern Western art to students at Silpakorn University. Academic training in drawing, painting and sculpture was also very important. Bhirasri emphasised drawing from nature to build a sound foundation in art. He held that students would be able to express themselves better in whatever style they liked after fnishing their art training and attaining a level of technical profciency.5 As a matter of fact, Silpa Bhirasri’s contributions to the Thai government and art institutions from the 1930s to the 1960s signifcantly enhanced the rise of modernism in Thai art. This phenomenon not only brought about new art styles, concepts and techniques, but also provoked questions concerning the adaptation of Western art as well as the confrontation between modernism and traditionalism. Paintings and sculptures of the period predominantly refect the infuence of Impressionism and Cubism from Europe, and abstraction from the United States. A revival of traditionalism also ran parallel with Western infuence then. In the 1950s, Bhirasri promoted Thai art not only in Thailand, but also in other coun158

6

Pichai Nirand, interview with the author, 21 January 2016.

tries. In 1953, he led Thailand to become a member of the International Association of Plastic Arts (IAPA) at Maison de I’UNESCO in Paris. Later, in 1954, Bhirasri participated in the IAPA conference in Venice and again in 1960, when it was held in Vienna. Fua Haribhitak and Sawasdi Tantisuk also represented Thailand at the conference in 1954. In the same year, the Thai artists Khien Yimsiri, Paitun Muangsomboon, Sitthidet Saenghiran, Sawang Songmangmee and Amnart Puangsamneang participated in the International Sculpture Competition of the Unknown Prisoners in London. Among the famous artists from different countries who submitted their works were Henry Moore, Alexander Calder, David Smith, Jean Arp and Barbara Hepworth. In 1960, Bhirasri promoted exhibitions of modern Thai art at the German Council of Art in Cologne, the 2nd International Biennale of Prints in Tokyo and the Graphic Center of the Pratt Institute in New York. Through these activities, modern Thai art and Thai artists were exposed to the outside world and received international recognition. Publications by Silpa Bhirasri Apart from his work in the Thai art institutions, Bhirasri’s numerous publications have been invaluable resources to art educators, students and the public. Although he wrote in English, some have been translated into Thai by Khien Yimsiri and Praya Anumanrachadhon. Among his writings are small booklets on modern art

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in Thailand, Thai architecture, painting and Thai Buddhist sculpture, which formed part of the Thailand Culture Series published by the National Culture Institute in 1955. In 1965, the Faculty of Painting and Sculpture published another series of booklets by Bhirasri, with titles such as Art and Evolution of Modern Art, Aesthetics and Notes on Art, History of Art (Chinese-Japanese, Oceanic and Australian, Old America-African), Important Dates in Indian Philosophy, Thai Buddhist Art and Architecture, Thai Culture and Contemporary Art in Thailand. The last title was frst published by the Promotion and Public Relations Subdivision of the Fine Arts Department, Bangkok in 1959– 1960. Most of Bhirasri’s articles can be found in catalogues published in conjunction with Thailand’s national exhibitions of art. His articles on art include: “Culture and Art” (1959), “West and East” (1958), “Literature and Art,” “Art and Morality,” “Critic [sic] of Traditional Art and Modern Surroundings,” “Meaning and Psychology of Colours,” “Nude—Art or Obscenity,” and “Research of Old Thai Art.” An important dictionary of Western art terms by Bhirasri, titled Silapa Songkrau, which was translated into Thai by Phaya Anuman Rajadhon, was frst published in 1967. The dictionary proved very useful because there was no publication as such available in Thailand then; it was also one of the texts that the Royal Institute of Thailand translated. More notably, the publication was initiated and supported by the former Prime Minister, Phibun Songkram. The Style of Art, which deals with styles of art and architecture of cultures, was another key publication by Bhirasri used by most art students at Silpakorn University at the time for their studies. Bhirasri’s publications have proven to be very accessible and benefcial for anyone interested in art. All of his publications are informative and of great value to the development of Thai art, and have done much to revive appreciation for Thai traditional art. Sadly, most of his old publications are no longer available.

Silpa Bhirasri and Traditional Art Bhirasri’s contributions to traditional art are often eclipsed by his greater work in the promotion of modern art in Thailand. Understanding the impact of traditional art on Bhirasri can offer insights into its revival in modern Thai art and how it came to play an important role in this area. Bhirasri frst encountered traditional Thai art when he worked with Prince Naris, a well-known royal architect during the reign of King Mongkut. In order to work for the Thai government on various commissioned projects, it was necessary for foreign artists, such as Bhirasri, to understand the country’s traditional art and culture. Hence, Bhirasri studied Thai ornamentation, the decorative motifs on Thai temples and architecture under Prince Naris. Fortunately, some extant drawings and sketches of traditional art and decorative motifs by Bhirasri are now kept at the Silpa Bhirasri Memorial National Museum in Bangkok. As the dean of Silpakorn University, Bhirasri was responsible for repairing and restoring old monuments, on top of his teaching duties. He realised that knowing about traditional art was essential for these projects, and planned for traditional art to be revived at Silpakorn University. He introduced courses on Thai traditional art, such as Thai ornamentation, Thai architecture and research of old Thai art, to an education system largely based on the Western art system, truly refecting his awareness of the signifcance of traditional art. Pichai Nirand, from a younger generation of artists after Haribhitak, explained that under Bhirasri, the intent of the research of old Thai art course was not for students to make exact copies of traditional paintings, but to study the overall structure, unique styles, subject matter and techniques of traditional paintings of different periods.6 Such research enabled students to understand, appreciate and get inspiration from tradition to create their own individual artworks. Artworks by Khien Yimsiri, Pichai

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Nirand, Thawan Duchanee and many others are exemplary of this method of teaching and learning. Bhirasri’s expectations regarding the assimilation of traditional and modern art styles were to pave a way for the new traditional art movement. Bhirasri also devoted himself to the study of Thai mural painting of different periods and published The Origin and Evolution of Thai Murals in 1959. On several occasions, Bhirasri joined the staff of the Fine Arts Department in their research on old mural paintings in temples. He was concerned about the damages to these murals; he felt that they should be conserved or copied and kept as a form of historical reference to preserve Thailand’s national heritage. He was of the opinion that these reproductions would also serve as valuable and signifcant historical sources for Thai art. Artists who were very much involved with such research were Fua Haribhitak, Khien Yimsiri and Angkarn Kalyanapong. According to Fua Haribhitak, when he was working closely with Bhirasri while teaching at Silpakorn University, he often went to an old temple to reproduce images of old, deteriorating traditional paintings of Ayudhaya for fear that these images may disappear in the coming years.7 Recognising Haribhitak’s effort and the value of his work, Bhirasri wrote to UNESCO on behalf of the Fine Arts Department, to send an expert from Europe to teach them the conservation of paintings. Art Movements and Styles from the 1940s to 1960s In 1944, prior to the frst National Art Exhibition, a group of artists from different felds of art known as the Chakrawat Sinlapin, organised an art exhibition at the Sala Chalermkhrung Royal Theatre. Among the artists who participated in the exhibition were Chamras Kietkong, Jitr Buabusaya, Panom Suwanaboon and Prasong Padmanuja. Apart from Jitr Buabusaya, most 160

were former students of Bhirasri. The second exhibition organised by the group in 1945 was also held at the same venue. It was possible that their works might have made known to Thais modern Thai art and the individual expression of artists at that time. Possibilities and alternative paths for the development of modern Thai art emerged in the 1940s. The infuence of Western modernism in Thai art manifested in different ways. For instance, Impressionistic styles were very popular and widely practised in the Thai art scene from 1949 (when the frst National Art Exhibition was offcially held) until 1958. During this period there were no galleries or museums to exhibit these artworks, and the National Art Exhibition was the only source of evidence of the evolution of these movements. Prominent Thai artists who had submitted Impressionist-style paintings to the National Art Exhibition between 1949 and 1958 and won awards were Misiem Yipintsoi, Chamras Kietkong, Sawasdi Tantisuk, Tawee Nandakwang, Suchao sae-Yim, Pranee Tantisuk, Prayura Uluchadha, Nopparat Livisithi and Taweesak Senanarong (1958); most painted landscapes, while others won awards for their Impressionist portraits, such as Chamras Kietkong, Fua Haribhitak (1950), Banchop Palawongs (1953, 1954) and San Sarakornborirak (1958).8 Widely regarded as one of the most signifcant artist in the history of Thai art, Chamras Kietkong (1916–1965) specialised in portraiture and once trained under Bhirasri during World War II. He worked mainly in oils and pastels and his works are characterised by lively strokes. The pastel drawing Woman (1962, fg. 11.1) shows his excellent manipulation of light and shade. Another well-known fgure who painted in the French Impressionist manner was Jitr Buabusaya, who had attended postgraduate courses at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. In the 1940s, he became infuenced by the French Impres-

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7 See Prof. Silpa Bhirasri and his Students, ed. Nipon Khumwilai, republished by (Bangkok: Silpa Bhirasri Research Center, Focal Image, 2008), 43. Author’s translation.

sionist paintings he saw in galleries and museums in Japan. He painted country landscapes, and scenes of different places such as Tokyo Fine Art University Garden (1942), Fuji Vine Arbor (1946) and Autumn Suburb in Tokyo (1942, fg. 11.2), which portray the atmosphere of the seasons in beautiful colours. It is very unfortunate that most of the artist’s works were destroyed in Japan during World War II. Only a few paintings could be brought back to Thailand. The artists who executed their works in a realist style were largely sculptors. Piman Mulpramuk and Sitthidet Sanghiran produced mainly human fgures and portraits in this vein while Paitun Muangsomboon was far more interested in modelling life-sized animal fgures such as Calf (1951), Deer (1953) and Fighting Cock (1953). He also made some realistic portraits. In fact, at the onset of modern Thai art, all modern artists went through realistic and Impressionistic phases before moving on to other new art movements. The infuence of Cubism in modern Thai art began in the late 1940s, with Fua Haribhitak as the frst Thai artist to paint in this manner. The style became fully developed in the 1950s, when Fua Haribhitak studied in Italy for two years on a scholarship granted by the Italian government and was inspired by the Cubist works there. One of his masterpieces in the Cubistic style is Blue-Green (fg. 11.3), painted in 1956, which clearly refects the infuence of Picasso’s early Cubist style between 1907 and 1908. During that time, Cubism became highly appreciated and grew in popularity as Thai art-

8

Suchao sae-Yim was also known as Suchao Yimtrakul before he changed his name to Sisganes in 1946.

ists turned away from Impressionistic styles to the new trend. Tawee Nandhakwang’s Ayudhaya (1948) and Sompot Upa-In’s Politicians were painted in the same manner of Analytical Cubism as seen in Haribhitak’s practice, clearly refecting their interest in Picasso’s Cubist work. Sawasdi Tantisuk and Chalood Nimsameur also applied geometric planes in their works. In contrast to the aforementioned artists, Prasong Padmanuja (1918–1989) was inspired by a different approach to Cubism. His sketch, Wat Phra Keo (1951, fg. 11.4), possibly refects his interest in Synthetic Cubism, which can be seen in the use of geometric planes and bright colours, and decorative quality of the work. His use of decorative spatial concept in his paintings is stylised and far more modern as compared to his contemporaries. Although the style is modern, his subject matter focuses on Thai contexts. The work also shows that his artistic creativity could have stemmed from his background and interest in decorative art. Thai artists who worked in the new Impressionistic and Cubistic styles during this transformative period were criticised by the public for copying Western art. Bhirasri was defensive of such criticism and explained: with reference to landscapes, remarks have been made that the painters were infuenced by Western Impressionism. In such respect we would like to say that the Thai painters have a natural style, they do what they see and what they feel. If they succeed in rendering every part related to oth-

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9

Silpa Bhirasri, Modern Art in Thailand, Thai Culture Series (Bangkok: National Culture Institute, 1955), unpaginated.

10 Pira Pathanapiradej, interview with the author,

ers and the whole to space, and succeed in conveying the atmosphere and light of Thailand, then they have succeeded in their artistic aspiration. If not, the works are considered a failure, for the lack of artistic value and not because the painter imitated any foreign school.

Revival of Traditional Art and Thai Identity

Bhirasri went on to make an interesting remark on sculpture, saying that a sculptor modelling a portrait has no chance to link the characteristic of his work to the past for the simple reason that in old time [sic] Thai statuary was limited to modelling Buddha images. Besides, we have also to realise that real art is an individual expression and as such it corresponds to the personal style of each artist. This style may be realistic, Impressionistic, may be that of Cubism, conventionalism or anything else.9 During this period there was also an unusual approach to Surrealism in modern Thai art, which can be detected in Pichai Nirand’s painting titled The End (1959, fg. 11.5). According to Nirand, the work expresses his subconscious and nightmares during a diffcult time in his life, and is a sincere presentation of his innermost feelings. 162

22 January 2016.

In the 1940s and late 1950s, it became apparent that some Thai artists were grappling with Western infuence (modernism) while maintaining their own culture and identity (revival of tradition) in their works. Around the late 1950s to 1960s, a group of artists emerged who strove to revive tradition to balance the dominant infuence of Western art. Buddhist themes and philosophies and even folk life and culture counted as their inspirations. In fact, courses on Thai art at Silpakorn University encouraged the revival of tradition art, in tandem with the government’s commitment to strengthen traditional values and institutions.   Khien Yimsiri frst revitalised traditional art by combining it with modern art forms, as exemplifed by the bronze sculpture Musical Rhythm (fg. 11.6), which was awarded a gold medal at the frst National Art Exhibition in 1949. It features a futist in a graceful pose playing his musical instrument. According to Kanongnuj Yimsiri (the artist’s daughter), Khun Malini (Bhirasri’s wife) said that Bhirasri himself actually posed for this sculpture. Moved by the beautiful representations of the Sukhothai Buddha, Yimsiri assimilated its traditional characteristics and a simple, modern form to create the graceful pose. In the 1960s, in the feld of painting, Pichai Nirand, Tha-

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wan Duchanee, Angkarn Kalayanapong and Pratuang Emjaroen turned to Buddhist themes as means of expression. Pichai Nirand was the frst to use Buddhist elements as symbols to convey his thoughts and spirit. This group of artists established a new movement in modern Thai art.   Damrong Wong-Uparaj’s early works, such as Fishermen Village (1960, fg. 11.7), portray aspects of Thai folk life. In this work, architectural structures absent of human fgures are used to convey the simple and peaceful life of the village fshermen. Other artists who created works of similar subjects were: Manit Poo-Aree, Prayat Pongdam (who produced stylised woodcut prints of domestic animals) and Chalood Nimsamer (who created paintings and prints).  The Beginning of Abstraction In the early 1960s, fguration gave way to the infuence of non-representational art and Abstract Expressionism in Thai modern painting and sculpture, as young Thai artists who had furthered their studies in the United States and were infuenced by the Abstract art movements there, returned to Thailand. In 1965, Chamruang Vichienkhet, widely regarded as the pioneer of abstract sculpture, produced his frst abstract piece titled Group (fg. 11.8), in which elongated human fgures merge into one beautiful abstract form. According to the artist, the work portrays a group of people coming together in an expression of unity and goodness of spirit and mankind. Many Thai abstract painters at the time such as Panom Suwannat, Anan Panin and Prawat Laochareon were inspired by the works of the New York School. Pricha Arajunka and Pira Pathanapiradej (fg. 11.9) also painted non-fgurative art. In an interview, Pira Pathanapiradej recalled that the frst exhibition of non-objective art had greatly inspired him and other abstract painters then.10 It was held at Bangkapi Gallery in

1962 and featured works by prominent architect Dr Sumeth Chumsai, Pratuang Emjaroen and Tang Chang (Chang sae-Tang) who also experimented with abstraction. While most painters were following Western approaches to abstraction, Tang Chang derived his style of abstraction from his own Chinese roots, namely, through philosophy and poetry. His work was closely related to Taoism, and Chinese and Zen Buddhism. Evidently, Tang Chang’s abstract paintings were powerful and truly expressed his emotions and the depth of his inner feelings (fg. 11.10).  Art galleries (both commercial and nonproft) and new venues that could be used for exhibitions proliferated in this new artistic era. Founded in 1962, Bangkapi Gallery was the frst art gallery in Thailand. Unfortunately, the public was not ready for modern art at the time. Only foreigners who were living in Thailand and foreign institutions in Bangkok, like the British Council, Goethe Institute, Alliance Francaise, and the United States Information Service, supported this new art, and also provided their premises for exhibitions. Through these exhibitions, artists were able to sell their works. In fact, many artists at the time made a living by selling their works. Conclusion Historical evidence clearly shows that modern Thai art evolved during the 1940s to 1960s along two trajectories. Firstly, it drew inspiration from traditional cultures in Thailand, which promoted a revival of traditional art. Secondly, it incorporated new expressions of art from the West, mainly from Italy and the United States, without losing touch with Thai subject matter and spirit. As a result, a third avenue emerged, through the overlapping of both trajectories, paving the way for new individual expression and artistic styles. Presently, art in Thailand is still progressively developed along these three paths.

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11.1 Chamras Kietkong Woman 1962 Pastel on paper 53 x 32 cm Collection of Silpa Bhirasri Memorial National Museum Image courtesy of Silpa Bhirasri Memorial National Museum 11.2 Jitr (Prakit) Buabusaya Autumn Suburb in Tokyo 1942 Oil on canvas 30 x 40 cm Collection of Thai Art Council, California, USA Image courtesy of Jitr (Prakit) Buabusaya Foundation

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Fua Haribhitak Blue-Green 1956 Oil on canvas 66 x 90 cm Collection of Silpa Bhirasri Memorial National Museum Image courtesy of Silpa Bhirasri Memorial National Museum

11.4 Prasong Padmanuja Wat Phra Keo (sketch) 1951 Tempera on paper 28 x 21 cm Collection of Chuleerat Pipitpakdee Image courtesy of Rama IX Art Museum Foundation

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11.5 Pichai Nirand The End 1960 Oil on hard board 61 x 102 cm Collection of Silpa Bhirasri Memorial National Museum Image courtesy of Silpa Bhirasri Memorial National Museum

Khien Yimsiri Musical Rhythm 1949 Bronze 55 x 38 x 38 cm Collection of Silpa Bhirasri Memorial National Museum Image courtesy of Silpa Bhirasri Memorial National Museum 11.6



11.7 Damrong Wong-Uparaj Fishermen Village 1960 Tempera on cloth 89 x 110 cm Collection of Silpa Bhirasri Memorial National Museum Image courtesy of Silpa Bhirasri Memorial National Museum

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Pira Pathanapiradej The Conquerer 1965–1966 Oil on canvas 65 x 145 cm Collection of the Bhirasri Institute of Modern Art Foundation Image courtesy of Rama IX Art Museum Foundation Tang Chang (also known as Chang sae-Tang) Untitled 1965 Oil on canvas 210 x 250 cm Collection of Thip sae-Tang Image courtesy of Thip sae-Tang

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David van Duuren, “Governors-General and Civilians: Portrait Art in the Dutch East Indies from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth century,” in Marie-Odette Scalliet et al., Picture from the Tropics: Paintings by Western Artists during the Dutch Colonial Period in Indonesia (Amsterdam: KIT/Pictures Publishers, 1999), 90–103. Dullah, foreword to Sukarno & Dullah, LukisanLukisan Koleksi Ir. Dr. Sukarno Presiden Republik Indonesia [Paintings from the Collection of Dr Sukarno President of the Republic of Indonesia], vol. I (Peking: People’s Fine Arts Publishing House, 1956), 21; Angus McIntyre, “Sukarno as Artist-Politician,” in Indonesian Political Biography: In Search of Cross-Cultural Understanding, ed. Angus McIntyre, Monash Papers

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on Southeast Asia 28 (Clayton: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, 1993), 162. Dullah, op. cit., 22; Carla Bianpoen, “Kunst en staat: De cultuurpolitiek van Soekarno” [Art and state: The cultural politics of Sukarno], in Beyond the Dutch: Indonesië, Nederland en de beeldende kunsten van 1900 tot nu [Beyond the Dutch: Indonesia, the Netherlands and the visual arts, from 1900 until now], eds. Meta Knol, Remco Raben & Kitty Zijlmans (Amsterdam: KIT Publishers; Utrecht: Centraal Museum Utrecht, 2009), 99, 103. Agung Hujatnikajennong et al., Modern Indonesian Art: From Raden Saleh to the Present Day, ed. Koes Karnadi (Denpasar: Koes Artbooks, 2006), 23–4, 26. Abdullah Suriosubroto is listed as “Abdullah Sr.” in the

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Landscape Painting in Indonesia: Continuity and Change in President Sukarno’s Collection Susie Protschky

In the days immediately following the transfer of sovereignty from the Netherlands to the Republic of Indonesia in late December 1949, Sukarno, the country’s new president, set about claiming the former palaces of the colonial governors-general for the newly independent nation. On the walls of the palaces hung portraits of the Dutchmen who had reigned from Batavia, now renamed “Jakarta,” since the early 17th century.1 Sukarno, a keen amateur painter himself who had been collecting art since the 1920s, removed the governor-general portraits and replaced them with his own collection of paintings.2 These grew to constitute the largest body of works belonging to a single collector in Indonesia, numbering 3,000 paintings by the end of Sukarno’s presidency in 1967. He thus emerged as the most infuential patron of Indonesian painting in the frst decades of the 164

Republic. His collection was periodically displayed to local and foreign dignitaries as well as artists, journalists and, occasionally, members of the general public.3 Viewers of the artworks would have seen antique paintings in the wayang (shadow puppet theatre) style, recent scenes from the revolution, a large collection of mainly 20th-century portraits, and a signifcant number of landscapes, some from the late 19th century, most by painters who were active during Sukarno’s own lifetime and whom he knew. Landscape had been a major theme in colonial art from Indonesia since the 19th century. Some of the landscapes produced in this period were by painters who are now considered to be the frst Indonesian artists of the modern era: Raden Saleh (c. 1811–1880), Abdullah Suriosubroto (1874–1941) and Mas Pirngadie (c. 1875–1936), all of whom were either trained

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volumes: see his landscapes in volume II of both the 1956 and 1964 editions. See the testimony of Amir Sidharta, Hardi and Dr. Ing. H. Fauzi Bowo in Amir Sidharta, S. Sudjojono: Visible Soul (Jakarta: Museum S. Sudjojono, 2006), 17, 143, 217. Sukarno & Dullah, op. cit., vols. I and II (1956). Two further volumes (III and IV) were published in 1959, but appear not to have been widely distributed, for they are not in major public libraries. There were 401 paintings in Sukarno & Lee Man Fong’s Lukisan-Lukisan dan Patung-Patung Kolleksi Presiden Sukarno dari Republik Indonesia [Paintings and statues from the Collection of President Sukarno of the Republic of Indonesia] (Indonesia: Publishing

in Europe or by Europeans in the Indies.4 Landscape paintings by Suriosubroto and Pirngadie feature in Sukarno’s collection, and were represented in two compendia of luxury volumes printed in 1956 and 1964 that widely publicised the president’s artworks.5 It was through these volumes that many future artists and collectors in Indonesia became acquainted with the major Indonesian painters of the 20th century.6 The frst edition, published in 1956, comprised two volumes that reproduced 384 paintings.7 The fvevolume second edition was published in 1964. It replicated many of the works produced in the earlier edition and augmented these with a number of newer paintings.8 The volumes were curated by Sukarno’s “Palace Painters,” Dullah (appointed in 1950) and Lee Man Fong (appointed in 1960), but the preface of each set was written by Sukarno himself, and the fnal approval rested with him. That these volumes were intended for an international audience is signalled by their multilingual text, which was issued in Indonesian, English, Chinese and, for the 1956 volumes, Russian. The effusive front matter in the second edition described the paintings as a “bridge of friendship between the Indonesian people” and other nations for “art

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Committee of Collection of Paintings and Statues of President Sukarno, 1964). Volumes I–IV were dedicated to paintings, while volume V was devoted to sculpture. Lee Man Fong, foreword to Sukarno & Lee, op. cit., vol. I (1964), 8. J.D. Legge, Sukarno: A Political Biography (Singapore: Archipelago Press, 2003), 300, 330–1, 402, 426; Sukarno & Cindy Adams, Sukarno: An Autobiography (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 295, 297–8. Interestingly, only four paintings from the Soviet Union were reproduced across the two sets of volumes of Sukarno’s paintings, which suggests that he acquired much less art from there than from China or even Japan. Legge, op. cit., 294–5, quote on 402.

enthusiasts all over the world.”9 More specifcally, the decision to print the frst volume set in Russian and Chinese refects the close economic and diplomatic relations that Sukarno fostered with the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China during his presidency.10 At the same time, Sukarno was positioning himself as a leader among postcolonial developing nations. The frst edition of his painting volumes appeared soon after the Asian-African Conference that Sukarno hosted at Bandung (Java) in April 1955, a key moment in his representation of himself as a leader of the Third World and proponent of the Non-Aligned Movement in the early Cold War era. The painting compendia published in 1956 and 1964 were thus arguably extensions of what the Australian historian John Legge called Sukarno’s “adventurous foreign policy” in this period.11 Indeed, the two multivolume sets positioned Sukarno’s art collection as a vehicle for international cultural diplomacy and announced his broader political ambitions as Indonesia’s frst president. In his prelude to the frst edition, Sukarno highlighted the predominance of paintings made by Indonesians after 1945 and held that “before Independence, the fne arts did not thrive in Indonesia. Independ-

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Sukarno & Dullah, op. cit., vol. I (1964), 14. Ironically, Sukarno was echoing the views of European art critics in the Dutch Indies in the 1940s who held that the colony was a cultural wasteland: see the frst footnote to Koos van Brakel, “‘For Evidently, the Fine Arts Do Not Thrive in the Indies’: The Artistic Climate in the Dutch East Indies in the First Half of the Twentieth Century,” in Scalliet et al., op. cit., 103. Sukarno & Lee, op. cit., vol. I (1964), 15. Hardi’s testimony is given in Sidharta, S. Sudjojono:

ence, however, has made it possible for the fne arts to quicken and fourish.”12 The maturation of this narrative in Sukarno’s preface to the second edition is worth quoting at length: In the present atmosphere of independence—FREE INDONESIA—, art is sure to bloom. Such is not the case in an atmosphere of colonialism! The paintings and sculptures in my collection are not always of the same high quality. However, those paintings and sculptures are themselves proof of “the fruits of independence”. Surely independent nations are happy nations!13 Since these volumes abridging Sukarno’s art collection were clearly part of the cultural and political project of proclaiming a radical break in Indonesian art with the practices of the colonial past, one would expect to see landscape paintings among the works that heralded these changes. Yet, as this chapter demonstrates, the volumes refect signifcant continuities across the late colonial and early postcolonial periods in Sukarno’s art collection, not only in terms of the painters he favoured but also in the themes these artists chose. The greatest changes we see emerge in the 1950s and 1960s are, frst, a new interest in seascapes that depart from colonial 166

Visible Soul, 143. Dezentjé does not appear in the 1956 volumes, but is listed as “Indonesian” in the 1964 volumes. 16 Claire Holt, Art in Indonesia: Continuities and Change (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 214. 17 Ibid., 235–8; Helena Spanjaard, Moderne Indonesische schilderkunst [Modern Indonesian art] (Abcoude: Uniepers, 2003), 95–120; Nicole Baros, “Yogyakarta and Bandung: Stijl en inhoud” [Yogyakarta and Bandung: Style and substance], in Knol, Raben

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modes of viewing the coast; and second, an orientation toward art traditions in the Asia region that had been absent from painting in the colonial period. Temporality and Nation in the Sukarno Painting Volumes In the two multivolume sets that sample Sukarno’s art collection, no discernible mode of organisation can be gleaned from browsing the images themselves. The table of contents at the end of each volume arranges the works by the artists’ nationality rather than by theme or the chronological order of the works’ production. As observed by the painter Hardi (b. 1951), who became acquainted with some of the major Indonesian artists of the generation before him through the pages of the Sukarno volumes, this peculiar mode of organisation promotes the confation of colonial and postcolonial artists and their works, and imposes a similitude on Indonesian painters with very different “artistic” politics. “What we could see there,” Hardi remarked, “was only photographs of the paintings, not the artists’ ideologies.”14 Each volume commenced with “Indonesian” artists, a category that subsumed the painters’ various ethnicities into a new national identity, but also failed to differentiate between artists who worked in a colonial idiom and

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& Zijlmans, op. cit., 125–38; Amir Sidharta, “The land and her people in the discourse on Indonesia art,” in Soul Ties: The Land and her People: Art from Indonesia (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 1999), 10–7. The Javanese artist Dullah (1919–1996), Sukarno’s frst Palace Painter, observed that Sukarno “loves form that is close to nature and images that are true to life, more especially if the form is delineated in strong, bold, clear and swift strokes.” See Dullah, op. cit., vol. I (1956), 22. The Bandung painters were not, meanwhile, prohib-

those who opposed it. Thus, Javanese painters like Abdullah Suriosubroto, who were active not just in the colonial period but also in the colonial genre, were stealthily reclaimed as predecessors of modern Indonesian art by virtue of their indigeneity. The Indo-European Ernest Dezentjé (1885–1972), who is to this day classifed as a Dutch or colonial painter in standard works on art surveying the preindependence period, was nationalised as Indonesian in the Sukarno volumes by virtue of his having taken citizenship in the 1950s.15 The two compendia thus haphazardly mixed genres together, entirely evaded temporal categorisations such as “colonial,” and instead simply grouped together paintings made within the century leading up to Sukarno’s reign. It may not have been the intention of Sukarno and his Palace Painters, but such an arrangement has the effect of emphasising continuities in the style and subject matter of the paintings across the colonial period and early years of Indonesian independence. Art historians have been reluctant to acknowledge such possible continuities in painting from Indonesia in the 1950s and 1960s, partly because the political allegiances and activities of Indonesian artists were deeply infuenced by the nationalist revolution, and many painters conceptualised their practice in distinctly anti-colonial terms. The eminent art

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ited from working; they simply found their buyers elsewhere. See Holt, op. cit., 239. Dullah held that Sukarno visited the homes and studios of artists, where he would drink tea with them and “very often their talk turns into controversies which are as lively as debates on some political issues.” See Dullah, op. cit., vol. I (1956), 21. For further discussion surrounding the defnition of modern Indonesian painting, see Holt, op. cit., 195, 199–201, 218; Spanjaard, op. cit., 51, 81.

historian Claire Holt, for instance, held in her germinal work on Indonesian art that “subject” was “decidedly not” what made postcolonial Indonesian painting “modern.” Instead, she argued that the question of “style” was “intimately linked with the quest for national cultural identity.”16 Art historians since Holt have invariably been drawn into this contention, in part because Indonesian painters themselves extensively debated the merits of style in distinguishing their work from that of their colonial predecessors. A great deal of ink has been spilled on the rifts between painterly schools in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly the Yogyakarta–Bandung rivalry, which was characterised by a preference for naturalism among adherents to the former and abstract styles in the latter school.17 As the volumes sampling Sukarno’s collection show, the President favoured the naturalism of the Yogya school.18 It was painters working in that style who chiefy enjoyed his patronage.19 Meanwhile, contemporary debates between artists (in which Sukarno is claimed to have taken part) concerning style, composition, subject matter and the social goals of painting carried over into artists’ organisations, their political activities and printed matter, providing fertile material for art historians to plough in their search for what defned “modern”, “Indonesian” painting in the frst decades after independence.20

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Holt, op. cit., 257. Spanjaard, op. cit., 7, 73. Ibid., 97, 103, 184. Modernist painters included Pieter Ouborg (1893– 1956) and Dolf Breetvelt (1892–1975): see Leonie ten Duis & Annelies Haase, Ouborg: Schilder [Ouborg: Painter] (Amsterdam: Openbaar Kunstbezit, 1990) and Rob Delvigne, Dolf Breetvelt: Modernist in Indië

Holt partly acknowledged the possibility of signifcant continuities between the colonial and postcolonial period in her assertion that a “breakthrough” in modern art had already occurred in the 1930s. But for her, this change was chiefy characterised by a new “self-assertion” among indigenous artists who were opposed to the European, colonial establishment in this decade.21 Holt’s focus on the rhetorical commitment of Indonesian artists to breaking with the conventions of colonial-era art is implicitly underpinned by the self-identifcation of the artists as Indonesian, and their political opposition to colonial rule: personnel and politics thus constituted the greatest change in painting practices during the 1940s and paved the way for the art of the 1950s and 1960s to be “modern.” Helena Spanjaard has expanded on Holt’s contention by detailing the “intellectual, urban context” that served an “emergent nationalism” among Indonesian artists.22 However, Spanjaard concludes that, overall, “socially engaged” painting and works done in a neocolonial style coexisted in the immediate post-independence period.23 I argue that these continuities can most clearly be observed in paintings that show the mountainous, rice-growing landscapes of Java’s interior. Mooi Indië / Beautiful Indonesia Prior to the 1940s, the largest body of landscape art from Indonesia was made by Euro168

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en Nederland [Dolf Breetvelt: Modernist in India and Netherlands] (Amsterdam: KIT Publishers, 2008). Susie Protschky, Images of the Tropics: Environment and Visual Culture in Colonial Indonesia (Leiden: KITLV Press/Brill, 2011). Holt, op. cit., 198. However, Sukarno distanced himself from Sudjojono in the late 1950s following a personal scandal (the

peans, and their most (in)famous trope has become known as the Mooi Indië (beautiful Indies) scene. Apart from a marginal contingent of modernist painters, the most successful landscape painters in the Indies worked in a realist or Impressionist style.24 Their subject matter was rice felds, palm trees, mountains or smoking volcanoes, all contained within a sweeping panoramic feld that minimised details and created a generic impression of “the tropics.” Such paintings were widely seen in the Indies and Europe in art clubs and academies as well as world fairs and international colonial exhibitions. Further, as lithography and other printing processes became cheaper and more advanced in the second half of the 19th century, reproductions of Indies paintings moved from expensive, low-circulation folios for collectors to illustrations in books that reached a wider audience.25 During the 1940s, the dominance of these views of Indonesia began to attract criticism from a number of mostly self-taught indigenous artists. Prominent among these was the Javanese painter Sindudarsono Sudjojono (1913–1986). A self-proclaimed nationalist, modernist, eventual communist, and co-founder, in 1937, of the Association of Indonesian Drawing Masters (Persatuan Ahli-Ahli Gambar Indonesia, PERSAGI), Sudjojono was one of a number of young Javanese painters who struggled to establish themselves within the conservative colonial

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artist’s affair with the woman who was to become his second wife) that saw Sudjojono lose his position in the House of Representatives. See Sidharta, S. Sudjojono: Visible Soul, 70, 84–6. 28 S. Sudjojono, “Seni Lukis di Indonesia Sekarang dan yang Akan Datang” [Painting in Indonesia now and in the future], in Seni Lukis, Kesenian, dan Seniman [Painting, the arts, and the artist] (Yogyakarta:

art establishment of the 1930s and early 1940s. After Indonesia achieved its independence in 1949, Sudjojono was among those whose careers were launched in part because of their political commitment to a more “socially engaged” form of art.26 Sukarno was a patron of his work in the 1940s and early 1950s.27 Sudjojono’s present status as the “father” of modern Indonesian art stems in large part from his manifesto, produced in 1946 during the Indonesian War of Independence. In this frequently quoted work, Sudjojono deplored the European focus on the “holy trinity” of mountain, coconut palm and rice feld in landscape art at the expense of “sugar factories and emancipated peasants, the motorcars of the rich and the pants of the poor youth.”28 What Sudjojono articulated here was an objection to historically unchanging and thematically uniform visions of colonised landscapes that avoided the transformative impact of Dutch rule on local environments, economies and societies. While Sukarno condoned Sudjojono’s nationalist and revolutionary credentials, he clearly did not share the latter’s aesthetic politics. Indeed, colonial Mooi Indië painters were included prominently among the president’s artworks, as the volumes sampling his collection demonstrate. Many of these works were originally held by the Batavia Kunstkring (Art Circle), a colonial association of artists and

Yayasan Aksara Indonesia, 2000), 1–8.

29 McIntyre, op. cit., 167. 30 Spanjaard, op. cit., 25. The relevant painting in the

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Tropenmuseum (Amsterdam) collection is Ernest Dezentjé, Landscape on Jawa, 1925, oil on unknown medium, Tropenmuseum, coll. no. TM-1602-1. Both artists have works in Sukarno & Dullah, op. cit., vol. I (1956) and Sukarno & Lee, op. cit., vols. I–V (1964).

afcionados. The collections were seized by the Japanese during the occupation that commenced in 1942 and then handed over to Sukarno when it ended in 1945.29 The selection of some of these works for publication in the two multivolume sets may be interpreted as Sukarno’s triumphant display of the spoils of nationalist victory. However, the President’s preferences in Indonesian art resonated so profoundly with these colonial paintings that they cannot solely be viewed as trophies of the revolution. Ernest Dezentjé, a leading practitioner of the Mooi Indië genre active in the colonial period, emerges as one of Sukarno’s favourite painters: ten of his landscapes are reproduced across the two editions of volumes. One of the Dezentjés in Sukarno’s collection (fg. 12.1) is strikingly similar to a painting at the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, an archive that showcases the highlights of colonial art. Indeed, Dezentjé was from a prominent IndoEuropean family of French-Javanese extraction, and moved among the Indies art establishment as a member of and frequent exhibitor in the Batavia Kunstkring.30 Dezentjé is not the only colonial artist to feature in Sukarno’s collection. In the landscape genre, Willem Imandt (1882–1967) and C.L. Dake the Younger (1886–1948) are also represented.31 Elsewhere in the volumes, the president’s predilection for the Bali artists

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As above. Werner Kraus, Raden Saleh: The Beginning of Modern Indonesian Painting, eds. Werner Kraus & Irina Vogelsang, trans. Chris Cave & Werner Kraus (Jakarta: Goethe Institut Indonesia, 2012), 33, 162. For an example by Antoine Payen, see pages 200–2 for an 1844 painting of a thunderstorm off the West Java coast near Karang Gajah (Elephant Rocks), Museum Volkenkunde Leiden. Protschky, op. cit., 23–43. C.L. Dake Jr, Madura Beach, in Sukarno & Dullah, op. cit., vol. I (1964), plate 66; Ernest Dezentjé, The Sea, in Sukarno & Lee, op. cit., vol. II (1964), plate 13. See works by the American painter B. White (vol. I

[1964]) and the Italian painters Galli, E. Brianto, Mariani and Simonetti in the 1964 volumes. See also the specifc works: William Imandt, The Rolling Sea, in Sukarno & Lee, op. cit., vol. II (1964), plate 61; Basoeki Abdullah, The Oceanic Wave, in Sukarno & Lee, op. cit., vol. II (1964), plate 29. For further exposition on Imandt see Paul van der Velde, “The Painter Willem Imandt Revisited,” The Newsletter 64, Summer (2013): 6–7. 37 By the same painter, see also On the Shores of Flores Island, in Sukarno & Dullah, op. cit., vol. II (1956) and Sukarno & Lee, op. cit., vol. III (1964), plate 30. 38 Agus Dermawan T., R. Basoeki Abdullah RA: Duta Seni Lukis Indonesia [R. Basoeki Abdullah RA: Am-

Rudolf Bonnet (1895–1978) and Willem Hofker (1902–1981) is strongly evident.32 More importantly, the subject matter and treatment of many of these works are indistinguishable from the paintings of indigenous artists who were active from the 1940s onwards—the so-called “frst generation” of modern Indonesian painters who had been involved in nationalist organisations during the War of Independence and progressed to illustrious careers in the postcolonial period. Examples included in the volumes are by the renowned painters Basoeki Abdullah (1915–1993), Dullah (1919–1996) and Henk Ngantung (1921–1991). Together, 35 of the 115 landscapes across the two compendia were made by these three artists. Many of their landscape paintings from the 1950s and 1960s continue directly in the tradition of the Mooi Indië scene (fgs. 12.2 and 12.3).

contingent of landscape works by artists from China, Japan and other parts of Asia. These outward orientations—toward the coastal geographies of the Indonesian archipelago and the art traditions of its neighbours in Asia— represent signifcant departures from colonial landscape painting in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Apart from a few works by 19th-century artists who dabbled in Romanticism—notably Raden Saleh, but also one of his teachers, the Belgian painter Antoine Payen (1792–1853)— wild seascapes had not previously been a strong feature of colonial painting in the Indies.33 Instead, a cartographic way of seeing the coast informed colonial landscape art: a tradition of viewing the shore from the perspective of a ship’s deck, and a focus on identifying port cities and historic sites of Dutch settlement.34 Paintings of lonely beaches and crashing waves appear to have been to Sukarno’s taste, and as with views of mountainous hinterlands, he was indiscriminate in his liking for colonial as well as nationalist painters. Scenes of deserted beaches painted in a realist style and (in contrast to colonial views) from an inland perspective looking out to sea at distant mountainous shores are featured regularly.

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New Orientations: Looking Out to Sea, Engaging with Asia Two conspicuous features of the volumes abridging Sukarno’s painting collection are, frst, a novel interest in coastal landscapes and views of the sea, and second, a signifcant 170

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bassador of Indonesian painting] (Jakarta: Gramedia, 1985), 13–4, 16. On romanticism in European marine painting see William Gaunt, Marine Painting: A Historical Survey (London: Secker & Warburg, 1975), 95, 116. 39 With the exception of Beach, in Sukarno & Lee, op. cit., vol. III (1964), plate 15. 40 Ratu Loro Kidul is elsewhere represented in the Sukarno volumes in a famous painting by Basoeki Abdullah, Queen of the South Seas, in Sukarno & Dullah, op. cit. and Sukarno & Lee, op. cit., vol. II (1956 and 1964), plates 105 and 30. It was a visitation from the queen while Basoeki was meditating on the beach of South Java that (according to leg-

Two come from Dake and Dezentjé, colonial artists better known for their inland Mooi Indië scenes.35 Sukarno also collected numerous close-cropped views of tempestuous waves against stormy skies. These were made by unremarkable American and Italian painters, by the Dutch painter Willem Imandt (who was one of the most established artists in the late colonial period), and by the Indonesian painter Basoeki Abdullah—but they are virtually interchangeable with one another.36 Works that celebrate the sublime qualities of Indonesia’s coastal landscapes are particularly evident in the beach scenes of Sukarno’s favourite painter, Basoeki Abdullah (fg. 12.4).37 The latter’s emphasis on the majesty and scale of Indonesia’s shores resonates with Romantic European traditions of the kind that Basoeki would have encountered during his training in Europe.38 Sukarno also acquired several coastal scenes by Henk Ngantung. With his lower perspectives and emphasis on monotonous, horizontal stretches of sand, Ngantung was notably less inclined towards the sublime than Basoeki. However, the titles of Ngantung’s paintings give his beach scenes a sacred resonance.39 Beach of the South Sea (date of composition unknown) alludes to the domain of Ratu Loro Kidul,

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end) set him on the career path of painting. See Dermawan T., op. cit., 10. The sense of integration with the natural backdrop is created in an almost identical pen and ink drawing of the spot that Ngantung made in 1952, which may have been a preparatory sketch. See Henk Ngantung, Sketsa-Sketsa Henk Ngantung dari Masa ke Masa [Sketches of Henk Ngantung through the years] (Jakarta: Penerbit Sinar Harapan, 1981), 170. John Pemberton, On the Subject of “Java” (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1994), 270. Astri Wright, Soul, Spirit and Mountain: Preoccupations of Contemporary Indonesian Painters (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1994).

Queen-Goddess of the South Ocean and mythical consort of Central Java’s kings; On the Shores of Tanah-Lot (Bali) (fg. 12.5) shows the rock formation off the coast of Bali where a centuriesold Hindu sea temple, a site of pilgrimage (and now, of tourism) is located. Ngantung integrated the temple into the rocks such that it is barely distinguishable from its natural backdrop.40 Ngantung’s paintings drew attention to the environmental features of what the American anthropologist John Pemberton conceives as “topographies of power,” and thus to veneration for the natural, ancient and undisturbed qualities of Hindu-Buddhist sites of pilgrimage that continued to have meaning for many Indonesians even in places where Islam had become the dominant religion.41 Scholarship to date has rightly focused on the importance of the cosmic mountain in 20th-century Indonesian painting and other arts.42 Ngantung’s sacred coastal landscapes, together with the more generically sublime views of the shore and ocean in Sukarno’s collection, suggest that the sea was also being explored by painters in the president’s lifetime as a potential site for spiritual retreat and refection. Sukarno’s painting volumes also prominently feature landscapes from artists through-

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43 Legge, op. cit., 426. 44 The paintings reproduced in the frst edition were photographed by Chinese personnel. Each artist selected received 2000 rupiah from the Chinese government for each of their works in the volumes. See Holt, op. cit., 209. Sukarno endorsed the publication of the frst edition, among other reasons, “for the sake of strengthening the brotherly ties between the people of China and Indonesia.” Dullah himself viewed the volumes as evidence of “the further strengthening and growth of the friendship and cultural exchange between the Chinese and Indonesian peoples,” and dedicated them to “the friendship between the Chinese and Indonesian peoples and to those who love art and peace dearly.” See Sukarno & Dullah, op. cit., vol. I (1956), 7, 14. Qi Baishi is listed as “Chi Pai-Shih” in volume I (1964) where his work, Pine and Peony, is reproduced. On the artist’s career and works, see Low Sze Wee, 20 th

Century Chinese Paintings in Singapore Collections (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 2003), 15, 86. 47 Chu-tsing Li, “Traditional Painting Development during the Early Twentieth Century,” in TwentiethCentury Chinese Painting, ed. Mayching Kao (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1988), 78, 82, 87. 48 Spanjaard, op. cit., 74–5. 49 One exception is the artist Affandi (1907–1990), who experimented with Japanese brush and ink styles but expressed ambivalence about these works. See Holt, op. cit., 199. 50 Ibid., 208. 51 Yoshizawa Chu, Taikan: Modern Master of OrientalStyle Painting, 1868–1958 (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1962), 9, 21–2. 52 Tanio Nakamura, Contemporary Japanese-Style Painting, trans. Mikio Ito (New York: Tudor, 1969), 29–31. 53 Wright, op. cit.

out East and Southeast Asia. The greater number were by Chinese and Japanese artists working in a distinctively traditional visual idiom, using materials such as ink, colours and brush on folding screens and hanging scrolls of silk or paper, and featuring motifs that signalled the seasons (the pine tree for winter, the cherry blossom for spring and the maple for autumn). The inclusion of these works by Chinese and Japanese painters in the two volume editions of Sukarno’s collection reveals a novel orientation toward Asian landscapes and artists in Indonesian painting, away from the colonial focus on Europe and its traditions. Following an initial foreign policy firtation with non-alignment either with the United States or the Soviet Union in the early 1950s, in the latter years of his presidency Sukarno moved from what Legge called a “westward looking neutralism” toward a strengthening alliance with China.43 This political shift was presaged in the text of the frst edition of volumes abridging his painting collections. The 1956 volumes were the result of a collaboration between Sukarno’s staff and Chinese art

specialists, and were presented by Sukarno as a gift to the People’s Republic of China on a state visit.44 Gestures toward the “friendship” between China and Indonesia were made both by Sukarno in his brief introduction, and in the foreword written by the Javanese Palace Painter Dullah.45 Some of the Chinese artists in Sukarno’s collection were renowned painters in their own countries. An eminent example is Qi Baishi (1864–1957), who was born to a peasant family and commenced painting late in life, but rose to be celebrated during Mao’s reign as a People’s Artist. Qi Baishi’s humble origins and vigorous style, combining gongbi (a meticulous realism) with xieyi (a spontaneous free-hand), were traits that Sukarno particularly admired in artists.46 Landscapes in which the eye is led upward through forested mountains, as practised by traditional painters active in Beijing in the early 20th century, also featured in Sukarno’s collection. Among them is an undated work by Chen Shaomei (1909–1954) that is representative of his landscape paintings from the 1940s (fg. 12.6).47

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Numerous landscapes by Japanese artists also feature in the volumes sampling Sukarno’s painting collection. During the Pacific War, Japanese authorities established artists’ organisations run by Indonesians to foster and “improve” traditional arts, and contribute culturally to the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere envisioned for Japanese-occupied Asia. These organisations supported the independent development of Indonesian art, not least because of the prominence they gave to revolutionary painters.48 Given the oppressive experience of the occupation, however, Indonesian painters were generally not inclined to experiment with traditional Japanese styles of painting in the post-war years.49 At the same time, a growing number of artists were exposed to Japanese painting in the mid-1950s, when the Indonesian government sponsored exchanges through artists’ fellowships to a range of countries, including Japan.50 Sukarno’s collection refects this cultural re-orientation toward Indonesia’s former occupier. His volumes include a painting by Yokoyama Taikan (1868–1958), who was renowned for contributing to the modern Japanese style of painting in the early 20th century. Trained at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in the 1890s, he was awarded one of the frst Orders of Culture, conferred annually by the Emperor, when it was founded in 1937. Indeed, Taikan was a committed ultra-nationalist during the 1930s and the World War II.51 In his painting, he was particularly renowned for renditions of Mount Fuji (fg. 12.7).52 The theme resonates with the Indonesian veneration for sacred mountains, derived from the archipelago’s Hindu-Buddhist heritage, and refected in the work of Indonesian artists throughout the postcolonial period.53 Conclusions Thematically, the landscape paintings selected for reproduction in the volumes sampling Su-

karno’s art collection reveal the gradual nature of decolonisation in Indonesia following the end of Dutch rule in the 1940s. They represent the more general trend of continuities in personnel—European artists who remained infuential even after the colonial establishment that once supported them had collapsed—as well as in themes and interests shared between Indonesian artists whose careers fourished between the 1940s and the mid-1960s and their colonial predecessors. Thus, despite the political commitment of many frst-generation Indonesian artists to more “socially engaged” themes in their work, in landscape, the Mooi Indië scene endured. The impact of war, revolution and urbanisation on the countryside were nowhere to be seen in Sukarno’s collection. In his view, the hard work of reconstruction and nation-building in independent Indonesia was evidently for the political arena and not for the canvas. Sukarno’s art collecting refects an ecclecticism on his part in everything except aesthetics: the politics and background of the artist were ultimately less important than whether the style and subject matter pleased the president. A change visible in the President’s paintings is the reclamation of the coast by Indonesian artists from colonial ways of seeing this landscape. The sea and shore were depicted in the 1950s and 1960s from indigenous perspectives as sites of introspection and, indeed, religious signifcance. Important also was Sukarno’s interest in foreign artists and their work, particularly those from China and Japan. Paintings that focused on the landscapes and artistic traditions of East Asia reveal the emergence of Indonesia as a nation seeking to negotiate a world order in fux after World War II, after decolonisation, and entering the Cold War era. In this context, regional neighbours with whom Indonesia had complex historical and political relations would play a far more important role than the nation’s distant former coloniser, the Netherlands.

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Ernest Dezentjé Rice Fields 1956 Oil on canvas 110 x 176 cm Collection of Dr Sukarno, President of the Republic of Indonesia As published in Sukarno & Lee Man Fong, Lukisan-Lukisan dan PatungPatung, Kolleksi Presiden Sukarno dari Republik Indonesia [Paintings and statues from the Collection of President Sukarno of the Republic of Indonesia], vol. II (Indonesia: Publishing Committee of Collection of Paintings and Statues of President Sukarno, 1964), plate 15. Basoeki Abdullah Landscape Date unknown Oil on canvas 170 x 255 cm Collection of Dr Sukarno, President of the Republic of Indonesia As published in Sukarno & Lee, ibid., vol. I, plate 18. Dullah Rice Fields Near Mt Lawu Date unknown Oil on canvas 92 x 148 cm Collection of Dr Sukarno, President of the Republic of Indonesia As published in Sukarno & Lee, ibid., vol. II, plate 22.

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Basoeki Abdullah A Peaceful Sea Date unknown Oil on canvas 80 x 120 cm Collection of Dr Sukarno, President of the Republic of Indonesia As published in Sukarno & Lee, ibid., vol. IV, plate 47.

12.5 Henk Ngantung On the Shores of Tanah-Lot (Bali) 1952 Oil on canvas 84.5 x 144 cm Collection of Dr Sukarno, President of the Republic of Indonesia As published in Sukarno & Dullah, Lukisan-Lukisan Koleksi Ir. Dr. Sukarno Presiden Republik Indonesia [Paintings from the Collection of Dr Sukarno President of the Republic of Indonesia], vol. II (Peking: People’s Fine Arts Publishing House, 1956), plate 58 and Sukarno & Lee, op. cit., vol. IV, plate 14.

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Chen Shaomei Landscape Date unknown Chinese ink and colour on paper 177 x 98 cm Collection of Dr Sukarno, President of the Republic of Indonesia As published in Sukarno & Lee, ibid., vol. II, plate 86. Yokoyama Taikan Mount Fuji Date unknown Watercolour on silk 67.5 x 90 cm Collection of Dr Sukarno, President of the Republic of Indonesia As published in Sukarno & Dullah, op. cit., vol. I, plate 30 and Sukarno & Lee, op. cit., vol. I, plate 86.

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Oesman Effendi, “Surat I, Perkembangan Seni Lukis Indonesia Baru: Surat-Menyurat antara 2 Orang Pelukis” [Letter I, New developments in Indonesian painting: A conversation between two painters], Zenith, 15 February 1951, 81. Author’s translation. Jim Supangkat, “The Two Forms of Indonesian Art,” in Modern Indonesian Art: Three Generations of Traditions and Change 1945–1990, ed. Joseph Fischer, exh. cat. (Jakarta: Panitia Pameran KIAS; New York: Festival of Indonesia, 1990), 220. For further reading, see Trisno Sumardjo, “Kemerdekaan dan Kesenian” [Independence and the arts], Indonesia XI, no. 4, 155–8.

4

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Helena Spanjaard, Moderne Indonesische schilderkunst [Modern Indonesian painting] (Abcoude: Uniepers, 2003), 81. Trisno Sumardjo, “Bapak Seni Lukis Indonesia Baru” [The father of Indonesian modern painting], Mimbar Indonesia, no. 41 (8 October 1949). Author’s translation. M. Balfas, “Seni Lukis Indonesia Baru” [New Indonesian painting], Indonesia no. 4 (April 1951): 2–6. Author’s translation. S. Sudjojono, Seni Loekis, Kesenian dan Seniman [Painting, the arts and the artist] (Yogyakarta: Indonesia Sekarang, 1946), 8. Author’s translation.

(13)

Confict and Denial: The Discourse of Identity in Indonesian Art, 1950s–1980s Aminudin TH Siregar

The differences between East and West are only relative, to the point [that] it becomes nonsense.1 Oesman Effendi, 1951 The long-standing problems that gave birth to unique developments in Indonesian modern art arose from the cultural debate of confrontation between the West and the East. This debate is not unique to Indonesia, being prevalent in many developing countries, and various studies conducted by Western researchers or developing countries themselves show that these kinds of debates stem from sociopolitical conficts. The search for Eastern values within these debates is not based on Orientalism; typically, it is a reaction based on anger over the displacement of ethnic cultural identities by Western culture during colonial times.2 If the 174

“West” here traditionally refers to Western culture, the “East” relates to locality and is commonly understood as standing for the values of ancestral heritage. The theme of confict and denial in this essay is discussed as it pertains to modern art—its meaning and its relation to the Indonesian contemporary cultural scene at large. But modern art did not just happen. It arose as a result of deepening nationalist values in the revolutionary era after the 1945 Proclamation of Indonesian Independence and can be traced back to ideas frst introduced in the 1930s. The intellectuals and artists were aware that something radical was happening around them, but it was not always easy to identify. They were aware too that tremendous change had come over the arts at that time. Why? What were

Charting Thoughts

the true forces behind the change? What does “modern art” really mean? Indeed, there is an opportunity to enrich the hypothesis in the previous paragraph by observing shifts in East‒ West discourse within the history of Indonesian art, and the confict and denial between actors in the era of postcolonial awareness. The search for Eastern values in fact started with an awareness of the Eastern exoticism used by European painters in their works. It is too simplistic to conclude this issue was purely caused by the anger of the locals or angst over displacement; we must consider the option that it was also buoyed by painters looking at Indonesia through new perspectives. Examining the history of Indonesian art, it is clear that the greatest conficts actually happened between Indonesian artists, rather than between Indonesian artists and the Dutch. Not everything can be explained by antagonism towards the West. After proclaiming its independence on 17 August 1945, Indonesia entered into a postcolonial situation of social, political and cultural ambiguity. The tense, confrontational situation between 1945 and 1949 forced Indonesia into battling the Dutch using both weapons and diplomacy, until the latter eventually acknowledged the sovereignty of the new nation on 27 December 1949. After the transfer of independence, intellectuals and artists began questioning how Indonesia should defne for itself an identity with national characteristics—an issue that had bearing on the direction of its art and culture. Nevertheless, they soon realised that security, stability, and economic and political recovery were the main issues that had to be addressed by the Sukarno administration.3 Fiery debates began in the run-up to 1950, in cultural congresses and seminars. Concepts of art and culture were disseminated through articles in magazines and newspapers. Outside of offcial channels used to promote the new national culture, the intellectuals and artists gathered in studios, their favourite places to trade ideas. It was in these studios that they

discussed culture and art, and the role of art in creating a new identity for Indonesia.4 This paper will elaborate on these debates. The Early Phases of Heading East The pages of Indonesian modern art history begin with S. Sudjojono (1913–1986). As a thinker and ideologist, he is not a mere painter. In 1949, critic Trisno Sumardjo said this of Sudjojono: “In Indonesia’s lethargy and quietness of spirit and soul during the occupation era, Sudjojono’s voice was like a nafri [a traditional trumpet-type musical instrument] emanating a new sound, bringing up those who were cowering, to stand up and use their soul’s ear.”5 Before the arrival of the Japanese, Sudjojono was the only painter who had actively pushed for painting to enter the debate of national culture. He placed a sign on his studio’s door that stated: “In Search of the Uniting Characteristic of Indonesia.”6 The search for the characteristics of Indonesian painting began with the founding of the Association of Indonesian Drawing Masters (Persatuan Ahli-Ahli Gambar Indonesia, PERSAGI) in 1938 by a few painters in Jakarta. However, quite a few people criticised PERSAGI painters as being discernably Western. PERSAGI painters naturally denied the charge, although the accusation was not unfounded. While the group was nationalistic, its key fgure Sudjojono, openly admired European painters such as Vincent van Gogh and Marc Chagall. Sudjojono also derided traditional art, describing it as art that was antiquated and “smell[ed] of oncom [traditional West Javanese food] and incense,” and was unsuitable for the spirit of the times.7 In Seni Loekis, Kesenian dan Seniman, he showed his avant-garde attitude along with his strong nationalistic empathy. Among other things, he highlighted the importance of fve things: leaving behind the dogma of tourism; not searching for beauty in the past (for instance, art from the Majapahit or Ma-

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8 9

Ibid., 7–9. There are many variations regarding the founding date of POETERA. Some say it was in 1943, while others specify 1 March 1943. See Djawa Baroe, no. 5, 1 March 1943. Yet in Djawa Baroe, no. 1, 1 January 1943, it states that POETERA was founded on 8 December 1942, coinciding with the frst anniversary of the Greater East Asia War and POETERA’s frst exhibition. 10 Imam Boechori Zainuddin, Latar Belakang Sejarah Pembinaan dan Perkembangan Seni Lukis Indonesia

taram eras); not listening or becoming a slave to one of the moralisserende-mensen (moralisers or moralising people) groups or parties; being wholly independent, releasing oneself from the binds of morals or traditions; and treating daily realities as the arena wherein to search for the “Indonesian national identity.”8 Before World War II, PERSAGI, through Sudjojono, contributed many important thoughts about how best to handle the lack of practice and discourse in painting since Raden Saleh’s work in the 19th century. Sudjojono tended to foreground nationalism in painting while denying that modern painting was a continuation of the traditional arts, even distancing it from Raden Saleh’s achievements. The understanding of new Indonesian painting was instead offered via paintings that emphasised the recording of daily life. In less than fve years, however, PERSAGI disbanded when the 16th Division of the Imperial Japanese Army landed on and occupied Java. In the early months of the Japanese Occupation, popular independence fgures like Sukarno, Mohammad Hatta, K.H. Dewantara and Kyai Mas Mansoer founded the Centre of People’s Power (Poesat Tenaga Rakjat, POETERA).9 POETERA worked hand-in-hand with the Japanese, building up the people’s support to win the Greater East Asia War (Dai Toa Senso). Sudjojono and Affandi led the cultural 176

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Modern (1935–1950) [A historical background of the development of modern Indonesian painting] (master’s thesis, ITB, 1966), 36. Ibid., 48. Boejoeng Saleh, “Perkembangan Kesusasteraan Indonesia” [The development of Indonesian painting], in Almanak Seni 1957 [Art almanac 1957], ed. Zaini (Jakarta: BMKN, 1956), 30. Aiko Kurasawa, Mobilisasi dan Kontrol: Studi Perubahan Sosial di Pedesaan Jawa 1942–1945 [Mobilisation and control: A study of social change in rural

section of POETERA, and the Japanese used POETERA to popularise the concept of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (Dai Toa Kyoeiken). One of POETERA’s exhibitions, titled Winning the Greater East Asia War and held at the Rakoetentji night market on 8 December 1942, was evidence of Japanese interests.10 The exhibition accelerated the emergence of new painters, and the Japanese played a role in introducing these painters to the public through 23 exhibitions held from 1943 to 1945.11 The Japanese encouraged Indonesian painters to develop their art from Eastern values and reject the West. To that end, myths about the stateliness and superiority of the East were spread, along with tales of the lowliness and decadence of the West.12 The Japanese maintained that the various East Asian nations had to be convinced they were really one: one cultural character—Eastern culture—under threat from the West. Keimin Bunka Shidosho (KBS) was founded by the Japanese government on 1 April 1943 in Jakarta, and had divisions in Bandung, Malang, Semarang and Surabaya. KBS was known as a cultural centre, its name literally translated as: keimin, enlightment for all; bunka, culture; and shidosho, place or centre for briefng. Congruent with these defnitions, KBS was founded to enlighten and educate the public about art and culture. One of the offcial

Aminudin TH Siregar

Java 1942–1945] (Jakarta: Grasindo, 1993), 61. Claire Holt, Art in Indonesia: Continuities and Change (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 198–9. 15 Sanusi Pane, “Seni Indonesia Siap Berkembang” [The art of Indonesia ready to evolve], Soeara Asia, 22 May 1943. Author’s translation. 16 Ibid. 17 In D. Suradji’s version of the translation, Hopman’s article was titled “Hari Kemudian Seni Bentuk di Indonesia” [The future of Indonesian art]. See D. Suradji, Bertebaran: Rangkuman Tulisan Menyinari Seni

Drama, Film, Lukis dan Sketsa Ibukota R.I.S [Scattered: A compilation of texts of theatre, flm, painting and sketches of the Capital of the Union of Republik Indonesia] (Jakarta: Haruman Hidup, 1961), 147–8. Under the same title and indeed using the translation from D. Suradji, the article was also printed along with S. Sudjojono’s book, Kami Tahu Kemana Seni Lukis Indonesia Akan Kami Bawa [We know where we are going with Indonesian art] (Yogyakarta: Penerbit Indonesia Sekarang, 1948).

reasons behind its founding was that for over 300 years, the Dutch colonial government had failed to progress Indonesian art and culture, just as it had failed to provide opportunities for Indonesians. The long-term goal of KBS was thus aligned to the larger development goals of Greater East Asia.13 Unlike KBS, painters from POETERA avoided propagandistic subjects and themes in their work like planting cotton, romusha (forced labour), the spirit of warriors or saving money, which were diligently campaigned by the Japanese. Interestingly, a few Japanese artists within KBS safeguarded the purity of art so that it could not be subordinated to propagandistic ideology. Japanese artists also spread the techniques and styles of Western painting to Indonesian painters, leading many historians to suspect that Indonesian painting during the Japanese Occupation actually became more Western.14 The Japanese consciously attempted to achieve a balance between artistic content, entertainment and slogans. However, in practice, the lines between propagandistic art and art for art’s sake became blurred. The Japanese government placed pressure on Indonesian painters to fnd Eastern characteristics of painting via exhibitions and painting competitions. When KBS held a 1943 exhibition titled Kehidupan Djawa Baroe (The New Life in Java), the organisation awarded

female painter Emiria Sunassa a prize. Paintings from Sudjojono, Soekirno and Agus Djaya were also received with much fanfare. Sanusi Pane, a KBS administrator, praised these artists, opining that “their steps seem to have stepped further towards the realm of Indonesia and the East.”15 Sunassa appropriated the essence of primitive sculptures from Indonesia, which could be said to give a “prehistoric feel” to her work; Sudjojono was said to be “attempting to achieve Indonesian norms”; Soekirno appropriated the basics of wayang (shadow puppet theatre) and used primitive colours and the atmosphere of giant temples from wayang stories; and Agus Djaja, who appropriated the substances and styles of sculptures and reliefs of temples, was said to “elevate Eastern values.”16 Artists felt they had discovered Eastern or Indonesian values but this sense did not last beyond the end of the Pacifc War, when the Japanese left Indonesia.

14

Denials In a magazine published in 1947, Dutch critic J. Hopman denied the existence of truly Indonesian painting and even predicted that it would cease to exist in a few years. Hopman admitted that the content of Indonesian paintings was Eastern, but felt the methods merely aped those of Western modern art.17 Sudjojono was

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21

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Sudjojono, ibid., 3. Ibid., 14–5. See Soemarno Soetosoendoro, “Seni Lukis Kita dalam Mencari Jalan” [Our painting fnds its way], Indonesia no. 10 (November 1949). See the rebuttal in Trisno Sumardjo, “Seni Lukis Kita Bukan Tiruan: Tanggapan atas Soemarno Soetoesoendoro,” Indonesia II, no. 4 (April 1950). Suromo, “Tentang Seni Lukis” [About art], Indonesia II, no. 2 (February 1950).

angered by Hopman’s denial. In the magazine Revolusioner, he retaliated by demanding that the Dutch leave issues of Indonesian painting alone, asserting: “We know where we want to bring Indonesian painting.”18 Moreover, after hundreds of years of occupation it was clear the Dutch had been ineffectual in managing and progressing Indonesian painting.19 Two years later, academic Soemarno Soetosoendoro stood with Hopman.20 His cynical article about Indonesian painting received a harsh rebuttal from Sumardjo in an article titled “Seni Lukis Bukan Tiruan” (Our paintings are not imitations).21 At the same time, a painter from the PERSAGI era, Suromo, also maintained that Indonesian painting did not copy Western painting. Suromo was careful to note this did not therefore mean that Western art had no infuence on Indonesian painters, and also brought up the inherent normality of “infuence” in culture.22 Painter and photographer Baharudin Marasutan also admitted that Indonesian painters were initially heavily infuenced by the achievements of Western painting, although the process of infuencing did not result in mindless imitation. Indonesian painters certainly studied the techniques and essence of Western painting diligently. However, he believed that Indonesian painters with Indonesian souls, who live among their people and breathe the air of their land, would be able to 178

23 Baharudin Marasutan, “Seni Rupa Indonesia Seka-

24

rang” [Indonesian art now], Daya, no. 1 (1 February 1949), cited in Ugeng T. Moetidjo & Hafz, Seni Lukis Indonesia Tidak Ada [There is no Indonesian painting], ed. Ugeng T. Moetidjo (Jakarta: Dewan Kesenian Jakarta, 2007), 72. Trisno Sumardjo, “Realisme Sudjojono” [Sudjojono’s realism], Mimbar Indonesia no. 20 (May 1950). Sudjojono wrote a rebuttal in the same journal over two editions, nos. 33–4 (August 1950).

create paintings that coincide with the personality, spirit and aspirations of the nation—an “Indonesian-ness” both specifc and unique.23 Also in 1949, after his rebuttal of Hopman, Sudjojono urged painters to follow a return to realism. Sumardjo once again fercely rejected it, as he felt it narrowed the meaning of realism and ignored the potential of creativity and freedom of the artist.24 Sumardjo, a rightwing artist, held this opinion: “Sudjojono’s realism does not recognise the value of spirituality, it is left with the surface of the senses. Realism should occur through the spirit as we would have it, through each true artist.”25 In fact, in the eyes of Sudjojono communist realism in painting expressed the will of the times. Other than being an advocate for paintings that could be understood by the masses, he also asked modern Indonesian painters not to use abstract styles. Abstraction in art, he felt, was “the art of the bourgeois,” and just as the people needed rice, the people needed realism. Sudjojono realised that the occupation and the war had worsened Indonesian society. His belief that one of the main functions of art is to serve the people forced him into action, with the recognition that it was no longer possible to merely stand as a spectator of society. In PERSAGI, he remarked that art must improve society. Therefore, art must actively and concretely change society into something bet-

Aminudin TH Siregar

25 Trisno Sumardjo, “Kedudukan Seni Rupa Kita” [The position of our art], in Almanak Seni 1957 (s.l.: s.n., n.p.), 137. Author’s translation. 26 Aminudin TH Siregar, Sang Ahli Gambar: Sketsa, Gambar dan Pemikiran S. Sudjojono [The drawing specialist: Sketches, drawings and thoughts of Sudjojojono] (Jakarta: Sudjojono Center & Galeri Canna, 2010), 98. 27 Statement publicised in Brochure Kesenian in 1949 in an interview between Dr Huyung and S. Sudjojono.

ter than it was, lending its power to mobilise the people towards concrete social goals.26 He declared: “Realism, for me, is more real. If Yogya is taken, I would want to take back the real Yogya. If I haven’t eaten, I must eat rice. Real rice. When I fght for independence, I want real independence. Not symbolic. Not fulflling, but real.”27 Abstraction versus Socialist Realism Aside from studios, university campuses were also dragged into the East‒West debate. Founded in 1947, the art academy at Institute of Technology Bandung (Institut Teknologi Bandung, ITB), under the tutelage of Dutch painter Ries Mulder, was a Western institution. The resulting artworks were not based on experiences of Indonesia, but were oriented towards the sensibilities and events of the West.28 Meanwhile, the works of painters at the Indonesian Academy of Fine Arts (Akademi Seni Rupa Indonesia, ASRI, founded in 1950 in Yogyakarta) embraced themes of the people, at the time imagined as “Indonesia.” These opposing trends brought forth tension between what is known in Indonesian art history as the Bandung school of thought, typically represented by ITB, versus the Yogyakarta school of thought, led by ASRI. Historian Helena Spanjaard notes that in this debate, it must be observed that

28

29 30

See Dr Huyung, Brochure Kesenian [Brochure on the arts] (Jakarta: Kementerian Penerangan Republik Indonesia, 1949), 18–9. Author’s translation. Trisno Sumardjo, “Bandung Mengabdi Laboratorium Barat” [Bandung is a servant of the laboratory of the West], Siasat, 5 December 1954, 26. Helena Spanjaard, “Bandung, the Laboratory of the West?” in Fischer, op. cit., 207. A.D. Pirous, interview with the author, March 2012.

both the Bandung (abstraction and Cubism) and Yogyakarta (realism and expressionism) schools followed Western painting practices. The differences lay merely in the basic themes of their paintings.29 As with Piet Mondrian who heavily infuenced the development of abstract art since his arrival in New York in the 1940s, Mulder is thought to have done the same in Bandung. Before arriving in Indonesia, he lived in Paris, studying European modern art and its history, philosophy and theories. During his stay, Paris was still the centre of the modern art world, where Cubism and Futurism were developed. In 1910, Jacques Villon started to experiment in Analytical Cubism, which was then absorbed by Mulder and taught to his students in Bandung. This fact showcases the development of European modern painting outside America (and particularly New York); as an “agent,” Mulder brought the knowledge of European modern art across the Asia Pacifc for study in Bandung. Reactions to the new developments in painting in Bandung did not only come from the studio painters of Sudjojono’s generation. Left-leaning painters also vocalised vehement criticism.30 These reactions were quite understandable as the style of paintings coming from ITB deviated from mainstream painting at the time, which was based on the realism of

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31 Jennifer Lindsay, “Ahli Waris Budaya Dunia 1950–

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Taufk Ismail (Bandung: Penerbit Mizan, 1995), 439. Aidit, op. cit., 64. Author’s translation. For further reading, see Moejanto & Taufk, op. cit. See further details in Brita L. Miklouho-Maklai, Menguak Luka Masyarakat Beberapa Aspek Seni Rupa Kontemporer Indonesia Sejak 1966 [Exposing society’s wounds: Aspects of contemporary Indonesian art since 1966] (Jakarta: Gramedia Pustaka Utama, 1997), 25. 38 Sudarmadji, Dari Saleh Sampai Aming, Seni Lukis Indonesia Baru dalam Sejarah dan Apresiasi [From Saleh to Aming, an appreciation of new Indonesian painting and its history] (Yogyakarta: Sekolah Tinggi Seni Rupa Indonesia “ASRI” Yogyakarta, 1974), 75. Author’s translation. 39 Miklouho-Maklai, op. cit., 28. 40 See Kenneth M. George, Melukis Islam: Amal dan Etika Seni Islam di Indonesia [Picturing Islam: Art and ethics in a Muslim lifeworld] (Bandung: Mizan, 2012), 21.

1965: Sebuah Pengantar” [Heirs to world culture 1950–1965: An introduction], in Ahli Waris Budaya Dunia; Menjadi Indonesia, 1950–1965 [Heirs to World Culture; Becoming Indonesia, 1950–1965], eds. Jennifer Lindsay & Maya H.T. Liem (Denpasar: Pustaka Larasan; Jakarta: KITLV-Jakarta, 2011), 12. Author’s translation. 32 Keith Foulcher, Social Commitment in Literature and the Arts: The Indonesian ‘Institute of People’s Culture’ 1950–1965 (Clayton: Monash University Center of Southeast Asian Studies, 1986), 212. 33 D.N. Aidit, Tentang Sastra dan Seni [On literature and art] (Jakarta: Yayasan Pembaruan, 1964), 52–3. 34 Sunaryo, interview with the author, January 2006. See the supporting archives of Bandung artists for the Manifes Kebudayaan in D.S. Moejanto & Taufk Ismail, Prahara Budaya: Kilas Balik Ofensif Lekra/ PKI dkk. [The cultural hurricane: Looking back at the offensive of LEKRA/PKI DKK], eds. D.S. Moejanto &

35 36 37

PERSAGI, Young Artists Indonesia (Seniman Indonesia Muda, SIM) or the Institute of People’s Culture (Lembaga Kebudayaan Rakyat, LEKRA), and revolved around populist concepts. Many harboured suspicions that ITB was a product of neocolonialism, subservient to the West and flled with middle-class bourgeois practices. Those outside ITB could not differentiate between paintings by different ITB artists. Mulder himself had been accused as a spy many times. Entering the 1950s, sociopolitical confrontations related to the cultural identity of Indonesia started to heat up. Previously in Jakarta in 1946, Asrul Sani, Chairil Anwar, Mochtar Apin, M. Akbar Djuhana, M. Balfas, Rivai Apin, Baharuddin Marasutan and Henk Ngantung gathered to form the cultural group, the League of Independent Artists (Gelanggang Seniman Merdeka). The group’s aims were only released in February 1950, impressively stating: “We are the true inheritors of the world’s culture, and we shall continue this culture in our

own way.” The statement not only encouraged Indonesia’s cultural involvement on the world’s stage, but also acknowledged that the Indonesian national culture project is internationalist. Within this framework, Indonesian culture is seen as formed via a continuous interaction with the world, a heritage continued “in our [Indonesia’s] own way.”31 Several months later, LEKRA was founded in Jakarta on 17 August 1950. At the beginning, LEKRA avoided hostility with foreign cultures: “The essence of progressive foreign cultures will be acquired for the progress of the culture of the Indonesian people.”32 In the ensuing years, artists from LEKRA, often believed to be affliated with the Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia, PKI), reformulated realism into a 1–5–1 guide, to create integration between the artist and the people. The 1–5–1 guide consisted of: a principle of treating “politics as commander”; 5 guides to creation, which were breadth and height, high-quality ideology and aesthetics, combin-

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ing tradition with cutting-edge contemporary notions, combining the creativity of the individual with the wisdom of the masses, and combining revolutionary realism with revolutionary romanticism; and a method of work, which was to practise tiga kesamaan (the three similarities method): working, eating and living in the same manner as poorer farmers and labourers.33 Entering the 1960s, the confrontation became messier after a number of intellectuals, painters and poets declared the Manifes Kebudayaan (Cultural Manifesto) in 1963. 38 people from art and journalism circles signed the manifesto, including ITB lecturers Kaboel Suadi, A.D. Pirous, Sanento Yuliman, Gandjar Sakri, Imam Boechori, Aceng Arif and Sunaryo, among others.34 The manifesto followed universal humanist values, was viewed as oppositional to LEKRA’s beliefs, and was a source of confict between the two groups. In 1964, when the Bandung school announced their support for the Manifes Kebudayaan, accusations of being Western lackeys arose. The rejection and criticism regarding abstract and Cubist styles intensifed. This issue was no longer a problem between academies in Bandung and Yogyakarta, but a problem on the national political stage. In the 1964 National Conference of Art and Literature, D.N. Aidit, head of PKI, cursed: “Abstractionism in the felds of literature and art are forms of aggression of imperialistic culture, conducted through agencies such as USIS, The American Center for Culture, Field Service, Peace Corps and so on.”35 The situation came to a head in May 1964 when President Sukarno banned the Manifes Kebudayaan, accusing it of neocolonialism and rampant Westernism. The ban received wide support, particularly from LEKRA artists. Afterwards, the debate about the character of Indonesian art and culture waned. Quite a few groups asserted that during this period, the communists and left-leaning artists were pre-

paring to emerge as winners.36 Then, on 30 September 1965, a bloody coup involving the Army, PKI and President Sukarno occurred. Indonesian Painting Does Not Exist Events in the art world after the 1965 coup, which killed thousands of people accused of communism, were marked by the victory of universal humanism, a celebration of individual expression and the desire to develop wider international relations in art, which were previously silenced by the Sukarno administration.37 Critic Sudarmadji welcomed the new era, naming it “an era of freedom in creating art.”38 The face of art post-1965 showed a strong tendency to explore new things, mixing traditional art aesthetics with the language of modern painting. We can see this tendency in the works of senior painters such as Sudjojono, Affandi, Agus Djaya, Otto Djaya, G.A. Sukirno, Surono, Mochtar Apin, Soedibio, Sudarso, Hariadi S., Dullah, Barli, Popo Iskandar, Oesman Effendi, Zaini, Baharudin Marasutan, Nashar, Rusli, Kusnadi, and a number of others.39 Meanwhile, it is important to remember the adversity and brutal violence experienced by left-leaning artists and writers after the 1965 coup.40 Painter Hendra Gunawan was jailed for 12 years at Bandung’s Kebon Waru prison, while a darker fate met Trubus Sudarsono, who remains missing to this day. Basuki Resobowo painted in exile in the Netherlands, where he died. The elimination of left-leaning artists from the arena did not, however, quash the East‒West debate. In 1969, the debate resurfaced, still revolving around the character of Indonesian painting, and captured the attention of artists and critics. It continued to do so up to the 1990s. The debate began with a lecture by Oesman Effendi (1919–1985) on 27 August 1969 at the Art Discussion Night held at the Indonesian-American Friendship Institute (Lembaga Pendidikan Indonesia-Amerika, LPIA). In

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contrast to his position in the 1950s, Effendi stated that Indonesian painting did not yet exist as there was no “Indonesian stamp” or identity consisting of national characteristics that defned Indonesian art and culture. Painting in Indonesia was merely an imitation of Western painting—the result of following a teacher— and painters were just serving the market. This provocative statement quickly induced reactions. Critic Dan Suwaryono demanded that Effendi prove the existence of Indonesian art or lack thereof via scientifc methods.41 Cultural fgure Umar Kayam also responded to the issue, refuting Effendi’s declaration and asserting that “Indonesian art does exist, as it exists today—paintings with all its scribbles.”42 Kayam also highlighted the importance of realising that Indonesian art was a new culture still undergoing development, and stood apart from traditional culture. Conversely, writer D.S. Moeljanto appreciated the courage and honesty of Effendi: Therefore it is correct as Oesman Effendi has stated, that when we had achieved our independence in 1946, when Young Artists Indonesia (SIM) was founded, we had travelled [along] the correct path, but afterwards until today, our compass for painting [has been] pointing in the wrong direction.43 Moeljanto also reminded readers that this was not a new debate: Problems as stated by painter Oesman Effendi [are] actually not […] new issue[s] in the history of discussing Indonesian painting. The issue of development in Indonesian painting has long been discussed by our art critics, even becoming topics in seminars, discussions or debates. […] “[T]he existence or not of Indonesian painting” once was a hot topic in a 1956 seminar in Yogyakarta. At the time, paint182

ing fgures such as S. Sudjojono, Hendra Gunawan, Affandi, Trisno Sumardjo, Sudjoko, Amrus Natalsja, and Widayat faced each other and defended their opinions and standing about “the history of Indonesian art.”44 Painter Rusli expressed surprise that Effendi was still making an issue of the “Indonesian stamp” in art. He believed one was an Indonesian painter if they had an Indonesian passport, and stated: “Art must be free. Art should not be held back by ties of tradition, nationalism and so on. Because the existence of such ties will only paralyse the artist to the point [that] he cannot create.”45 Effendi did not stop there. His belief in the absence of Indonesian style in painting was restated in his lecture at the November 1969 Jakarta Art Festival II at Taman Ismail Marzuki, two months after his lecture at LPIA which frst triggered the debate. By considering terms like “painting,” “painting in Indonesia,” “Indonesia,” “painters or artists,” “infuence” and “modern painting,” Effendi tracked the development of painting from the pre-Japanese, Japanese and post-independence eras. After this, he claimed, Indonesian painting began to lose direction: “Indonesian painting has lost its way. While all this time—regardless of its values—it is based on the impulses of the heart, and the movement of the spirit, lately, many external factors have also defned its direction.”46 Effendi did not specify precisely which external factors could divert the direction of Indonesian painting. However, we can guess that they are closely related to actors in the Indonesian art scene such as collectors, critics and galleries. Effendi touched on this issue of external intervention: he called it “judgement from foreigners,” and saw them as meddling in the development of painting by providing help to Indonesia. In Effendi’s view, these “foreigners” assumed: “Since this is a new nation, it must be brought forward. Prove it. Support.

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41 Dan Suwaryono, “Quo Vadis Oesman Effendi?” [Where are you going Oesman Effendi?], Kompas, 6 October 1969. 42 Umar Kayam, Kompas, 1 September 1969. Author’s translation. 43 D.S. Moeljanto, Suara Merdeka, 23 September 1969. Author’s translation. 44 Ibid. 45 Rusli, Sinar Harapan, 1 October 1969. Author’s translation. 46 Oesman Effendi’s lecture “Seni Lukis di Indonesia Dulu dan Sekarang” [Painting in Indonesia, past and present] was presented at Diskusi Seni Rupa Pesta Seni Jakarta II, 7 and 8 November 1969 at the Exhibition Room of di PKJ-TIM, Jakarta Art Council. Excerpt taken from Moetidjo & Hafz, op. cit., 11. Author’s translation. 47 Effendi in Moetidjo & Hafz, ibid., 19. 48 Ibid.

Buy. Invite. Giving sweet criticism, you must know, is an incomprehensible manifestation that a nation that did not know anything yesterday, could magically create something that looks exactly like ours.”47 Effendi believed the “Indonesian stamp” of identity would be attained on its own if the artist diligently and humbly created, following the calling of his spirit. Effendi also believed that the landscape and environment of the artist’s surroundings would infuence his artistic style, although this process would take time. Eventually, artists would discover their artistic identity and at a certain level of maturity, Indonesian painting would surface. He summed up his position thus: “Therefore, I believe, Indonesian painting is still growing, but does not exist yet, as it is in the process of discovering its unique form.”48 Critic Sudarmadji voiced his support of Effendi’s position, asserting that “painting as we know it today, painting upon canvas and enjoyed without any relation with religious, mystical ceremonies, is an sich [per se] a Western infuence.”49

49

Sudarmadji, “Indonesian Modern Art,” in Sinar Harapan, 12 October 1974, unpaginated. Author’s translation. 50 S. Sudjojono, “Seni Lukis Indonesia Telah Ada Sejak Abad-7” [Indonesian painting existing since the 7th century], Kompas, 29 August 1979. Sudjojono had also stated his disagreement in response to Effendi’s statement two years prior, also in Kompas. According to him, acknowledgement of the existence of Indonesian art had already come from France in 1947. See S. Sudjojono, “Seni Lukis Batik Kontemporer Juga Termasuk Seni Lukis” [Contemporary batik painting is also considered art], Kompas, 13 August 1977. In it, he stated: “We should not make a problem of identity. We will discover it as we go.” Both quotations translated by the author. 51 S. Sudjojono, “Jangan Ributkan Soal Orisinalitas!” [Do not argue about the problem of originality!], Kompas, 4 November 1977. Author’s translation.

Sudjojono, however, naturally disputed Effendi: That is nonsense! If there are Indonesian painters, and they have works, have the vocabulary and these Indonesian painters are of a good social standing, then the life of Indonesian painting does exist. And if the life of Indonesian painting exists, how could one say Indonesian painting does not?50 Sudjojono, who rebutted Hopman in 1947, strongly believed that painting in Indonesia had existed since the 7th century and developed clearly until the 14th century. From that point onwards, however, Indonesian painting had its ups and downs. Sudjojono ventured that to prove its existence, “One did not need to search as far as the rural areas to locate Indonesian painting.”51 Mara Karma, a painter, attempted to fnd the middle ground. He thought that Effendi’s statement was not a manifesto, not even a statement meant to act as a new premise of the dis-

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52 Mara Karma, “Oesman Effendi dan ‘Tjap’-nja” [Oes-

56 S. Sudjojono, “Seni Rupa yang Menjawab Tantan-

man Effendi and his “stamp”], Harian Kami, October 1969. Author’s translation. Sides Sudyarto D.S., “Seni Lukis Indonesia Merindukan Pengadilan” [Indonesian painting demands for a trial], Kompas, 31 December 1974. Author’s translation. Oesman Effendi, “Orang Sederhana dari Pedalaman” [Ordinary people from the hinterland], Tempo, 16 April 1977. Excerpt taken from Moetidjo & Hafz, op. cit., 7. Soedarso S.P., “Isu Tentang Keindonesiaan Bangkit Lagi” [The issue of Indonesian-ness rises again]. Taken from clippings of Laporan Bentara Budaya, March 1985 (no other publication details are available). Author’s translation.

gan Masa Kini” [Art that challenges the present], a lecture presented at the symposium Indonesian Art Today, 10–28 June 1985. Author’s translation. 57 Sanento Yuliman, “Mencari Indonesia dalam Seni Lukis Indonesia” [Looking for Indonesia in Indonesian Art], Budaya Djaya, November 1969 as republished in Dua Seni Rupa: Sepilihan Tulisan Sanento Yuliman [Two Arts: The compilation of Sanento Yuliman’s papers], ed. Asikin Hasan (Jakarta: Yayasan Kalam, 2001), 65–6. Author’s translation. 58 Based on Jim Supangkat & Sanento Yuliman, G. Sidharta di Tengah Seni Rupa Indonesia [G. Sidharta in the midst of Indonesian art] (Jakarta: Gramedia, 1982), 29–32. Author’s translation.

course surrounding Indonesian painting. He also believed the statement was not the introduction of a new school of thought:

sions: “What defnes Indonesian painting?” And the answers, of course, are not all in agreement with the painter, humble as he is, but has received a lot of bad sentiment by saying “Indonesian painting does not exist.” It seems that any answer is not suffcient. In reality, the opinion that questions the existence of Indonesian painting has flled every pore of consciousness of the observers and enthusiasts of our painting.53

53

54

55

What came out of his mouth that night at LPIA last September was merely a slip of the tongue. Oesman Effendi quietly admitted this to people or friends whom he thought he could talk with discreetly. Apparently, Effendi himself did not realise what he said at that time. Despite having a concept beforehand, when the time to speak came, he forgot about it. What came later—says the storyteller—were “voices” that came from within him. That is how this controversial statement came about.52

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Over seven years later, Effendi himself continued to comment on the matter:

The charge about the lack of an “Indonesian stamp” in painting, as levelled by Hopman in 1947 and Effendi in 1969, became a latent problem, prone to surfacing at any time. In the mid-1970s, poet Sides Sudyarto D.S. began his report:

In previous years I said that there is no “Indonesian stamp,” as I saw the tendencies in painting based on thoughts that originate from outside us. Man is the child of his environment. Picasso, for instance, said to be accepted all over the world, could not release himself from Spanish lands. For me, land is the same as the blood of the men living upon it.54

Approaching the end of 1974, an old question proposed by an Oesman Effendi remains alive in offcial and unoffcial discus-

Effendi felt that the shapes on the canvas could lead one to the development of Indonesian characteristics. It was these basics that were

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more apparent in Western painting and absent in Indonesian painting, and that had yet to be explored by Indonesian painters. Several years later, this issue remained up for debate. At a workshop titled Temu Seniman (The artists’ gathering) at Purna Budaya, Yogyakarta in February 1985, art academic Soedarso S.P. brought up “Oesman Effendi’s denial,” elaborating on the issue: People everywhere are in confusion in the search to discover what is the feeling, meaning and characteristics that are Indonesia. I believe Indonesian painting already exists; yet we are still formulating it, on what defnes Indonesian painting. If it has not been discovered, we should not say it does not exist. The paintings have existed for a while, so why should we say Indonesian painting does not exist?55 Meanwhile, in a lecture in Solo during the mid-1980s, Sudjojono continued to respond seriously to Effendi: Indonesian painting exists. So if Oesman Effendi says that Indonesian painting does not exist, it is incorrect […] as the nation of Indonesia accepted PERSAGI as a national movement, and its artist members strengthened the spirit of nationalism through their work, therefore the art belongs to us. It is a tool of our expression, to express our thoughts. It is the literature, poetry and kinanti [song] of our nation. So our art is once again used after being forgotten for centuries, in a new form with an impressive style and creative power. This symptom is an atavism, [a return to] a characteristic heritage resulting from hundreds of years of the nation’s culture.56 Of the various reactions, critic Sanento Yuliman framed the fact of the matter with greater clarity. He stated: “The new painting

developing in Indonesia is undeniably ‘Indonesian Painting.’ It means it is shaped by the historical legacy of Indonesia. True, it does not stand frm as it relies on weak support pillars. It is isolated in the large cities, further isolated to [only be] part of the educated and rich.”57 Effendi had become increasingly lonely since his declaration that “Indonesian painting does not exist” sparked rigorous debate. He was attacked from all sides and criticised for being blind to all the existing developments in painting. His search for unique, Indonesian characteristics was considered ridiculous in these modern times. The bulk of Effendi’s thoughts failed to engage or be understood: people latched on to only this notion of “unique characteristics,” taking it to mean anything originating from Indonesia, such as cultural products which were then placed on canvasses. There was even a quip that one just needed to place the red and white fag on the canvas to make the painting “Indonesian.”58 During the anti-communist New Order regime, abstract painting grew in popularity and received strong political endorsement, thanks to support from the Bandung school of thought. The style was deemed innocuous, apolitical and did not represent anything from reality; the canvas was seen as a fat plane that must be freed from the narrative needs of the artist. Aside from being associated with modernity, abstract paintings were considered congruent with the spirit of the nation’s development. Such art had no diffculty fnding homes in the houses of the rich and offces of private and government-owned enterprises. These paintings, which were actually diffcult to understand, were suddenly associated with the intellectual capacity of the artist and the appreciator. This was most likely politically engineered, to subjugate the artistic preferences of the public and silence the potential for criticism. Since the abstract style was associated with modernity, those who did not paint in this style were considered old-fashioned or obsolete. In

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his frst solo exhibition at Balai Budaya, Jakarta, at the end of 1968, Sudjojono’s paintings were mocked for being outdated. “It is strange, that I am now accused of being not modern, behind the times, when it was I that encouraged the development of modern art,” he complained.59 The issues of “modernity in art” and “Indonesian modern art” muddied the discourse during these times. After 1965, the Bandung school of thought felt that they were following the correct course: this is Indonesian art! In that aspect, Indonesian modern art was very much a part of the global art community’s belief that modern art manifested the aspirations of modern man. This belief was, naturally, regarded as much too arrogant. Semsar Siahaan, an artist from a younger generation, fnally questioned the notion that Indonesian modern art had succeeded in synthesising ethnic styles with Western abstraction. His ideas about art were judged as a refection of the art ideology followed by the LEKRA artists during the 1950s. Semsar Siahaan was a student at ITB who had shocked the academic world when he burnt to ash a sculpture by his professor, Sunaryo. He held that the burning was an event in art and titled it Oleh-oleh Dari Desa 2 (1981), a protest against the exploitation of primitive art of ethnic minorities by Indonesian modern artists, especially the artist-professors in the academic circles of ITB.60 Effendi left Jakarta for his hometown in West Sumatra, never to publicly comment on the existence of Indonesian painting again. Yet he was not alone. There was another artist who had also questioned the identity of Indonesian art: Gregorius Sidharta Soegijo, a popular fgure from the West-leaning Bandung school of thought.61 He elaborated on his concerns in 1971: “Are the thoughts and ways of the West, the only way to reach today’s art in Indonesia? I would like to be free of absolute values. I would like to search for the local values of Indonesia.”62 186

The Shadow of Colonialism Nationalist painters such as Agus Djaya, Sudjojono, Suromo, Basuki Resobowo, Baharuddin Marasutan, Trisno Sumardjo and Oesman Effendi were, in their time, defenders who persistently fought attacks directed towards Indonesian painting. They came to accept Western infuences on art and its prevalence as an inevitable reality of the times. These painters realised that Indonesian modern art was neither a transformation nor a continuation of the traditional art of any ethnic group.63 New Indonesian painting, in their view, was an art that shaped its own traditions and established its autonomy.64 However, these turn of events and conclusions were not as simple as we imagine. During the 18th and 19th centuries, the Nusantara region was represented by all things calm, fresh, peaceful and full of romance. People did not realise that beneath the depictions of lush forests, fertile lands, clear rivers, open skies and diligent workers toiling in harmony, as if all was under control, lay colonial aggression and the establishment of Western supremacy. Paintings, lithographic prints and etchings were flled with the visual vocabulary of those times and were the roots of the style popularly known as Mooi Indië (beautiful Indies). This would later be vilifed by Sudjojono in the 1930s; because these were “representations of the East,” the authentic East could not be said to exist. “The authentic East,” in these images, was the East sucked dry by colonialism, oppressed by the expansion of the capitalism of Western countries. Painters who were cognisant of this perspective were encouraged by Sudjojono in 1939 to also paint sugarcane factories, skinny farmers, cars owned by the wealthy, urban fashion and the changing social realities of Indonesia. While Sudjojono aggressively discredited the dogma of colonial painting, he did not suggest for painters to return to the notion of the East in their work, being a proponent of

Aminudin TH Siregar

59 Bur Rasuanto, “Pertemuan dengan S. Sudjojono”

63 Sanento Yuliman, “Kelahiran Seni Rupa Modern In-

[Meeting with S. Sudjojono], Indonesia Raya, no. 253, 15 December 1968. Author’s translation. 60 Miklouho-Maklai, op. cit., 103–6. 61 Supangkat & Yuliman, op. cit., 33. 62 Ibid., 20–35.

donesia” [The birth of modern Indonesian art], in Hasan, op. cit., 55. 64 Hasan, op. cit. 65 Sudjojono, Seni Loekis, Kesenian dan Seniman, 6–9. 66 Ibid., 13–4.

“painting that is not searching for the beauty of past times.”65 To Sudjojono, the “East” was one that had been frozen into orientalist museum artefacts, a consequence of Western modernity that had uprooted art, alienated it from its people and placed it in museums. Sudjojono had little faith in such institutions, declaring: “Museums will not help much.”66 These suspicions of Western modernity were justifable, evinced, he believed, by the inauthenticity of the East as presented in Jakarta museums, being merely Western narratives and interpretations of the East. It is true that the founding of Eastern nations like Indonesia arose out of the shadows of Western might in the guise of colonialism. The political implications of this attitude of superiority rejected the validity of any modern order outside the West, subsuming them into Western hegemony. Sudjojono’s suspicion towards Western modernity was thus read as suspicion towards Orientalism. The effects of Effendi’s denial clearly transcended time; every artist in the two decades following his denial responded to the issue in his or her own way. The Design Center Association (Decenta) group formed in 1973, for instance, succeeded in creating a synthesis of East and West through their work in silkscreen and pioneered this technique in the Indonesian art scene. The experiments and exploration of ornamentation and mythology, Indonesian popular culture icons and Pop Art in works by G. Sidharta, T. Susanto, A.D. Pirous, Diddo

Kusnidar and Priyanto Sunarto from Decenta were deemed to offer new inspiration to the young artists. The discourse surrounding the character of Indonesian art resurfaced at the Black December Manifesto of 1974, questioned by young artists who were part of the New Art Movement (Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru, GSRB) in 1975, and then criticised by the What Personality (Kepribadian Apa or PiPa) group in 1977. The East‒West discourse continued to be debated until the early 1990s. The wound caused by Hopman’s denial in 1947 was reopened 40 years later, when several modern art museums in Europe and America declined to exhibit Indonesian modern painting. This rejection is clear indication that until the 1990s, the existence of Indonesian modern painting remained unacknowledged. What we understand as the identity of Indonesian art is full of contradictions and confrontations which are diffcult to unravel. Myriad statements attempting to tell what actually happened and why only succeed in making one thing clear: the identity of Indonesian art, at its core, still faces a complex, serious problem. Its mode of discourse consists of a convoluted web of acculturation and enculturation processes, and the sheer amount of participants and actors involved means every process has to factor in manifold points of view. A much sharper structuring and interpretation of its history is needed in the future.

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1

2

3

Kevin Chua, “Painting the Nanyang’s Public: Notes Toward a Reassessment,” in Eye of the Beholder: Reception, Audience and the Practice of Modern Asian Art, eds. John Clark, T.K. Sabapathy & Maurizio Peleggi (Sydney: Wild Peony, 2006), 74. Toshiko Rawanchaikul, Nanyang 1950–65: Passage to Singaporean Art (Fukuoka: Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, 2002), 36. The 1950s and the 1960s form the timeframe of this essay as this period marked the emergence and height of social realism in Singapore, when artists envisioned playing a role in the anti-colonial struggle to create a new national culture and identity imagined as Malaya. Singapore and Malaya were imagined as sharing a common Malayan culture in the 1950s until 1965, when Singapore became independent. First published in 1963, Marco Hsu’s A Brief History of Malayan Art was a product of this

4

striving towards a Malayan culture. Marco Hsu, A Brief History of Malayan Art, trans. Lai Chee Kien (Singapore: Millennium Books, 1999), 101. There have been competing, and at times confusing, terms used to describe this group of artists (and their artworks) as “Nanyang artists,” “Nanyang School,” “Nanyang art,” Nanyang movement” and “Nanyang style.” There are nuanced differences in each of these terms. “Nanyang School” implies a loose grouping of artists associated with a particular institution, such as an art academy or society, with a shared stylistic and aesthetic direction discernable in their artworks. “Nanyang movement” is broader than the “Nanyang School” as it suggests a stylistic movement and common aesthetic evident in a group of artists. “Nanyang style” is a much narrower defnition based on a specifc set of formal qualities that are common in the practices of a

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Lim Hak Tai Points a Third Way: Towards a Socially Engaged Art by the Nanyang Artists, 1950s–1960s Seng Yu Jin

To the Equator Society, the Nanyang painters must have lacked a certain realism in their work—their paintings were disengaged from social reality, and did not speak to the public sphere. In part the rejection was born of the exigencies of their moment: by the late 1950s “Western” modes of painting seemed too compromised, too tainted with memories of a colonialist past.1 Kevin Chua, 2006 Among the Equator Art Society, some do not believe the art that they pursued can be categorised as being part of Nanyang art. However, isn’t the gaze directed toward the local Malay, their peculiar customs and poverty in the countryside the same gaze towards the aborigine and their customs in peripheral areas like Bali? Perhaps the 188

artist who pursued social themes took these subjects under their gaze, turned works that are based on reality at times, and at other times turned into works full of Nanyang sensibility.2 Toshiko Rawanchaikul, 2002 Marco Hsu gave a contemporary account of the Equator Art Society, which was established in 1956 in Singapore, and other realist artists active in the 1950s and 1960s in Malaya as sharing “a common melancholic tone and realist tenor expressing the anger, sadness, and injustice for the unfortunate.”3 Artist and art historian Redza Piyadasa cites Chung Cheng Sun, a graduate of Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA), as recalling a group of realist painters such as Lim Yew Kuan, Chua Mia Tee

Charting Thoughts

group of artists. This essay adopts the use of “Nanyang artists” to refer to a loose grouping of artists, most of whom emigrated to Singapore and Malaya from China, either before or soon after World War II. (Although this was the general trend, it does not preclude the possibility of Chinese artists who emigrated to other parts of Southeast Asia, such as the Philippines. The region was conceived broadly as the “Nanyang” [South Seas], a general geographical direction relative to China.) These artists produced a new art form that this essay terms as “Nanyang art,” characterised by a synthesis of practices from Chinese ink painting and the School of Paris (movements/styles associated with Paris such as Cubism and Post-Impressionism), as well as local and regional subject matter. Redza Piyadasa, “The Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts,” in Pameran Retrospektif Pelukis-Pelukis Nanyang, eds. T.K. Sabapathy &

and Lee Boon Wang who had graduated from NAFA. Although these realists had been under the tutelage of the Nanyang artists at NAFA, their works were radically different compared to their teachers.4 According to Chung, these Equator Art Society artists and social realists were “responsible for emphasising a more socially oriented approach toward creativity, based on the depiction of the harsh realities of everyday life devoid of any romantic or sentimental implication.”5 However, are we certain that the Nanyang artists did not produce works that were socially engaged?6 Hungry (fg. 14.1), a painting by Cheong Soo Pieng, one of the leading Nanyang artists, challenges this view of the Nanyang artists as socially disengaged. In the work, a boy is depicted holding a scrap of food in his hands. His misery is registered in his expression as he looks dejectedly at the morsel of food he has, insuffcient to satiate his hunger. Painted in 1950, Hungry depicts an ubiquitous scene in a Singapore that was recovering from the ravages of World War II and the Japanese Occupation. Food was scarce and many buildings were in the midst of being rebuilt, just as its people were rebuilding their own lives. Hungry is an example of a socially engaged work,

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Redza Piyadasa (Kuala Lumpur: Muzium Seni Negara, 1979), 33. Ibid. Lim Yew Kuan was cited by Marco Hsu as one of the important artists connected to the founding of the Equator Art Society. See Hsu, op. cit., 103. However, there is no evidence of Lim Yew Kuan’s works being shown at the Equator Art Society exhibitions. This could be due to Lim’s departure from Singapore in 1957 to further his studies at the Chelsea School of Art in London. Art historian and curator Low Sze Wee proposed that both the Nanyang artists and artists who produced social realist works could be considered as proponents of Nanyang art. Please refer to Low Sze Wee, “Lim Hak Tai—Art and Life,” in Crossing Visions—Singapore and Xiamen: Lim Hak Tai and Lim Yew Kuan Art Exhibition (Volume on Lim Hak Tai) (Singapore: Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, 2011), 38.

painted with empathy—Cheong’s bold, thick and richly layered brushstrokes capture the intensity of his emotional response to the plight of this boy who represents the multitude of other similarly suffering children Cheong must have seen daily. A crescent moon shining on the boy, in the atmosphere of a dark night, illuminates his desperate situation—a reality that cannot be ignored and forgotten. It is hardly possible to describe a painting like Hungry as romantic, idealised and disengaged from the reality of society. In light of Cheong’s Hungry, are there other works by the Nanyang artists that are also socially engaged and if so, how do we account for them art historically? To reconsider the oeuvre of Nanyang art to include works that are socially engaged demands that we scrutinise the art historical discourse on both Nanyang art and social realism in Singapore. In this regard, Piyadasa’s dominant narrative of the social realists and the Nanyang artists deserves closer study. According to Piyadasa, the social realists adopted a socially engaged artistic practice as their subject matter focused on themes such as social inequalities and injustices faced by the working classes, thereby rejecting the works of

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T.K. Sabapathy, “The Nanyang Artists: Some General Remarks,” in Pameran Retrospektif Pelukis-Pelukis Nanyang, 44. Various terms like “Nanyang style,” “Nanyang School,” “Nanyang movement” and “Nanyang art” have been used when referring to this group of artists and their practices and need further research. For an understanding of the history of Socialist Realism, refer to Andrei Zhdanov, “From Speech at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers 1934,” in Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Docu-

the Nanyang artists, including Lim Hak Tai, Cheong Soo Pieng, Chen Chong Swee, Liu Kang and Georgette Chen, as being “romantic and sentimental.” This narrative of the social realist artists was frst constructed in Piyadasa’s writings published in the exhibition catalogue of Pameran Retrospektif Pelukis-Pelukis Nanyang, the seminal frst survey exhibition on Nanyang art held at the Muzium Seni Negara Malaysia in 1979. This narrative has been perpetuated in art historical discourses since. Art historian Ken Chua’s assessment of the Nanyang artists as making pictures that lacked realism and were disengaged from social reality reinforces Piyadasa’s narrative of the adversarial aesthetic and even political positions of the Equator and Nanyang artists. T.K. Sabapathy, a leading art historian on the Nanyang artists, in an illuminating pictorial analysis, describes the Nanyang artists’ representational schema as “using styles and techniques derived from two sources: Chinese pictorial traditions, and the School of Paris.”7 Sabapathy’s representational schema of “scroll meets easel” explains Nanyang art as synthesising the pictorial schema of Chinese ink painting (in the hanging and hand scroll formats), and techniques and brushstrokes from the School of Paris (dominated by avant-garde styles such as Cubism, 190

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ments, eds. Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman & Olga Taxidou (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 525. The Soviet Union endorsed Socialist Realism as the offcial art style of the Soviet state in 1932. As this essay is focused on socially engaged Nanyang art (as a discrete body of works and category), rather than Socialist Realism, the strategies of Socialist Realism employed by Singapore artists in the 1950s and 1960s will have to be left for future research.

Fauvism and abstraction), which were based on the easel format.8 Circumscribing Nanyang art chiefy in these two pictorial schemas supports Piyadasa’s view of the Nanyang artists and the social realist artists as two opposing groups as it excludes the possibility of a socially engaged Nanyang art based on realism. Curator Toshiko Rawanchaikul questions the dominant art historical discourse that has established the Equator and Nanyang artists as adopting mutually exclusive artistic and aesthetic positions: the former based on a socially oriented realism and the latter on romanticised representations of local and regional subject matter using representational schemas from Eastern and Western pictorial traditions. She questions and problematises the paradoxical aesthetic position taken by the Equator artists who were equally guilty—as the Nanyang artists—of their romanticised representations of “the Other.” But is this necessarily a contradiction given that the work of the artists of the Equator Art Society could also have been described as Nanyang art as suggested by Rawanchaikul? This essay looks at the distinction between Nanyang artists and Equator artists by examining the writings and works of Lim Hak Tai, the frst principal and founder of NAFA. An

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analysis of Lim’s ideas that bridge the seemingly oppositional aesthetics posits him as an interlocutor between the two groups of artists. Lim’s call to depict the “realities of the South Seas,” (the term “South Seas” is a reference to Nanyang), provides a possible third way: a socially engaged form of Nanyang art, besides the other two sources derived from Chinese ink painting and the School of Paris as formulated by Sabapathy. This essay challenges rigid categories like Nanyang artists and social realist artists as being mutually exclusive. For example, pioneers of Nanyang art such as Cheong Soo Pieng are known to have produced socially engaged woodcuts in the early 1950s. The category of Nanyang artists is also problematic as artists like Tan Tee Chie produced both Nanyang art, as seen in his romanticised Chinese ink landscapes of the region, and also woodcuts that depict local social realities. In addition, not all the social realist artists were members of the art societies that advocated social realism in the 1950s and 1960s like the Equator Art Society and/or the Singapore Chinese High Schools’ Graduates of 1953 Arts Association (henceforth in this essay, the SCHSGAA); an example being Choo Keng Kwang. Furthermore, while most of the prominent artists in the Equator Art Society were graduates of NAFA, the academy was not affliated with the society. As such, this essay argues that such categories are problematic when applied rigidly in our understanding of social realism and Nanyang art. Socially engaged Nanyang art is distinguished from the social realism of the Equator artists. Socially engaged Nanyang artists depict social realities, such as the suffering of labourers, to raise social awareness without participating in or forming an artists’ society with a manifest desire to pursue sociopolitical aims, such as independence from colonial rule. Nonetheless, this essay asserts that both the Nanyang and social realist artists share a common concern for social issues as seen in

their artworks. Socially engaged Nanyang art and social realism are, in turn, distinct from Socialist Realism; the latter seeks not to generate social awareness or effect social change but to glorify, propagandise and “depict the revolutionary development” of a communist state as it transforms into an ideal Communist society.9 A nuanced understanding of concepts such as socially engaged Nanyang art, social realism and Socialist Realism is important in unpacking the contradictions in why there is evidence of social engagement in the works of the Nanyang artists and why there are only a few instances of what can be considered social realist works produced by the Equator Art Society. The majority of the paintings exhibited at the six Equator Art Society annual exhibitions (from its frst exhibition in 1958 to its last exhibition in 1968) were academically realistic still lifes, portraits and landscapes. Social realist paintings such as Chua Mia Tee’s Epic Poem of Malaya and National Language Class, Lee Boon Wang’s Indian Workers and Lai Kui Fang’s Bedok Flood were exceptions rather than the rule. These paintings are considered social realist rather than Socialist Realist as they do not glorify a communist leader or a communist state. Instead, these works seek to evoke a desire for social action by involving the viewer not as a passive observer but as an active subject in the picture, a part of it and inspired with agency for social change. However, the technical competence and conceptual maturity required to produce such social realist works meant that only a few artists in the Equator Art Society were able to produce these works successfully. This distinction of exciting a desire for social action, for change, in social realist works distinguishes it from socially engaged Nanyang art that only seeks to raise social awareness in the viewer.10 Lastly, this essay will unpack the concepts of “reality of the ‘South Seas’” and to “depict the localness of the place we live in” as cardinal directions set by Lim Hak Tai that Piyadasa and Sabapathy have attributed as aes-

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Sabapathy notes that the “Nanyang style” is not necessarily synonymous with NAFA as there were artists who produced Nanyang art outside of the academy. See Sabapathy & Piyadasa, eds., op. cit., 32–43. Refer to fgure 2, a schema of the two trajectories of Nanyang art, the “aesthetic Nanyang art” and the “socially engaged Nanyang art.” Lim Hak Tai, “Art and Life,” Chinese transcript of a speech frst broadcast on local radio and later transcribed and published in The Father of Nanyang Art: Lim Hak Tai (Kuala Lumpur: Malaysia Art Academy Asia Research Centre, 1991). An English version of

thetic frames for Nanyang art.11 Sabapathy’s framing of the “scroll and easel” (where Nanyang artists synthesised representational schemas from Chinese ink painting and the School of Paris) provides an important framework for understanding Nanyang art that focuses on formal experimentation without social engagement. This essay will use the term “aesthetic Nanyang art” to describe this body of work. This essay will also examine the third source proposed by Lim in his writings and artworks. These materials provide entry points to map similar socially engaged practices and artworks by Nanyang artists that have been overlooked in current scholarship on Nanyang art (fg. 14.2).12 This essay conceives socially engaged Nanyang art, not as a style that is primarily visual, formal and perceptual, but one which conceptually and cognitively, through allegories, symbols and metaphors, make visible the “reality of the South Seas,” and engages with the public sphere, comprising the working class, rather than the social and economic elites. Lim Hak Tai Points a Third Way Art is a refection of social ideology, and therefore is closely linked to the commercial and industrial sectors of society. Commercial art is testament to this. In contrast, art has little relevance to common labourers and farmers in the past. This is 192

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this transcript translated by Goh Ngee Hui was later published in Lim Hak Tai: Quintessential Nanyang, eds. Bridget Tracy Tan & Justin Loke (Singapore: NAFA, 2009), 75. T.K. Sabapathy, “Hak Tai Points the Way,” in Sources of Modern Art (Singapore: s.n., 1986), 148–50. In an interview with Redza Piyadasa, Chung Cheng Sun recalls that Lim Hak Tai believed that their works should refect the “reality of the ‘Southern Seas’” and “localness of the place.” Chung Cheng Sun as paraphrased in Redza Piyadasa, “The Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts,” in Pameran Retrospektif Pelukis-Pelukis Nanyang, 32.

because in a capitalist society, art is viewed as something decorative, to be enjoyed by the scholarly and affuent classes with time on their hands. But this is not the case in new art movements.13 Lim Hak Tai, 1949 Lim Hak Tai was the founder and principal of NAFA, a pioneer of art education in Singapore and Malaysia and a visionary who, Sabapathy argues, provided artistic direction for Nanyang art based on depicting the “localness of a place” and the “reality of the South Seas.” Nanyang art departed from the then predominantly practised academic realism and traditional Chinese ink that depicted subject matter from Europe and China, by representing local contexts and conditions instead.14 What has been overlooked is how Lim played a critical role as an intellectual force in shaping the social realist movement in Singapore and the social engagement demonstrated in some of the works produced by the Nanyang artists, including Lim’s own paintings. Lim’s ideas were crucial to both the development of NAFA as an art academy and Nanyang art. As Piyadasa writes, Chung Chen Sun, a graduate of NAFA, recalls that Lim’s “greatest infuence lay in his thinking” for it was his ideas that attracted students from all over Singapore and Malaya to study art at NAFA, which was remarkable considering the absence of an art market, museum and

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15 Piyadasa, ibid. 16 Lim, “Art and Life,” in Lim Hak Tai: Quintessential

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Nanyang, 75.

17 This exhibition also travelled to the Federation of Malaya. 18 Chairman, foreword to Huawen biye ban tongxue Xingzhou yijiuwusan niandu yishu yanjiuhui zhuban meishu xunhui zhanlan tekan [Singapore Chinese High Schools’ Graduates of 1953 Arts Association travelling art exhibition catalogue] exh. cat. (Singapore: Yishu Yanjiuhui, 1956), 1. Author’s translation.

other art institutions then to support a career in art.15 In Art and Life, Lim saw art as a form of social ideology, and foresaw new art movements that would challenge the capitalist view of art dominated by the “affuent classes,” as decorative with “little relevance to common labourers and farmers.”16 Art as a form of social ideology formed the basis for his idea of a socially engaged Nanyang art that resonated with the working class rather than the affuent. This message that was broadcast over radio must have had a huge impact on the then young artists, who were stirred by nationalist sentiments against the social injustices of colonialism and who would later form the socially engaged realist movement with the Equator Art Society at its centre. He did not have to wait long for this new art movement—a Social Realist movement—to arrive. In 1956, the SCHSGAA organised an art exhibition at the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce that propelled social realism into the limelight.17 The foreword of the exhibition catalogue proclaimed: Art belongs to society­—it is public, and should serve the public. We want to refect public life and to produce artistic form and content that the public likes; and to create opportunities for our art to be closer to the public in order for them to

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Hsu noted the SCHSGAA “faced great external obstacles, and it soon ceased to function” and many members joined EAS. Hsu, op. cit., 102–3. Art historian Kwok Kian Chow uses the term social realism to describe the practices of the SCHSGAA and the Equator Art Society but does not elaborate on the distinction between the small body of social realist works and the majority of academically realist works produced by the Equator Art Society. See Kwok Kian Chow, Channels and Confuences: A History of Singapore Art (Singapore: National Heritage Board, 1996).

accept it. Only then will art have life and shine in this heroic age, which is the aim of our exhibition!18 The social realist artists in this exhibition called for art to serve and awaken the political consciousness of the working classes, instil a Malayan nationalism, and depict the social, political and economic realities of the people. The artists from the SCHSGAA, an organisation that was subsequently replaced by the Equator Art Society in 1956, used the broader term “xieshi” or “realism” to describe their practice of creating realistic works based on observations of their environment and everyday phenomena.19 This is an accurate description of the majority of their works, which include still lifes, landscapes and portraits. Shehui xieshi or “social realism” is evident in a minority of these realist works. This essay uses the term “social realism” specifcally to refer to a small body of social realist works that is different from the majority of the realist works that do not engage in social and political critique.20 As such, this essay uses the term “socially engaged realism” instead of social realism or Socialist Realism to denote a specifc mode of realism that engages in social and political critique that is historically closer to the writings and ideas of these realist artists. Author Marco Hsu described the artworks shown in the ex-

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21 Hsu, op. cit., 100. 22 The epigraph reads: “Art should not be the grandson of

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the nature, or the son of nature but the father of nature,” published in Huawen biye ban tongxue Xingzhou yijiuwusan niandu yishu yanjiuhui zhuban meishu xunhui zhanlan tekan, unpaginated. Author’s translation. Lim Hak Tai, “Using Art as a Finely-Edged Weapon,” Nanyang Siang Pau, 17 December 1940. In 1940, the “national” referred to China as most Chinese immigrants to Singapore continued to regard China as their motherland. The original four precepts were recorded in Lim Hak Tai, preface to First Painting Collections of NAFA (Singapore: Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, 1950), unpaginated. The four precepts are: 1. To spread the culture of our Motherland [“Mother land” refers to China] 2. To provide a supplement to overseas Chinese education

hibition as “mainly realist in nature […]. The subject of these works is drawn from farming, workers and public life, with many portraying the cries of injustice, calls for compassion and encouragement for unity.”21 It was therefore not surprising that Lim was invited to write an epigraph for the SCHSGAA catalogue, showing the high status accorded to him and the mutual respect between him and the socially engaged realist artists from the SCHSGAA.22 As early as 1940, Lim was already a leading art activist, championing support for China which had been at war with Japan since 1937 (the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945). He wrote about how art should be used as a weapon for national salvation: “Art must possess the spirit of resistance to allow it to become a fnelyedged weapon, to establish the value of fne art, and on the other hand to give it depth in meaning.”23 The concept of art as a “fnelyedged weapon” would have been embraced by the social realist artists of the SCHSGAA. While Lim’s ideas of art as a weapon gained currency with the social realists, his ide194



3. As a bridge connecting Eastern and Western art 4. To create a Nanyang art 25 Lim Hak Tai, preface to The Art of Young Malayans (Singapore: NAFA, 1955), 1. 26 Sabapathy, “Hak Tai Points the Way,” 148–50. 27 Toshiko Rawanchaikul notes that it is not clear if the interest in social themes by the Nanyang artists was infuenced by the younger generation of social realist artists, or if the opposite is true. Rawanchaikul, op. cit., 35. 28 David Brett, “On the Possibility of Social Realism,” Circa, no. 13 (1983): 16. 29 Michael Sullivan, Art and Artists of TwentiethCentury China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 80. 30 Refer to David Brett’s essay on the possibilities of social realism as a strategy that could be extended to contemporary practices, such as installation art. See Brett, op. cit., 17.

as on Nanyang art remained infuential as well. His preface in The Art of the Young Malayans (1955) represents the accumulation of his ideas since 1938 concerning Nanyang art. In it, he presented six precepts, which he had revised extensively and expanded from the initial four precepts outlined fve years before.24 It offers insights into Lim’s views as an art educator and artist regarding the direction of art in Singapore and demonstrates how his ideas bridge the ideologies of both the Nanyang artists and the social realists. Lim’s six precepts are:

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1. The fusion of the culture of the different races 2. The communication of Eastern and Western art 3. The diffusion of the scientifc spirit and social thinking of the twentieth century 4. To refect the needs of the peoples of the Federation of Malaya and Singapore 5. The expression of tropical favour 6. The educational and social functions of fne art25

Lim’s ffth precept, “the expression of tropical favour,” has been identifed by Sabapathy in his essay “Hak Tai Points the Way,” as the call to Nanyang artists to produce paintings that embody local and regional subject matter and aesthetics.26 What has not been discussed are his third, fourth and sixth precepts in particular, whose sources can be traced to the May Fourth Movement that promoted not only scientifc enquiry but also, and more importantly, the idea that art and society are inseparable. Lim, who was both a teacher at the Xiamen Art Academy and the Jimei Teachers’ Training College in China before he came to Singapore in 1937 and established NAFA, would have been exposed to these ideas. Lim’s call for a “scientifc spirit and social thinking” in precept three, “to refect the needs of the people in Singapore and the Federation of Malaya” in precept four, and the “social function of art” in precept six embody the ideologies of the May Fourth Movement that focused on science and the need for all knowledge, whether scientifc or artistic, to be socially engaged, regardless of whether in the realm of ideas (i.e. social thinking), or in everyday life (i.e. refect the needs of the people and social function of fne art). Art historical discourse on Nanyang art as shaped by Sabapathy and Piyadasa have located Lim’s ideas (in particular precepts one to fve) as the wellspring from which Nanyang artists have developed their new representational schemas and aesthetics. However, precept six that proposes a socially engaged Nanyang art has been neglected. Lim’s ideas about socially engaged art form the conceptual bridge between the Nanyang artists and the social realist artists as revealed in their shared strategies expressed through different narrative modes.27 Lim’s emphasis on social thinking, education, the social function of art, and for art to refect the needs of the people, distinguishes socially engaged realism from other realisms or representations of reality. Lim maintained that social reality is not visual and perceptual, but

is instead conceptual, represented in pictorial form. Social realism goes beyond the representation of reality, beyond what we see before us, as social reality cannot be depicted directly. Instead, it seeks to apprehend underlying reality, to reveal the truth as a form of knowledge.28 In this way, the task of a social realist artist is to develop artistic strategies to create knowledge that makes visible the otherwise invisible systems of power that generate and perpetuate social injustices, corruption and inequalities. Lim’s belief in the role of the artist in society can be seen in his admiration of Lu Xun, a revolutionary social realist writer. Lim’s Lu Xun Shrine (fg. 14.3) pays homage to the writer, who is depicted in a dignifed pose as a towering intellectual beside a stack of books. Lu Xun famously proclaimed, “We must establish the relationship between art and social life, its inherent existence and value.”29 Like Lu Xun, Lim regarded art and social life as inseparable. As such, the social function of social realist art is education, a means for people to apprehend social realities for themselves. Realism as a style that is naturalistic and representational is inadequate for the task of dealing with social reality. Art has to be socially engaged, and more importantly, socially critical, which requires a socially engaged realist artist to adopt conceptual strategies that expose these social and political structures that institutionalise exploitation and inequality. The strategies of social realism cut across stylistic categories of realist or Nanyang art, as well as affliations with art societies and art academies, to include narrative modes centred on the use of allegories, symbols and metaphors that will be explicated later in this essay, evident in a relatively small but signifcant body of socially engaged artworks produced by the Nanyang artists in the 1950s and 1960s.30 Allegory, Symbolism and Metaphor in a Socially Engaged Nanyang Art Allegory is a rhetorical device that has been deployed across different art forms such as lit-

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erature, music and visual art for its ability to seem “to be other than what it is. It exhibits something of the perpetually fuctuating, uncertain status of the world it depicts.”31 Allegory penetrates social reality to reveal uncomfortable tensions and uncertainty as it subverts and destabilises institutionalised systems of authority.32 More than that, allegory as a strategy “encourages its readers not only to aspire towards some world of perfect fulflment, but to direct attention to the limited world of which they are a part.”33 It is a kind of interpretation aligned with Lim’s precepts of art—to inculcate social thinking, educate and fulfl art’s social function of increasing the social and political consciousness of the people. Manifest in symbols, motifs and metaphors, the use of allegories enables us to express values and utopian visions of the world.34 Lim’s call for artists to be guided by the “social functions of fne art” in his sixth precept opens up the possibility for a socially engaged Nanyang art. This call was not only restricted to his writings and ideas, it extended to his artistic practice as well. The Tyranny of Time (Inner Beauty), painted by Lim in 1954, employs a surrealist alternate world that critiques vanity as shown in the picture of the woman applying lipstick while a skull looms ominously as her refection in the mirror. The skull, a symbol of mortality, conveys the message that the blind pursuit of beauty can only lead to one’s ruin and death. The refection in the mirror recalls Lim’s earlier statement of how “art is a refection of society” and as a tool, how art can be used to effect social change. In The Tyranny of Time (Inner Beauty), Lim adopts a form of realism that departs from academic realism, a faithful verisimilitude as one would see in the real world. Instead, a surreal world of dripping red, blue and green paints on the walls of a dark and forbidding room create the psychological atmosphere of drug-induced hallucinations that result in shifting perceptions of reality. After all, beauty cannot last forever 196

and only inner beauty is timeless. The Tyranny of Time (Inner Beauty) employs didacticism as its strategy to produce a socially engaged Nanyang art that was critical of society’s obsession with beauty at the expense of morals and values. Lim’s use of surreal allegories that were didactic in nature was furthered by his son, Lim Yew Kuan. Lim Yew Kuan graduated from NAFA in the early 1950s and was regarded by Hsu as one of the key members of the Equator Art Society. Searching (fg. 14.4), by Lim Yew Kuan, is an allegorical painting of a fctional world that makes visible the evils of capitalism. In the painting, a monk, who would have typically renounced material possessions, is seen counting money in the left foreground, while a bourgeois couple is at the right. The couple’s dog is barking at a barefooted man wearing a torn singlet who is holding a lit candle at the centre of this picture. On a literal level, this painting is absurd as the man is holding a lit candle in broad daylight, which forces the viewer to ask: What is the man searching for in this fctional social space? The candle illumines the reality of social and economic inequality and the exploitation of the working class. The working class itself is represented by the man holding the candle, who faces the sneering faces of all the other fgures. He is alone and thus powerless to fght corruption and greed. The lit candle offers the only possibility of destabilising this absurd world where equality and justice are all but absent. Searching and The Tyranny of Time (Inner Beauty), painted a year apart, can be seen as companion pictures that adopt didactic allegories for the betterment of humanity. As can be seen, both Lim Hak Tai and Lim Yew Kuan were known to have painted didactic allegories which adhered to the sixth precept, “education and social function of art,” to create socially engaged Nanyang art without romanticising local social realities. Lim Hak Tai’s strategy of didacticism places a responsibility on art to educate its viewers and raise their consciousness of problems in society.

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31 Jon Whitman, Allegory: The Dynamics of an Ancient

35 Lim Cheng Tju, “Chinese Cartoons in Singapore:

and Medieval Technique (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1987), 13. 32 For how allegory is deployed in social realism in the Philippines, see Patrick D. Flores, “Social Realism: The Turns of a Term in the Philippines,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context, and Enquiry Issue 34 (Autumn/Winter 2013), 62–75. 33 Ibid. 34 Brett, op cit. 18.

Chauvinism, Confrontation and Compromise (1950 to 1980),” in Southeast Asian Cartoon Art: History, Trends and Problems, ed. John A. Lent (North Carolina: McFarland & Company Inc., 2014), 155. 36 Brett, op. cit.,16. 37 Lim Cheng Tju, “Political Prints in Singapore,” Print Quarterly 21, no. 3 (September 2004): 266–7. 38 Ibid.

The Mother-and-Child Theme

nese newspapers, magazines and literary publications, became an alternative mode of exhibition initially featuring woodcuts and cartoons only and which later included paintings as well. One of the earliest of such publications was Wenman Jie, an arts supplement of the Nanyang Siang Pau edited by Dai Yinlang, a member of the Society of Chinese Artists in Singapore who promoted woodcuts and cartoons here.37 Woodcuts and cartoons printed in newspapers and magazines enabled these artworks to reach a wider audience beyond a gallery exhibition to achieve the goals of creating knowledge and promoting critical thinking on social and political issues among the public. More importantly, these artworks were seen in tandem with similarly thought provoking essays that “challenged readers’ conceptions of art, and introduced new works and ideas to the masses.”38 Literary supplements such as Gengyun and Shidaibao that were critical of politics and society in Singapore also published woodcuts and cartoons. The fact that Nanyang artists were also involved in the woodcut movement by creating their own socially engaged pieces further complicates the neat distinction between the Nanyang artists and the social realists. Cheong Soo Pieng, a leading Nanyang artist, produced woodcut prints in the late 1940s and early

The 1950s became an important decade in the history of social realism with the emergence of the woodcut movement. A Selection of Woodcuts and Cartoons by Singapore and Malayan Artists, edited by Ho Kah Leong and Ong Shih Cheng (pen name Ong Yih) is a catalogue that documents woodcut’s importance in the art history of Singapore and Malaya. Both Ho and Ong were infuenced by Lu Xun in seeing woodcuts and cartoons as “sister arts,” that could “provide art for the masses who might not have time or means to view it in galleries” and bring about improvements in society through social change.35 Most of the issues raised by the works in this landmark book concerns morality, values, the anti-colonial struggle and Chinese education. The editors were also graduates of NAFA and would have adhered to Lim’s call for art to be used as “a forceful weapon.” By turning to woodcuts and cartoons, they were engaged in a transactional strategy of social realism: the search for alternative modes of exhibiting beyond galleries, which were viewed as part of the capitalist process of commodifying art and alienating “the masses.”36 This transactional strategy seeks to present artworks in a manner that extends the meaning of the work beyond itself. The printed media, such as Chi-

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Joyce Fan discusses the repeated theme of the mother and child in woodcuts by Singapore artists, such as Tan Tee Chie’s Motherhood and Waiting (Beyond the Wall), as well as Koeh Sia Yong’s Scene at Bukit Ho Swee Fire, within the context of recognising the contributions of women towards society, which could be traced to China’s New Cultural Movement. Joyce Fan, “Social Commentary in Prints during the 1950s and Early 1960s,” (master’s thesis, Pratt Institute, 2000), 45–8. On 2 May 1971, the General Manager of Nanyang Siang Pau, Lee Mau Seng, was detained by Singapore’s Internal Security Department raising concerns over freedom of the press. It should be noted

1950s. Cheong’s early woodcuts have been largely unremarked upon by scholars, and his role in the woodcut movement in Singapore overlooked. Some of Cheong’s woodcuts were socially engaged, employing the allegorical mode similarly found in the artworks of other Nanyang artists.39 Cheong’s (Untitled) Mother and Child (fg. 14.5) engages with the subject of the “mother and child” in the late 1940s, derived from imagery of the Madonna and Child recurrent in Christian iconography. This theme has been reproduced by artists in Singapore as it is a universally recognised symbol of selfess love. In Mother and Child, a forlorn mother holds her child in her disproportionately large and rough hands in a warm and maternal embrace. The unusually large hands could be inspired by Kathe Kollwitz’s woodcuts as artists in Singapore and Malaya had access to reproductions of her prints through magazines like Wenman Jie. Georgette Chen’s East Coast Vendor (fg. 14.6) portrays a Malay mother and her two daughters, a different take of the mother and child subject as the three fgures meet directly with the gaze of the viewer as equals. In Chen’s 198

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that the Nanyang Siang Pau had become more pro-government in its views after 1965 as seen in its cartoons making more social, economic and international commentaries than local political commentaries. Xiao Gang Zhi Bi (pen name), “Tan yishu de fuwu duixiang” [Who art should serve], in the Huawen biye ban tongxue Xingzhou yijiuwusan niandu yishu yanjiuhui zhuban meishu xunhui zhanlan tekan, 6. Author’s translation. Lee Tian Meng, “Three Reasons against the Ideas of Pablo Picasso,” originally published in SCHSGAA’s 1956 exhibition catalogue and subsequently cited and translated by Lai Chee Kien in Hsu, op. cit., 101.

painting, these fgures are not romanticised representations of other ethnic groups. Both Cheong and Chen are Nanyang artists who adopted the mother and child as a theme to socially engage with the realities of the world. As such, certain works by Cheong and Chen exhibit a desire for social engagement that share affnities to artworks by Tan Tee Chie and See Cheen Tee who could be categorised as either Nanyang or social realist artists. Giving Instructions (fg. 15.2) and Three Generations by Tan and See respectively also adopt the allegorical strategy of the mother and child as a symbol to underline the importance of nurturing the young. Both artists were graduates of NAFA and were actively involved in making socially engaged woodcuts even though they were not members of the EAS. Giving Instructions portrays a mother and child looking towards a typical Malayan landscape dotted with coconut trees. The rays of sunlight radiating outwards signify a new beginning for the Chinese immigrants who have arrived in Singapore. Singapore was in the process of merging with Malaya, along with Sabah and Sarawak, to achieve independence from British colonial rule. Seen in

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this context, the theme of educating the young is used as a metaphor of a nation’s hope. This is also repeated in Three Generations which shows a child being breastfed while the mother has a Chinese newspaper known for publishing social and political criticism, the Nanyang Siang Pau, open in front of her. The mother’s gaze meets the grandmother’s and they appear to be having a conversation.40 Interpreted allegorically, the breastfeeding can be read as a metaphor for another form of nourishment: a thirst for knowledge about the world and the ability to think critically as well as the ability to engage in social and political criticism. The child as a metaphor for a young nation also suggests an underlying message of the need for guidance and direction through education that produces knowledge framed by nationalist ideologies. It is knowledge that serves social realism’s struggle to create a new nation whereby art becomes the vehicle in which critical thinking can be transferred to the next generation. The use of the mother and child imagery by the Nanyang artists (including See and Tan whose practices can be considered as a hybrid of Nanyang and social realist art) demonstrates that a socially engaged Nanyang art as espoused by Lim in his sixth precept (for art to embody social functions) existed. Who Art Should Serve The working class as a cornerstone of socially engaged art is clearly stated in a collective essay titled, “Who Art Should Serve” published in the SCHSGAA catalogue. Says the essay: “We should promote nationalistic culture, and at the same time, for art should serve the working class, art needs to be courageous in its criticisms to correct the mistakes of artistic directions taken by other artists, thus re-directing these artists towards art that serves the working class.”41 Workers such as coolies, street hawkers, miners, cobblers, rubber tappers, rickshaw pullers, construction workers and even child labourers were commonly depicted by social

realist artists, appealing to the working classes who would be familiar with, and who would be able to empathise with, the hardship that all labourers share. Beyond the literal depiction of the everyday life of labourers is the glorifcation of labourers united as a working class regardless of gender and ethnicity. Lim’s Riot (fg. 14.7) captures the tumultuous period of strikes by trade unions and students from 1954 to 1955, the most serious of which was the Hock Lee Bus strike in 1955. His use of a Cubistic angular fragmented mass of fgures to depict the scene of a riot expresses his social awareness of these strikes by workers fghting for better pay and working conditions. His choice of style is unusual as Cubism was discredited by some social realist artists from the SCHSGAA as being anti-realist. Lee Tian Meng’s essay, “Three Reasons against the Ideas of Pablo Picasso” rejected Cubism as a style for it “denies the heritage of tradition, discards humanity and truth in art, and emphasises hypocrisy and anti-realism.”42 Lim’s use of the Cubist style in Riot to depict labourers and students on strike reveals his approach of synthesising Cubism (from the School of Paris) with the realities of local social and political conditions, an approach that he propagated. The Cubist fgures depicted in geometric planes of different hues construct a unifed structure of shapes united in their belief in social action for change. For Lim, the ideology of Cubism as being antirealist did not matter as he was willing to experiment with different representational schemas, be it Surrealistic or Cubistic to convey his ideas. In Resting, Chen Wen Hsi similarly depicts labourers in the style of Cubism as seen in the angular geometric forms of their clothes. These labourers are probably rickshaw pullers as their hats are similar to the ones typically worn by rickshaw pullers to shade themselves from the scorching sun. The rickshaw pullers are depicted as huddled up, holding their knees close to their chests, and they fll the entire picture, forcing the viewer to engage with the reality of

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43 Fan, op. cit., 37. 44 The samsui women are known for forming tightly knit

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communities amongst themselves, their strong work ethic, taking vows not to marry and choosing to live in poverty than take on jobs that would involve vices, such as prostitution. It is estimated that 200,000 samsui women came to Singapore to work as construction or industrial labourers, as well as domestic servants. For a discussion of this body of works depicting rub-

the diffcult working conditions that these rickshaw pullers face in post-war Singapore. The heroic labourer is a recurrent fgure in allegorical paintings by socially engaged artists. Choo Keng Kwang’s Miners is an example of how workers were “often endowed with a strong physique and monumental appearance” to create a heroic image of the working class.43 Beyond such literal depictions of labour is the social realist strategy of deploying the heroic worker as resilient, self-sacrifcing and hard working to awaken the consciousness of the working class across ethnicities. Indian Workers by Lee Boon Wang, an Equator artist, depicts what appears to be a group of Indian workers constructing a road under diffcult conditions in Singapore’s hot climate. This work shares a similar theme to Liu Kang’s painting, Samsui Women, of women who mostly came to Singapore from Guangdong, China, in search of jobs, even those that involved hard labour.44 A Nanyang artist, Liu Kang depicts the samsui women as heroic, working tirelessly, some even barefooted like the woman carrying building materials up the plank. These samsui women, who are the embodiment of labour and selfsacrifce, built Singapore with their own hands. These paintings send a powerful message of a multicultural Singapore built by the working class, regardless of ethnicity or gender. 200

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bish dumps and backyards by Cheong Soo Pieng, refer to Seng Yu Jin and Grace Tng, “Bridging Worlds,” in Cheong Soo Pieng: Visions of Southeast Asia, ed. Yeo Wei Wei (Singapore: The National Art Gallery, Singapore, 2010), 52–61. Lim Hak Tai’s infuential ideas as his most signifcant contribution to Nanyang art was corroborated by the NAFA graduates from the 1950s such as Chung Cheng Sun.

The imagery of the heroic labourer, which recurs in the artworks of both the Nanyang and social realist artists, challenge the narrative of an aesthetic divide between the two. The emphasis of labour adheres to Lim’s ideas to depict the “reality of the South Seas” and for artists to make art that engages with society. Nanyang artists like Chen Wen Hsi, Cheong Soo Pieng and Liu Kang produced socially engaged depictions of labourers that raised social awareness of their plight. As such, the valorisation of the labourer can be conceived as a characteristic of socially engaged Nanyang art that bridges the false dichotomy between the Nanyang artists and social realist artists. Related to the social realist strategy of labour as a metaphor is the motif of construction found in socially engaged Nanyang art. Once again, Lim points the way in Construction on a Site at the Shipyard at Tanjung Rhu which depicts the never-ending cycle of construction and destruction at construction sites in Singapore. The work questions the country’s obsessive pursuit of the new at the expense of its heritage. Socially engaged Nanyang artworks like Lee Kee Boon’s Nanyang University critique the state of Chinese education in Singapore. The scaffolding, a stable, interlocking grid, symbolises the building of a nation-state is an ongoing process; it also suggests the frag-

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ile situation of Chinese education tainted by accusations of its affliations to the left. This motif of a grid is repeated in Liu Kang’s After the Fire I (fg. 14.8) which portrays the devastation caused by a fre, a frequent occurrence in the 1950s and 1960s. In the aftermath, the remnant of a building stands in a grid-like structure. Similarly, Cheong’s drawing Untitled, which depicts workers building a house, features horizontal and vertical lines in grids that dominate the composition. These three pictures adopt the motif of the grid to suggest the dialectical relationship of construction and destruction, necessary processes of revolutionary sacrifce to bring about social and political change. The grid, as scaffold and structural beams, a symbol for construction and destruction, recurs in artworks by the Nanyang and social realist artists. These common expressions unite the socially engaged realists and Nanyang artists and indicate a “third way.” Cheong’s body of drawings that depict backyard and dump sites exemplifed by (Untitled) A Rubbish Dump (fg. 14.9) reveal a recurrent interest in marginalised urban sites, the by-products of urbanisation and construction in the city.45 These works by Nanyang artists reveal a preoccupation with rapid urbanisation in post-war Singapore and a persistent interest in social issues; they underline a need to reappraise the parameters of Nanyang art. Conclusion: Lim Hak Tai’s Third Way Both Sabapathy and Piyadasa correctly recognised Lim Hak Tai as the intellectual force giving the direction that the Nanyang artists would take.46 What has been overlooked are Lim’s ideas that “art is a refection of social ideology” and the development of Nanyang art along a trajectory of social engagement as demonstrated by works discussed in this essay. This essay has traced the emergence and existence of a socially engaged Nanyang art to Lim’s ideas of an art movement that depicts the

“reality of the South Seas” and “localness of the place”; his call for a hybridisation of artistic traditions from different cultures as exemplifed by the eclectic adaptation of representational schemas from the School of Paris and Chinese ink painting; Lim’s belief in education and the social function of art; and his very own works that are examples of socially engaged Nanyang art. Socially engaged Nanyang art as a body of work produced by the Nanyang artists thereby forms a bridge between Nanyang art and social realism, unifed by their shared concern for social issues in Singapore. Lim had shown us that the way to Nanyang art need not be restricted to only the two sources (or ways) identifed by Sabapathy—the School of Paris (West) and Chinese ink painting (East). A third way exists: a socially engaged form of Nanyang art as an art historical category constructed discursively, pictorially and aesthetically by artists and art historians that draws from multiple artistic and cultural sources and contexts. Such art historical categories, like lexicons, are never stable as new ones emerge from alternative perspectives and interpretations, just as how Lim opened a third way of framing “Nanyang art.”

I would like to acknowledge the generous assistance of Janet Fang, Koh Nguang How, Simon Soon, Alison Carroll, Dr Edwin Jurriens, Low Sze Wee and Syed Muhammad Hafz for their invaluable help in sourcing and scanning materials, as well as editing and giving critical comments when I was based in Melbourne. This essay is heavily indebted to a seminal work, Patrick D. Flores, “Social Realism: The Turns of a Term in the Philippines,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context, and Enquiry Issue 34 (Autumn/Winter 2013): 62–75; as well as Francis Choo, “Social Realism in Singaporean Art: Its Beginnings, Practice and Subsequent Decline,” (master’s thesis, Lasalle College of the Arts, 2014).

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Two Types of Nanyang Art: Aesthetic and Socially Engaged Three Sources in Nanyang Art

Aesthetic and Socially Engaged Nanyang Art

1 First Source Chinese ink painting representational schemas and styles (e.g. hanging scroll or hand scroll compositional formats and ink brush techniques).

1 Aesthetic Nanyang art is the main body of works produced by the Nanyang artists that conforms to Sabapathy’s formulation of aesthetic explorations in representational schemas from Chinese ink painting or the School of Paris, and local or Southeast Asian subject matter. Aesthetic Nanyang artworks tend to romanticise and idealise their subject matter, focusing on aesthetic explorations and experimentations without signifcant engagement with the public sphere.

2 Second Source Representational schemas and styles (e.g. easel painting and styles such as Post-Impressionism).

3 Third Source Socially engaged realism representational schemas and styles (e.g. realism, woodcut movement, Surrealism).

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2 Socially engaged Nanyang art seeks to engage with the public sphere by raising awareness of social issues using narrative modes such as allegory, symbolism and metaphors to generate knowledge through didactic and artistic means. Socially engaged Nanyang art is distinct from Social Realism in that the former does not seek to incite social action in the viewer while latter uses art as a vehicle for social change.

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14.1 Cheong Soo Pieng Hungry 1950 Oil on board 50 x 40 cm Private collection 14.2



Two types of Nanyang art: aesthetic and socially engaged

14.3 Lim Hak Tai Lu Xun Shrine 1955 Acrylic on board 50 x 40 cm Collection of Lim Yew Kuan 14.4 Lim Yew Kuan Searching 1951 Oil on canvas 63 x 77.5 cm Collection of National Gallery Singapore

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14.5 Cheong Soo Pieng (Untitled) Mother and Child 1949 Woodcut on paper 20.3 x 17 cm Collection of National Gallery Singapore 14.6 Georgette Chen East Coast Vendor 1965 Oil on canvas 92 x 73 cm Collection of National Gallery Singapore 14.7 Lim Hak Tai Riot 1955 Oil on board 49.5 x 89 cm Collection of National Gallery Singapore

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14.8 Liu Kang After the Fire I 1951 Oil on canvas 98.5 x 131.5 cm Gift of the family of Liu Kang Collection of National Gallery Singapore 14.9 Cheong Soo Pieng (Untitled) A Rubbish Dump Undated Watercolour on paper 27.4 x 37.5 cm Collection of National Gallery Singapore

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As argued by Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, an alternative form of the biopolitical may be conceived as an opposite of biopower, defned by Michel Foucault as the application of sovereignty over subjects and the subjugation of social bodies through discursive and practical regulatory mechanism. Hardt and Negri then observe that one particular form of anti-capitalist insurrection occurs in the use of life and the body as weapons, through which challenges can be mounted against existing power structures. See Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Books, 2005). Mia Bustam, Sudjojono dan Aku [Sudjojono and I] (Jakarta: Pustaka Utan Kayu, 2006), 373–4. The book suggests they were once “nikah” (married), though

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this view is contested. For example, see Peter Lee et al., Inherited & Salvage: Family Portraits from the NUS Museum Straits Chinese Collection, exh. cat. (Singapore: NUS Museum, 2015). S. Sudjojono, “Seni loekis di Indonesia. Sekarang dan jang akan Datang” [Painting in Indonesia. Now and the Future], in Seni Loekis, Kesenian dan Seniman [Painting, the arts and the artist] (Yogyakarta: Indonesia Sekarang, 1946), 3–6. Amir Sidharta, S. Sudjojono: Visible Soul (Jakarta: Museum S. Sudjojono, 2006), 63. John Clark, Asian Modernities: Chinese and Thai Art Compared, 1980s to 1999 (Sydney: Power Publications, 2010), 20.

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The Woman and the Vista: Intimate Revolt of the Cultural Left Simon Soon

More often than not, the revolutionary élan of the cultural left is expressed in and represented by heroic gestures. Common examples include images exposing the destitution of the downtrodden or representations of an uprising of the disenfranchised masses. Subjects that are deemed politicised often trade in stock images that privilege the instructive and instigative quality of the picture over other criteria to rouse the public body into taking political action. Consequently, what is seldom discussed are some of the subtler relationships that transpire between an image and the outcome it inspires. Also, largely absent from our understanding of the cultural left is a history of emotion and sympathy that colours politicised thinking and grounds this history in a particular locale and persons. This essay considers two historical instances 202

from Indonesia and Singapore in order to posit a discussion about the manner in which images take on a spatio-visual quality. The term “spatio-visual” here is regarded as a practice that mediates space and visuality. In this sense, the practice of art is aestheticised and politicised so as to generate specifc strategies and tropes capable of demonstrating special purchase to address the critical conditions of modern life in relation to the urban environment that many artists are trying to make sense of. The political here is defned as a kind of practice, which the essay further qualifes as “spatio-visual.” I further propose a reading of intimacy as a biopolitical concept through which we may discuss the politicisation and aestheticisation of the interpersonal in art.1 Over and beyond the immediate questions of political identity and ideology is then the social terrain with

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which the cultural left is engaged. By thinking through the register of intimate revolt, I make a case for the way in which the image engenders new spatial critique of the present, qualifying the spatio-visual turn as a politics of inclusion and a signifcant register of the post-war modern in Southeast Asia. As artists attempted to direct practice towards a public outside of the gallery, which was perceived as a domain of the elite, the urban fabric as a social space was brought into relief. It was towards this other space of accommodation and critique that the spatio-visual gained currency. The Woman: Bodies that Matter A suitable entry point for our Indonesian example is Di Depan Kelambu Terbuka (In Front of an Open Mosquito Net), painted in 1939 by one of Indonesia’s pioneering modernists S. Sudjojono (1913–1985), a year after the Association of Indonesian Drawing Masters (Persatuan Ahli-Ahli Gambar Indonesia, PERSAGI) was founded. We know from the account of Sudjojono’s second wife, Mia Bustam, frst published in 1992, that the sitter is a prostitute by the name of Adhesi. Not only was she a prostitute, but also someone to whom Sudjojono was possibly once married in Batavia.2 The fgure of Adhesi in Sudjojono’s rendition is seated on a wooden chair in front of the bed frame. One can make out the gauzy linen that envelops her body to be the mosquito net behind her. Embroidered motifs of the orange blossom fank the parted mosquito net, a symbol of bridal purity. And yet, this is not a portrait of conjugal bliss. Adhesi is ashen-faced and leans frailly, her right elbow on the arm of the chair. The iconography recalls the standard portrait painting or photograph, commonly found in households of the native political elite. But unlike the standard portrait that commemorates the aspirations of the sitter, there is an unsettling quality to what is represented here.3

According to the writings of Sudjojono, his criticism was levelled against the commercial value of Mooi Indië (beautiful Indies) paintings, which circulated as tourist souvenirs of Dutch taste. He was also critical of the social value of Mooi Indië that drew on the false sentiment of paradisiacal life in the Dutch colony.4 Reacting to the typical Mooi Indië idyll of a paddy feld in the foreground and a volcano in the distance, which could be metaphors for the unperturbed cosmological and social order in which the Dutch instituted indirect rule through collaboration with local feudal powers, Sudjojono instead turned towards the unsettling and atomised contours of human relationships that emerge from within a domestic space. Here he reveals the strained interaction between two persons: the painter and his beloved subject. Sudjojono calls painting as such jiwa kethok (Javanese for “visible soul”).5 I have come to believe there is a Hegelian element to his notion of jiwa, and that is the geist. Art, in this sense, according to Sudjojono, makes visible the spirit of the age. Art historian John Clark posits that discursive domains aimed at qualifying the “Asian modern” operate on two signifcant, but not exclusive, intersecting registers—the exogenous (that which is external or coming from the outside) and the endogenous (the internal or that arising from within).6 It is through highlighting this binary as a strategy of the modern that we may locate agency in the artist and his or her practice, rather than fall back on the notion of “infuence,” through which a work like Di Depan Kelambu Terbuka is primarily seen as stylistically derivative of European modernism. Even so, the binarism introduced here is not meant as absolute and is productive only up to a certain point, after which a more complex formulation rooted in poetics, such as the rethinking of the revolution through the lens of intimacy and inclusion, can be advanced. Moreover, as I will demonstrate, the attention to art’s spatial context is equally signifcant as a criterion for analysis.

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With the above caveat, we may consider the exogenous. Sudjojono’s Di Depan Kelambu Terbuka may be considered to have a stylistic affnity with Van Gogh’s La Mousmé (1888, fg. 15.1), which features a centrally composed fgure that bears some resemblance to Adhesi. Their poses are similar, though Adhesi appears wizened and haggard next to a portrait of a young provincial girl from Arles in southern France. That is not surprising. After all, Adhesi lived a hard life in the slums of Batavia. The title of Van Gogh’s painting, La Mousmé, references novelist Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème (1887), in which the term is used to describe a young Japanese girl. The painted subject expresses Van Gogh’s romantic attitude towards Arles as a Provençal subject, while betraying his fascination with Japanese woodblock prints, particularly ukiyo-e.7 The resulting painting not only captures the vitality of youth through its graphic composition and exuberant colours, it is also a calculated study of the Other as a subject, a projection of a Provençal maiden through the flter of Japonisme. The pictorial charge is therefore ambiguous: innocent, yet sensual. The comparison is also productive on the grounds that Van Gogh was an artistic personality whom Sudjojono greatly admired and wrote extensively about. It is possible that Sudjojono became aware of this painting through images of it that were reproduced in catalogues that were once housed in Bataviasche Kunstkring’s library. These catalogues sat alongside original Van Gogh paintings from the Regnault collection that were exhibited in Bataviasche Kunstkring from the mid-1930s up to World War II.8 The comparison with Van Gogh is also apt because he was from the Netherlands, a colonising power of the East Indies, which was not eclipsed from his intellectual horizon. In a letter written in 1888 to his sister, Van Gogh notes: I assure you that in our native country people are as blind as bats and criminally 204

stupid because they do not exert themselves to go more to the Indies or somewhere else where the sun shines. It is not right to know only one thing—one gets stultifed by that; one should not rest before one knows the opposite too.9 The opposite, in this instance, offers a frame of reference for self, and is a methodology applicable to artists from different contexts. Understood in relation to a modern artist such as Sudjojono, practising under the condition of colonialism, his artistic admiration of Van Gogh must have at some point intersected with resentment towards the systemic subjugation of Dutch colonialism. This ambivalence is a condition that some writers have argued to be creatively productive, and it bears elaboration. In this instance, one cannot help but summon the “demon of comparison.”10 This is a phrase that Filipino writer José Rizal, in his 19th-century novel Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not), refers to as the condition of mediating discrepant worlds (the colonial and the metropole). These worlds come into contact, in an instance that is at once belated and present, through a gap (both temporal and geographic), which results in works of art that demonstrate both memory and mimicry. In this situation, art historian Patrick D. Flores notes: the local world exceeds itself and slips into the colonial one that is incommensurate, and the imperial world to which it pretends. That said, such pretension, or such pretending, permits the local world to cohabit with the outside and to insinuate the latter within itself. Thus, the colonial country at some point integrates with the world through mastery, and mestizaje.11 Both mastery and the hybrid condition of mestizaje are key here, for they illuminate the calculation that an artist makes as he chooses to

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See Vojtech Jirat-Wasiutynski, “Van Gogh in the South: Antimodernism and Exoticism in the Arlesian Paintings,” in Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: Policing the Boundaries of Modernity, ed. Lynda Jessup (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 185. Although the work entered an American collection fairly early on, the reproduction of its image is widely published. For a list of these publications, see http:// www.nga.gov/collection/gallery/gg84/gg84-46626lit.html (accessed 21 August 2015). Vincent van Gogh, “Letter to Willemien van Gogh.

adopt one particular style in order to advance his or her politics within a locality. Now for the latter, the endogenous. To be modern is a response to the customary of a locale. This might at times result in the formulation of the neo-traditional, a category of art that renovates local aesthetic motifs, principles and processes into a modern form with, at times, a distinct set of institutional practices and domains. This can also be detected in works of art that emerged from within mediums adopted from Europe, which is the case with Sudjojono’s Di Depan Kelambu Terbuka. Adhesi’s sickly body is clumsily propped up against a chair. It is a body whose posture is unregulated by the codifed language of performance and gesture that dominates the classical literary and visual identity of heroes and villains. Unlike, say, the vocabulary of erect postures of characters in a classical wayang repertoire, Adhesi’s body is an undisciplined, untrained and, therefore, unseen body. It is a trope that carries within it associations of marginality, baseness and sickness. In many of his early writings, Sudjojono called for the depiction of a reality that revolved around everyday life: the sugar factory, the undernourished farmer, the pantaloons of a young man,

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Arles, between Saturday, 16 and Wednesday 20 June 1888,” Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters, http://vangogh letters.org/vg/letters/let626/letter.html (accessed 18 August 2015). José Rizal, Noli Me Tangere, trans. Soledad LacsonLocsin (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997), 51. Patrick D. Flores, “Speculations on the ‘International’ via the Philippine,” Filozofski vestnik 35, no. 2 (2014): 175–91. S. Sudjojono, op. cit., 7.

among others.12 As a reaction against prevailing customary codes that regulate representation of bodily strength and vigour, we might read Di Depan Kelambu Terbuka as exposing the hierarchical binary within a customary social order, and in doing so argues for claiming a special purchase on the present as a characteristic of modern art. This characteristic is manifested by the artist training his vision on the broader social reality of Indonesia that had hitherto been sidelined. This transformation signals a move towards sympathising with the base, and constitutes the language of politics during the Indonesian revolution of 1945. The coming together of artists and the public at many of these junctures points to a desire to shape a new space for the modern. This aspiration was often collective and collaborative, spurred on by an urgency to remake the artist as partisan to political struggle. One popular anecdote concerns the production of a poster by Affandi, Boeng, Ajo Boeng (Come On, My Comrade!) (1945). This poster, created during the struggle for independence, was intended to mobilise the Indonesian masses against the returning Dutch. It features Indonesian painter Dullah as the fgure breaking free from the

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13 This account of the genesis of the poster is widely circulated in Indonesia today. It was also reproduced in the wall text at the Affandi Museum in Yogyakarta. 14 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Refections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 6–7. 15 See Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993). 16 Thum Ping Tjin, “‘Flesh and Bone Reunite as One Body’: Singapore’s Chinese-speaking and their Per-

chains of colonial oppression. While the poster was a call to arms, it is also a deceptively witty one. The phrase “boeng, ajo boeng” is said to have been contributed by Indonesian poet Chairil Anwar, who based it on the teasing and coquettish words that prostitutes cry out when soliciting customers.13 By transforming this phrase that originally carries perhaps a slightly manja or teasing tone into a war cry, both Chairil and Affandi succeed in injecting sensual frisson into the serious business of revolution. The poster also attempts to connect political struggle with the language of the street. After all, the soliciting cries of the prostitute are most often heard in the pasar or marketplace. The sex worker has always been seen as an abject fgure, whose profession is often questioned by those who wield moral authority. However, in Chairil’s wordplay, the allusion to the speech of the sex worker as representative of the downtrodden suggests that Affandi’s poster is not just animated by sympathy for the underclass. It is a mode of revolutionary enjoinment that draws from the linguistic resource of the street, and claims it as a central site for both truthtelling and power—aligning the legitimacy of the revolution with the class of the oppressed, the outsider. 206

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spectives on Merger,” Chinese Southern Diaspora Studies 5 (2011–12): 29–56. Chan Cheow Thia & Teng Siao See, “Interview with Lee Leong Seng,” in Education-at-Large: Student Life and Activities in Singapore 1945–1965, eds. Teng Siao See, Chan Cheow Thia & Lee Huay Leng (Singapore: Tangent; World Scientifc Publishing, 2013), 160. Ho Hui Lin, “The 1950s Striptease Debates in Singapore: Getai and the Politics of Culture,” (master’s thesis, National University of Singapore, 2014).

On days when I make imaginative leaps, I like to think that the poster is what the public is looking at in this supposedly unfnished painting titled Perusing a Poster (fg. 10.3), also by Sudjojono. It was painted in 1956, almost a decade and a half later, when he had turned towards a more realist rather than expressionist mode of representation, arguing that this was the jiwa kethok of nation-building after independence had been secured. The painting more likely captures the mood of the 1955 election, the frst democratic election in the new nation of Indonesia. Yet as I make this imaginative leap by suggesting what they are seeing is (speculatively) Boeng, Ajo Boeng, I am also suggesting that Sudjojono’s aesthetic sympathy mirrors what he saw in the democratic ideal of Indonesia, an ideal that expresses a politics of intimacy and inclusion. As Benedict Anderson notes, the “imagined community” of the nation produces a mental image of affnity, even if citizens belonging to the same nation will never get to know most of their fellow citizens in real life. At the same time, this claim of belonging and inclusion therefore resides in the minds of each member, creating what Anderson calls a “horizontal comradeship.”14

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Sudjojono, after all, became a member of the parliament under the ticket of the Communist Party of Indonesia (Partai Komunis Indonesia, PKI) in 1955. In this sense, the bodies that are captured as representative of a crosssection of society on the streets in this painting are “bodies that matter.” Referring to Judith Butler’s book of the same title is intentional, for I want to underline the citational politics evident in regimes of representation that regulate social identities, even if in my use of the phrase, I have expanded the term to canvas the broader political tenor of the postcolony.15 Ultimately, these bodies—along with that of Adhesi the prostitute—are bodies regarded by Sudjojono as worthy of making visible the soul in Indonesian modern art. So in spite of the performative being, in many senses, iterative—trading in stock characters—in making visible these tropes through painterly means, the confgurations of identities become open to slippages and contestations. The Vista: Homeland for the Future Past The trope in which one may detect a contending vision in Malaya is centred on a different set of relational dynamics. Tan Tee Chie’s Giving Instructions (1958, fg. 15.2) is exemplary here. It depicts a mother fgure kneeling next to her child. She wears a samfoo, the typical everyday attire of women from southern China. She kneels in protective embrace of the child as she points towards a vista flled with coconut trees and rolling hillocks. The tropical landscape is bathed in the rays of sunlight that are represented by strong lines issuing from behind the hilly backdrop. The woman in the picture surveys the land with her child and, we may assume from the title, conveys to the child a sense of a new beginning. The gesture of pointing out towards the horizon suggests that she is imparting a newly discovered concept of homeland in this part of the world to her progeny.16 Encapsulated in the work is a

prospect offered to a new generation: the story of mobility and arrival. Here, both land and landscape signify “belonging.” Essentially, the print tells an intergenerational story of Chinese migration to the Nanyang region. At the same time, the woman and child are stand-ins for a community whose horizons are embodied in the landscape. Giving Instructions expresses an idea of a people whose vision of a homeland is encapsulated in the vista. The larger narrative, as will be explored in this section, speaks of a hope that proceeds from a familial bond and is linked to the aspirations of a politicised student body in search of a poetics of homeland in 1950s Malaya. Unlike the Indonesian example, where revolutionary action and its imagined public can be traced back to a love story centred around the image of the fallen woman, opinions about the raucous public in Singapore were coloured by puritanical suspicion. This was fuelled by the anti-yellow movement, which emerged and became a cultural proxy for the anti-colonial struggle from the 1950s onwards in Singapore. According to Lee Leong Seng, a student in the 1950s: Yellow culture of that time refers to representations that were more obscene or engaged in excessive exposure, especially in the depiction of women … There was a book entitled Lan Pi Shu (Blue Paper). Lan Pi Shu was a famous “yellow” publication. It was from Hong Kong.17 The word “yellow” in this context not only connotes immorality, but also identifes the source of immorality as stemming from the crass materialism of Western cultural decay that contributed to the weakening of China since the 19th century. Moreover, the repercussion of this cultural decadence was perceived to have distracted the local populace from addressing more pressing social issues as well as pursuing independence from colonial rule.18

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As a new puritanical mindset took hold, it was directed at the numerous entertainment venues that provided popular night-time diversions to the urban populace from the 1920s to 1960s. Venues such as New World, Great World and Happy World provided affordable entertainment for Singaporeans. They offered a mixture of programmes that catered to the city’s diverse demographics, from cabaret performances to ronggeng, Hollywood movies to bangsawan plays, shopping to circus acts.19 These venues were cosmopolitan “worlds,” in a sense. They were crossroads, at which a broad section of the diverse multicultural populace came to be entertained. Even though these entertainment parks were increasingly regarded as disreputable as the 1950s marched on, they were also regarded as signifcant public spaces. For instance, the Singapore Chinese High Schools’ Graduates of 1953 Arts Association chose to hold a fundraising concert for Nanyang University at Happy World in 1955. In addition, students used theatres located in the amusement park to stage modern Chinese plays such as Lei Yu (Thunderstorm) and Qun Dai Feng (Nepotism), but made it clear that these theatrical productions were “healthy entertainment” to distinguish them from other more salacious forms of entertainment normally associated with these venues.20 Singaporean artists responded to the moralising pressure of the anti-yellow movement, and saw their art as a tool to help address the moral disorder of colonialism. Take, for example, Lim Mu Hue’s depiction of the 1958 Teachers’ Day rally (fg. 15.3). In Lim’s satirical take on the event, he shows a group of seemingly respectable teachers milling around Happy World park under a banner which reads “Long Live the Celebration of Teachers’ Day!” Above the banner are three oversized female striptease dancers performing to a crowd at the entrance of the park. This is based on a photograph published in the local daily, The Straits Times. The teachers were in 208

fact simply using the park as a venue for their rally, given that it could accommodate large congregations, without realising that the media could cast the event in such a negative light. It was Lim Yew Hock, then Chief Minister of Singapore, who, when invited to speak at the rally, subsequently saw the salacious posters and roundly condemned them as “defnitely not Chinese culture.”21 The irony is that while both right-wing and leftist movements in Singapore did not see eye to eye—for instance, Lim Yew Hock himself treated the leftist movement oppressively—one thing the both camps did agree on was what did not constitute Chinese culture.22 Tan Tee Chie’s A Dark Alley (1953, fg. 15.4) is another example. Here we see a very different view of prostitution compared to the Indonesian example mentioned earlier. Unlike the redeeming fgure of Adhesi in Sudjojono’s Di Depan Kelambu Terbuka, Tan shows two prostitutes being surrounded by men in a back lane. The scene depicts the women cornered by leering men, and addresses the issue of sexual exploitation in a pointed manner. There is little ambiguity in the message the artist is trying to convey here. Viewers of the print are compelled to weigh in their moral conscience. The larger debate then, however, revolved around the question of what exactly was Chinese culture. The search for an answer was also in part coloured by the need to address a second question: How was it relevant to Malayan culture? In attempting to answer these questions now, I suggest that the vista is a form of landscape that appears as a trope and conceptual metaphor to convey notions of belonging. This sense of belonging is connected to the question of the place of Chinese political and social identity within the Malayan imagination, as well as an idea of homeland. In the case of Singapore, then, we see an attempt by the cultural left to distance themselves from a particular kind of urban condition, in order to advance an idea of nature as an alternative

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19

Jürgen Rudolph, “Amusements in the Three ‘Worlds,’” in Looking at Culture, eds. Sanjay Krishnan et al. (Singapore: Artres Design and Communications, 1996). 20 Ji Yan, “Malayan Chinese Literature: Development in the Midst of Turbulent Torrents,” in The May 13 Generation: The Chinese Middle Schools Student Movement and Singapore Politics in the 1950s, eds. Tan Jin Quee, Tan Kok Chiang et al. (Petaling Jaya: Strategic Information and Research Development Centre, 2011), 266. 21 “Naked Girl Posters Anger the Chief Minister,” The Straits Times, 10 October 1958, 7. 22 Lim Yew Hock was an ambivalent fgure. His suppression of teacher and student movements led to his eventual defeat in the 1959 general elections. However, his commitment to Chinese culture was ex-

pressed in his support for Nanyang University and the eventual granting of university status to the Chineselanguage institution. 23 Chua Mia Tee, “Shitan fengjinghua de yiyi” [On the signifcance of landscape paintings], in From Words to Pictures: Art during the Emergency, republished from an essay written in 1959 for the catalogue of the Second Equator Art Society Exhibition in 1960 (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 2007), 22–3. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Kevin Chua, “Painting the Nanyang’s ‘Public’: Notes towards a Reassessment,” in Eye of the Beholder: Reception, Audience, And Practice of Modern Asian Art, eds. John Clark, Maurizio Peleggi & T.K. Sabapathy (Sydney: Wild Peony Press, 2006), 86.

space for the public, outside the kind of perceived immoral zones of contact that existing entertainment venues within Singapore’s urban fabric afforded. In Chua Mia Tee’s 1959 essay “Shitan fengjing hua de yiyi” (On the signifcance of landscape paintings), he acknowledges that “different genres are incommensurable.” Using an analogy, he notes, “we cannot judge the value of a million word novel against that of a deeply moving lyrical poem of merely four lines.”23 Reacting in part against the prevailing tendencies in Chinese landscape painting connoisseurship and in part against the fetishisation of formal innovations in modern artistic movements such as Cubism, Fauvism and Post-Impressionism, Chua calls for a form of landscape painting that is not “obsessed with minute details,” in which the viewer “becomes amazed by the painter’s trifing skills and more knowledgeable about the physical structure of the scenery’s individual components.”24 Instead, he prescribes an approach to landscape painting defned by a sense of totality. For Chua, painting landscape is an ability to present “nature in its entirety, about the atmos-

phere and feelings generated by the integrative image consisting of the various elements of the scenery.” Through this attitude and approach, the work of art is able to: directly or indirectly ennoble a viewer in terms of virtues and values as he basks in aesthetic pleasure and his feelings for the scenery. This helps to increase patriotic awareness and a sense of loyalty to our country.25 This statement suggests an attempt to situate the landscape of Malaya in the new political horizon of the nation. Indeed, artists were often trained in plein-air painting. Many Equator Art Society members received their art education at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA), where, as art historian Kevin Chua suggests, they inherited the “critical realism” of the Nanyang painters and proceeded to demonstrate how the rural idyll recorded by many of those artists represented a desire to arrest the fast-disappearing local worlds faced with the onslaught of modernisation.26 In relation to this, I suggest that what they furthermore

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27 See Huawen biye ban tongxue Xingzhou yijiuwusan niandu yishu yanjiuhui zhuban meishu xunhui zhanlan tekan [Singapore Chinese High Schools’ Graduates of 1953 Arts Association travelling art exhibition catalogue], exh. cat. (Singapore: Yishu Yanjiuhui, 1956), 11. Author’s translation. 28 Lai Chee Kien, personal communication with the author, May 2015. 29 Its exhibition history was later recounted in From

inherited from their teachers at NAFA was the desire to pictorialise a sense of place and homeland. Therefore, “critical realism” as a dimension introduced by the painters was also an attempt to bridge the landscape with the social. Perhaps what Chua Mia Tee had in mind when he wrote the above was the epochdefning painting he created four years earlier. Beyond its obvious patriotic register, the painting also argued for a belief that landscape was a genre of social and political signifcance. Titled Epic Poem of Malaya (1955, fg. 15.5), the painting shows a group of young people dressed in white, suggesting that they are high school students. The central fgure towers over the group of students, huddled together, seemingly engrossed by whatever he is telling them. This fgure holds up his right hand, his palm reaching up in a gesture that suggests he is delivering a rousing speech. In his left hand he carries a book with a red cover, which is presumably the eponymous title of the painting. An accompanying caption in a catalogue describes the scene: Who does not passionately love his ancestral country? Who does not passionately love his own kind-hearted compatriots? The fate of the people of any country, and their country’s fate are forever inseparable. As a citizen of Malaya, to be deeply moved by the recitation of an epic poem, 210

30

31 32

Words to Pictures, op. cit. However, no context was given for these events. Cheng Yuit Tung, “Statement,” in The Communist Organization in Singapore, 1948–66, ed. Lee Ting Hui (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1976), 19. Nantah Song (Singapore: Ren Jian Chubanshe, 1955). For the concept of “imagined community,” see Anderson, op. cit.

which documents the encounter with one’s ancestral land, this is only natural. Even if each person may have different level of experiencing the above, even if this was only one part of a picnic’s divertissement program.27 The catalogue was printed on the occasion of the 1956 exhibition organised by the 1953 Arts Association. The last sentence provides an indication of the nature of the activity, even if the historical specifcity has been largely skirted around by numerous iconographical readings since the painting entered Singapore’s National Collection in 1999.28 Primarily serving as a narrative of nation-building, such readings place great emphasis on how a migrant Chinese community fnally took root in this part of the world, fltered through the discourse of “Malayanisation,” the rising colonial (and, later, anti-colonial) ambition to produce a singular post-war cultural and political identity for the disparate populace that inhabits the British territories on the Malay Peninsula. However, the scene also describes a very specifc event. What was taking place was in fact a student picnic. Such excursions were often organised under the auspices of leftleaning student bodies and were commonplace throughout the 1950s.29 Workers would join the students on many of these events, which were typically held on the beaches along the

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east coast or other rural areas in Singapore. The organisers of these events would arrange transportation, and ask participants to assemble at an appointed location—Majestic Theatre was one—to be picked up. During these picnics, there were games and entertainment, as well as poetry recitals and singing. Amidst the revelry, covert communist party members would step up and speak about their political goals within the framework of an independence struggle, often connected to the desire to reconnect the British Crown colony of Singapore with Malaya. Hence, these gatherings were popularly known as “communist picnics.” A participant of a picnic, Cheng Yuit Tung, who was then 20 years old, recalls: Upon arrival at the picnic site, we were given the opportunity of free activities … After lunch we were instructed to form into a big circle where we played many types of games … After that some organisers came up to tell stories during which they introduced topics on world events. They concentrated mainly on the events and revolution in China.30 One could read Chua’s Epic Poem of Malaya as transforming the “communist picnic,” with some level of symbolic fourish, into a moral allegory. This is suggested by the colour of the book that the central fgure is holding with his left hand: the revolutionary red of socialism. But how is this imagined textual work connected to an idea of landscape? One possible connection is a text published in 1955, the Nantah Song, by the 1953 Arts Association to raise funds for the establishment of a Chinese-language tertiaryeducation institution. This text would not have escaped Chua’s notice, since he was a member of both the 1953 Arts Association and its successor organisation, the Equator Art Society. The opening verse is worth quoting here at length:

Our days on the equator is like an endless song … We sing to the mighty mountains, we sing to the blazing sun, we sing to the rich blue sea, we sing to the hardworking ordinary people, we sing to our great ancestors, we sing to the brilliance of Chinese culture, sing to the birth pangs that accompany the birth of Nanyang University! O, Malaya, we are here, we call out to you, sing to you!31 If this text was the basis of the imagined epic as hinted by the title of the painting, then the book in the painting also symbolises the irredentist goals of these students. The Chinese school students saw the history of the Malayan nation as resonating with the socialist goals of their present-day struggle. The confation of the mythic landscape into a real-life scenario in this painting spells out a contradiction. On the one hand, it draws on the conventions of history painting, with its connection to the institutional prestige of the academy and the hierarchy of genres, using symbolic function to compose a grand narrative suited to nationalist aspiration. On the other hand, the painting also attempts to forge a history from the ground up, showing a group of high school students within a rural setting, being roused into political awareness. In Chua’s estimation, landscape had to contain more than a sentiment of belonging. It had to be imbued with great ideological weight and agency, which also defned the terms of one’s dream of independence and homeland to the broader goals of a socialist commonwealth. For Chua, the purpose of landscape as genre, as a means to pictorialise totality, was to convey a sense of the whole through the vista as nation. The genre serves as a complementary alternative to Benedict Anderson’s thesis that the “imagined community” is primarily proliferated through the printing press.32 The painting was part of a travelling art exhibition, a point that is also seldom discussed

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in the history of the work’s production and reception. The exhibition began at the Chinese Chamber of Commerce before moving to the Hokkien Huay Kuan (Fujian Clan Association). Though not mentioned in the catalogue, the exhibition also travelled to Kuala Lumpur. It was then staged in the community halls of villages that dotted the outskirts of Singapore township.33 In this sense, the circulation of Epic Poem of Malaya in the form of a travelling exhibition mobilises this visual discourse of the vista, interacting across both urban and rural spaces. As the title suggests, the red book is also an epic. This conveys a sense that the text and the discourse were thought of as having a performative quality to them.34 The enactment of history, requiring oratorical prowess, becomes a communal event that takes place outdoors in nature. For the migrant Chinese community who were torn between acknowledging China or Malaya as their homeland, the concept of an epic was not only about striking deep roots; it also summoned the spectre of history as a means to identify oneself with the land. It is an attempt to defne a homeland for a kind of future past, predicated on a pseudo-predictive notion of time, whereby both a future for a nation-in-waiting and a past for a nation-thatis-already-there are collectively imagined as a dialectical realisation of a communist utopia. In this sense, Epic Poem of Malaya attempts to write a different history and future into the land. As a response to the predominant view accorded by the British that the land was known as Tanah Melayu, or Malay soil, the painting creates a counter argument that the land and landscape are able to imagine a more accommodating history, one that is not bound by the exclusionary categorisation of race, or the privileging of one racial group over another. Featuring students as principal actors, the painting does not fall into the conventional genre of landscape painting. Instead, one can say it offers an invitation to imagine, to be 212

roused by speech and enter into a landscape of collective imagination—it proposes an idea of the land as a welcoming vista, an international in the communist sense of the word, accommodating and inclusive of those coming from other parts of the world.35 Conclusion This essay has ventured two instances in which interpersonal affection, whether the private love between an artist and his model or the intergenerational bonds between mother and child, is entwined with a larger ideological discourse. Even if such intimacy associated with the interpersonal is often regarded as bourgeois in value and character, therefore excised from conventional account of revolutionary struggle focusing on the broader issue of class, I suggest that the interpersonal as a framework is signifcant as a locus for the larger politics of inclusion that challenge the way we think about social spaces and bonds. Such representations have engendered a way to characterise politicised action as a form of intimate revolt. A reading that explicates the politics of the cultural left along this line, which sustains both micro-history and the larger political forces that shape one’s experience of modernity, is an attempt to recover from our modern past, a social art history that doubly serves as a history of emotion. This essay points to two examples. The frst example illustrates how the image of the prostitute by Sudjojono provides a revolutionary baseline for the discourse of intimacy and inclusion in Indonesia’s independence struggle that was then deployed in agitprop created by Affandi and Chairil Anwar during Indonesia’s War of Independence as a call to arms. The second example elaborates on the concept of landscape in relation to Nanyang and the subsequent treatment of landscape as a locus of history in the promulgation of a communist irredentism, and how the concept of the travel-

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33 Tay Boon Pin, interview with the author, May 2012. 34 The Chinese word for “epic poem” used in Chua’s painting is “shishi.” It suggests a long narrative poem in the Homeric sense, ordinarily relating details of heroic deeds and signifcant events connected to a particular culture or nation.

ling exhibition then became a means through which such ideas were disseminated. In both instances, spaces became both pictorial tropes and actual sites in which the experience of modern life was expressed and circulated to a public. In doing so, we may think of the spatiovisual quality that an image possesses as carrying affective charge. Iconographic analysis focusing solely on the ideological message of an artwork limits our understanding of objects to

35 This refers to Friedrich Engel’s rejection that class struggle and revolution can take place in one country alone, arguing instead for change that is global in character. This is unlike, say, Stalin’s notion of “socialism in one country.”

content. Instead, the emotional scale that we may experience in works of art is always already spatial in character, whether this pertains to the history of its reception and patterns of circulation, or the undercurrent of feelings shaped by the personal and social compact, which spurs one’s regard for others. The passions that drive politics begin with those closest to oneself, which propels ideas, moves people, enters new spaces and opens new vistas.

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15.1 Vincent van Gogh La Mousmé 1888 Oil on canvas 73.3 x 60.3 cm Chester Dale Collection National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

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15.2 Tan Tee Chie Giving Instructions 1958 Woodblock print on paper 10.3 x 15.5 cm Collection of Fukuoka Asian Art Museum © Tan Tee Chie’s Family 15.3 Lim Mu Hue Celebrating Teachers’ Day Undated Pen and ink on paper 27.3 x 18.6 cm Estate of Lim Mu Hue, National University of Singapore Museum Collection

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Tan Tee Chie A Dark Alley 1953 Woodblock print on paper 15.5 x 20.5 cm Collection of National Gallery Singapore 15.4

Chua Mia Tee Epic Poem of Malaya 1955 Oil on canvas 112 x 153 cm Collection of National Gallery Singapore 15.5

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1

For an introduction to the trade networks of Southeast Asia, refer to Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).

2

Amitav Acharya, Singapore Biennale 2013, If the World Changed (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 2013), 15–9. 3 Ibid.

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Cultural Wars in Southeast Asia: The Birth of the Critical Exhibition in the 1970s Seng Yu Jin

What is the art historical signifcance of exhibitionary histories in Southeast Asia, and how is it meaningful to study this comparatively across this region? To answer these questions, it is critical to acknowledge that Southeast Asia is not a natural region but an artifcial notion—a social construct—born from a collective social imagination and geography in terms of territorial proximity, economic exchanges and interterritorial movement of peoples. Southeast Asia was carved out by almost every major colonial power in history, each vying for the region’s rich material resources. This intensity of colonial intervention provides a real collective historical experience in the region. The Portuguese were the frst to arrive in the Sultanate of Malacca in 1511, followed by the Spaniards in the Philippines, the Dutch in Indonesia, British in Singapore and Malaya, the Americans in the Philippines and fnally the Japanese during World War II. These colonial powers consolidated their political and economic control over their colonies, and constrained existing trade networks that had previously connected places and cities, moved peoples and transferred ideas in this region.1 214

Despite the region’s diversity, the concept of “Southeast Asia” has gained traction in academia, state discourses and even in the minds of the peoples who live here. Amitav Archarya draws on Benedict Anderson’s concept of nationstates as “imagined communities” to develop what he terms as “imagining the region” whereby Southeast Asia is an “imagined and socially constructed community.”2 Archarya outlines the material comprising territorial proximities, geographical and economic interconnections, and the ideational that thrives on a desire for region-ness and regionalism.3 This sustained desire and search for the concept of regionalism is based on ideas and myths of shared past histories decisively and signifcantly shaped by local actors. These ideas of region-ness manifest in: oral histories of myths, poems, literature, illustrations, institutions, artworks, material culture and, as this thesis argues, also in exhibitions; in particular, art exhibitions that functioned as vehicles of resistance against colonialism. Such exhibitions generated and disseminated shared ideas of a postcolonial reality and empowered people by creating new subjectivities to challenge existing ones forged by colonialism. Prolif-

Charting Thoughts

erating across the region, art exhibitions served as ideational signposts that mapped the inclinations of artists, who were imbued with agency to engage with and surmount the singular to belong to an imagined collective with shared ideas for a postcolonial future for Southeast Asia. An analysis of these regional exhibitions also reveals a pattern of a new exhibitionary mode: the “critical exhibition,” which shares ideas to advance different ways of conceiving the making and practice of art. Yet, as this essay will show, it was up to the artists to produce these critical exhibitions through their own agency, without preconceived notions of constructing a regional art form. In order to understand this shift to the critical exhibition that occurred in the 1970s, or the continuation of past exhibitionary modes, we need to examine intersections between the changing global, regional and local contexts that corresponded with the changing art worlds. Intersections between Changing Contexts and Art Worlds of Southeast Asia: Salon, National and Internationalist Exhibitions from 1945 to 1973 Art exhibitions are time-specifc events that bring together an ensemble of disciplines, practices and technologies, as a primary site of exchange and construction, to mediate between the art worlds and their contexts. The art worlds in Southeast Asia operate with their own institutional structures and discourses that are in turn engaged with local, regional and global social, political and cultural conditions. This history of exhibitions in the region serves to study the patterns of the changing exhibitionary modes with shifting inclinations, affnities and sympathies to new realities. The art exhibition as a site for exchanges brings together disciplines that have affnities with each other but are separated by boundaries, such as art history, art criticism, curation, postcolonial and Southeast Asian studies, technologies of display and discourse analysis. As a site of

construction, the art exhibition is imbued with agency to generate and deconstruct knowledge by mapping and, in the process, making visible its orders, categories and structures. Tracking the exhibition as a pervasive form and format to understand its impact on modern art developments in Southeast Asia requires attending to the ruptures and continuities within changing art worlds that they are an indispensable part of, and the wider social and political contexts that in turn shape these worlds. It is therefore the task of this essay to trace the history of art exhibitions by focusing on their structures and formats—not all are alike. Exhibition types which existed before 1945, such as solo, group, ethnic and Salon-type displays, reveal continuities in format, while new ones, such as medium-based, national and internationalist shows, were invented and mushroomed, post1945, across the region. By the turn of the 20th century, survey exhibitions (solo and group) became established as the primary way of displaying art. Scholarship on Southeast Asian art has tended to represent exhibitions as monolithic and static, however its structures, formats and discourses have changed over time in two phases. The frst phase (from the turn of the 20th century to 1973) saw the emergence of different exhibitionary formats, the most dominant of which were national, ethnic-based, mediumbased and internationalist exhibitions. The second phase started from 1974. It spawned the emergence of a new exhibitionary mode—the critical exhibition—that has produced manifestos, challenged dominant categories of art, envisioned a new role for art in society, and proposed new ways of thinking and making art. The Rise of the National and the Regional in Salon Art Exhibitions Exhibitions in Southeast Asia in the 1950s were dominated by Salon-type displays, modelled after the Salon de Paris that was frst organ-

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ised by the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1725 and, from 1881 onwards, the Société des Artistes Français. Salon de Paris exhibitions were held annually or biannually and, from 1748 onwards when they introduced a jury prize, achieved the status of an arbiter, determining taste and quality of art. John Clark in Modern Asian Art identifes art societies that founded art schools and organised exhibitions to support their own schools. For instance, the Indian Society of Oriental Art (founded in 1907) started an art school and organised exhibitions to promote the Bengal School, revealing an incipient network of art academies, art societies and exhibitions.4 Initially organised by fne art societies, some of the Salon exhibitions subsequently became institutionalised as national art salons, performing “the important function of defning what is national art, categorising works and certifying artists by giving awards and stimulating a national art market to create a standard for adjudicating price.”5 In this region, the Salon exhibition as an exhibitionary mode stamped its infuence on the art worlds by becoming not only an important stable fxture where artworks could be exhibited and artists recognised nationally, but also a guardian of artistic quality that shaped tastes and determined the pecking order of artists. Clark’s study of Salon-type exhibitions in Calcutta and Tokyo can form the basis of comparative studies in the history of exhibitions, understood within the art world, involving its network of the market, exhibition, and discourse; these determine how art is received, legitimised and understood in Southeast Asia. Other Salon-type national art exhibitions discussed by scholars offer different ways in which exhibitions can be appraised. Boitran Huynh-Beattie regarded the 1959–1964 annual Spring Painting Awards organised by the Department of Culture in Vietnam as heralding a “Golden Age” for artists from the Society of Young Saigonese Artists, as its members such as Nguyễn Trung and Đình Cương won 216

awards and gained national fame.6 The annual Spring Painting Awards, fashioned after the Salon d’Automne exhibitions that coincided with the changing seasons, were consolidated and institutionalised, becoming permanent fxtures of the Vietnamese art world. In Singapore, this was achieved partly through building exclusivity seen in the formation of the Société des Artistes Chinois or the Salon Art Society, subsequently renamed the Society of Chinese Artists (SCA). Registered on 20 January 1936, the SCA quickly established itself as the most prestigious art society in Singapore and, henceforth, was exempted from registration by the British administration. From the SCA’s founding up to 1941, it successfully organised fve Society of Chinese Artists Annual Art Exhibitions, only to be disrupted by World War II.7 Salon-type exhibitions primarily organised by art societies gradually institutionalised and gained a measure of stability after the War, as countries in Southeast Asia stepped into decolonisation fuelled by independence movements. Stringent entry requirements into the SCA created a perceived exclusivity, further amplifed by its accomplished members, such as Tchang Ju Chi, Dai Yinlang, Chen Puzhi, Chen Chong Swee and Liu Kang, who were recognised not only as prominent artists but also intellectuals with qualifcations conferred by prestigious academies in China. Gaining acceptance into the SCA was immediately recognised as an artistic achievement. The SCA’s penchant for inviting renowned artists like Xu Beihong and Liu Haisu to exhibit, give talks and raise funds for the Sino-Japanese War further raised its profle and status (fg. 16.1).8 These means, therefore, enabled the SCA to accumulate symbolic capital through its annual Salon-type exhibitions, and secure its position as the most prominent art society in 1930s Singapore. The concept of a national art exhibition differentiates itself from the Salon-type exhibition in its search for the national; it is, like the

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4

John Clark, Modern Asian Art (Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 1998), 175–9. Ibid., 181. Boitran Huynh-Beattie, “Saigonese Art during the War: Modernity versus Ideology,” in Cultures at War: The Cold War and Cultural Expression in Southeast Asia, eds. Tony Day & Maya H.T. Liem (Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Press, 2010), 95. According to Yeo Mang Thong, the sixth Annual Art Exhibition scheduled in December 1941 did not materialise due to the encroaching Japanese army. See Yeo Mang Thong, “The Society of Chinese Artists (1935–1941): The First Organizationally Complete Chinese Art Society in Singapore,” in Essays on the

History of Pre-War Chinese Painting in Singapore (Singapore: Singapore Society of Asian Studies, 1992), 41. 8 Xu Beihong gave talks on the two occasions he came to Singapore by invitation of the SCA in 1939 and 1941. Liu Haisu gave a talk in 1941 when he came to raise funds for the war in China. 9 See Apinan Poshyananda, Modern Art in Thailand: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 55. 10 See The 1st to 13th National Exhibition of Art Catalogue 1949–1962 (Bangkok: Silpakorn University, 2002), 8. 11 Ibid., 8–9.

concept of citizenship, often tied to a particular country and attempts (either silently or overtly) to construct a national cultural identity through art. It is premised on the notion that art and artists, as a unifying cultural force, can be marshalled to serve a country striving for nationalism and independence. Art was thought to somehow exhibit and manifest the nation and its identity, and national art exhibitions evidenced the “national characteristics” of art. Apinan Poshyananda in Modern Art in Thailand identifed this role played by the National Exhibition of Art, organised primarily for art students from Silpakorn University and Po Chang School to showcase their talents by saying that when “placed under the rubric ‘national exhibition,’ it affrmed for the viewers an acceptance of modern Thai art being practised by local artists.”9 Silpa Bhirasri, who was instrumental in the founding of Silpakorn University (established on 12 October 1943) and taught at its only faculty then, the Faculty of Painting and Sculpture, represented a prominent voice that championed the need for Thai artists to be free in their creative practice in tandem with how “contemporary art all over

the world has freed itself from traditional styles which relied on academism in order to express artistic personality from feeling and technique.”10 Tasked to be jointly responsible for organising the inaugural National Exhibition of Art, roles they played until its 14th edition, Silpakorn University and Bhirasri were given the power to shape the direction of the exhibitions in line with the education curriculum of the University. For instance, the exhibition accepted entries in numerous categories of art such as painting, applied arts, children’s art, decorative arts, advertising, graphic arts, drawing, painting and sculpture, which coincided with subjects taught at Silpakorn University, giving artists an additional impetus to work and develop in these areas.11 In A Brief History of Malayan Art, Marco Hsu identifes Salon-type national art exhibitions, such as the National Art Exhibition held at Kuala Lumpur for artists from the Federated States in 1959 and the 1961 second art exhibition of the Festival of Arts organised by the Ministry of Culture in Singapore, as signs of a maturing art community. Although Boitran, Apinan and Hsu do not analyse such exhibi-

5 6

7

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12

Marco Hsu, A Brief History of Malayan Art, trans. Lai Chee Kien (Singapore: Millenium Books, 1999), 81. 13 Huyhn-Beattie, op. cit., 93. 14 Andrew Ranard, Burmese Painting: A Linear and Lateral History (Chiangmai: Silkworm Books, 2009), 160. 15 Ma Thanegi, Paw Oo Thett (1936–1993): His Life and His Creativity (Yangon: Daw Moe Kay Khaing, 2004), 8–9. 16 Magtanggul Asa, The First Exhibition of Non-Objective Art in Tagala (Manila: House of Asa, 1954), iii. 17 ASEAN first comprised five countries—Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand— and was expanded to include Brunei Darus-

tions (termed “salon national art exhibitions” by Clark) as a mode that has defned, categorised, legitimised and infuenced the reception, dissemination and conception of art in the art world, the importance of this type of exhibition is registered in their narratives. The shift from Salon-type exhibitions to internationalist exhibitions that promoted specifc styles, media and ideologies sourced from around the world began in the 1950s and 1960s across Southeast Asia. Social realism and abstraction represented two trajectories of internationalism that marked this shift in the region. The social realist strand of internationalism manifested in the Equator Art Society. In his book A Brief History of Malayan Art, Hsu devotes an entire chapter, “Vibrant Young Artists (B),” to the 1956 exhibition organised by the Singapore Chinese High Schools’ Graduates of 1953 Arts Association and the exhibitions by the Equator Art Society. He traces discourses centred around these exhibitions by highlighting specifc artworks and essays in their respective catalogues and quoting exhibition texts (such as “Art belongs to society—it is public, and should serve the public”) to mark these exhibitions as ideologically drive, describing them, stylistically, as “mainly realist in na218

18

19

20

salam (1984), Vietnam (1995), Laos and Myanmar (1997), and Cambodia (1999). T.K. Sabapathy, “Thoughts on an International Exhibition on Southeast Asian Contemporary Art,” in 36 Ideas from Asia: Contemporary South-East Asian Art (Singapore: ASEAN COCI & Singapore Art Museum, 2002), unpaginated. Message by Salvador H. Laurel in the Anugerah Senilukis Kumpulan Syarikat Philip Morris [The Philip Morris Group of Companies Art Awards] (Kuala Lumpur: Balai Seni Lukis Negara, 1998), unpaginated. ASEAN Plan of Action on Culture and Information (Jakarta: ASEAN Secretariat, 1993), 43.

ture.”12 Solo exhibitions that propelled “avantgarde” styles like Cubism and abstraction were mounted by individual artists, such as Tạ Tỵ who was described by Boitran as being committed to “Cubism for a brief period of time before venturing into abstract art.”13 Andrew Ranard recounted Paw Oo Thet’s solo exhibition in Burma, described as groundbreaking for adopting Cubist and semi-abstract styles, “as the spark which ignited the ‘modern art movement’” in 1963.14 This show was held at the Burma-America Institute, a cultural centre sponsored by the United States Information Service (USIS), and opened on the same day American President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas (22 November 1963). It was a great success for Paw Oo Thet. Most of his works were sold even though his paintings drew from the Cubist visual language, a modernist break from “traditional” paintings dominated by realism.15 In the Philippines, the 1953 exhibition The First Exhibition of Non-Objective Art in Tagala featured non-representational works that included Cubist, semi-abstract and symbolist paintings, marking the emergence of exhibitions based on propagating styles conceived as “non-objective.” This went against the tide of the dominant Amorsolo school that featured

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realist and idealised landscape and fgure-types which embodied the imagined Philippines.16 From 1957 a new exhibitionary mode emerged—the regional exhibition—with a scope and scale much larger than Salon and national art exhibitionary modes. The First
Southeast
Asia
Art
Exhibition:
A
Southeast
Asian
Competition and Exhibition organised by the Art Association of the Philippines marked the birth of the regional exhibition. It was soon followed by other regional art competitions like the Philip Morris ASEAN Arts Awards in 1994. Patrick Ng Kah Onn’s painting, titled Batek Malaya, won frst prize at the 1957 exhibition, a signal that batik as a textile was imbued with an imagined “region-ness.” Ng’s painting on batik, which evokes the “national” and the “regional,” partly reinvented batik painting as a hybrid genre: a traditional textile craft and an easel format infused with regional pictorial idioms. This is a refection of why Seah Kim Joo’s batik painting was accepted by the Modern Art Society as the bastion of avant-garde artistic practices 15 years later in the 1972 exhibition that also did not show Cheo Chai Hiang’s conceptual 5′ x 5′ (Singapore River). Besides exhibitions, the 1964 Seminar on Fine Arts
of
Southeast
Asia, under the auspices of the Association
of 
Southeast
Asian
Institutions
of
 Higher
Learning, nurtured a growing interest in understanding art from a regional perspective. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) was established in 1967.17 This grouping of countries represented Southeast Asia in fostering regional cooperation based on the principle of equality and respect for the sovereignty of individual nation-states. Regional cooperation was skewed towards forging economic exchanges and interdependence, but the forging of a regional identity received a measure of focus through the ASEAN art exhibitions. In art historical terms, the birth of ASEAN heralded a new era of cultural cooperation

among its members. As art historian and critic T.K. Sabapathy noted, “Art exhibitions are one of several cultural initiatives which are deemed as useful in displaying regional consciousness and diversity.”18 The frst exhibition to mark the establishment of ASEAN was held in Jakarta in 1968. In 1972, the ASEAN Art Exhibition was organised to mark the 5th ASEAN Ministerial Meeting in Singapore where the fve founding members of ASEAN (Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines) held an exhibition of paintings and photography. The concept of a roving or mobile exhibition that would travel to the various capitals of the participating countries was mooted and actualised in the 1974 ASEAN Mobile Exhibition in Kuala Lumpur. The ASEAN Committee on Culture and Information (COCI), which was set up in 1978, inherited the objectives of ASEAN as an institutional endeavour to promote a “sense of regional identity and contribute to the enrichment of the culture of ASEAN.”19 The Bali Summit in 1976 laid the groundwork for the establishment of COCI as its framework, and included the support of “ASEAN scholars, writers, artistes and mass media representative to enable them to play an active role in fostering a sense of regional identity and fellowship.”20 Cultural activities, of which the visual arts were a part, were deemed useful for forging a regional identity through ASEAN. The ASEAN exhibitions exemplifed how art could be pressed to serve diplomacy, a connection that forms the very basis of COCI’s existence. The signifcance of “culture and information” was of vital importance to ASEAN, especially during its early years when some member countries were wary of each other’s intentions. It was ASEAN’s programmes on culture and information which served as the spadework that generated the spirit of regionalism during ASEAN’s infant years. The South East Asia Cultural Festival organised by the then Ministry of Culture in Singapore continued the regional exhibition-

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Jennifer Lindsay, “Festival Politics: Singapore’s 1963 South-East Asia Cultural Festival,” in Cultures at War, op. cit., 228. Ibid., 243. Ibid., 229.

24 See “Introduction,” in Student Activism in Asia: Be-

ary mode where “national, regional and global factors intersect in cultural display.”21 Jennifer Lindsay provides a way of examining a mode of exhibition organised by the state that involves strategic systems of representations by projecting Singapore as “a nation of gathered races performing to and each other, a vision extended to Southeast Asia as a whole”; a multiracial exemplar that embodies the culture and racial strands of this region traced to its Malay, Chinese and Indian sources corresponding to Singapore’s racial make-up.22 Such state-sponsored and choreographed exhibitionary displays are a mode of exhibition and a site where the networks of the art world and “cultural networks cut across political and ideological ones.”23 Lindsay’s focus on the politics of constructing national and regional cultural identities within the context of the Cold War provides another way of studying modes of exhibitions as strategic systems of representation, where national, regional and global forces intersect. This review of current scholarship on exhibitions in Southeast Asia in the 1950s and 1960s reveals how exhibitions can be viewed not just as types, such as solo or group exhibitions as in the majority of current literature, but as modes of exhibitions. The approaches employed by scholars like Clark, who looked into national art salons as a mode of exhibition, and Apinan, who looked into the reception of exhibitions, offer different and useful ways to appraise exhibitions, further developed by 1970s scholarship on exhibitions and exhi-

bitionary discourses. These scholars deepened analysis of exhibitionary discourses that deploy strategic systems of representation in the display, reception and discourse of art by understanding the national salon and regional types as exhibitionary modes that were new before the 1970s. Another type of exhibition—the critical exhibition—that emerged only in the 1970s in the region had not yet been conceived and historicised. The rest of this essay will focus on the social, political and cultural conditions that provided the context for the birth of the critical exhibition in the 1970s.

21

22 23

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tween Protest and Powerlessness, eds. Meredith L. Weiss & Edward Aspinall (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 5.

The Birth of the Critical Exhibition in Southeast Asia in 1970–1994 The late 1960s and 1970s period was key in the history of exhibitions in Southeast Asia. It was a tumultuous time, characterised by radical student activism; a push for economic development by governments across the region that resulted in an unprecedented expansion of higher education; the spread of authoritarian and military regimes, as in the cases of Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia; and the looming spectre of the Cold War as manifested in the intensifcation of the Vietnam War (1955–1975) in the early 1970s, resulting in the eventual withdrawal of American forces in 1975. This was a period when ideas and ideologies mattered, marked by a resurgent youth movement that mainly involved students from higher education institutions such as univer-

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sities and fne art academies that were either part of these universities or autonomous institutions. Students in this period of social and political upheaval saw themselves as the elite intellectual vanguards of their country, a moral force for social justice, and a bastion against corruption. They could claim to be so by their perceived lack of vested interests to advance their careers within the political system, and did not stand to receive any fnancial gain. Academics who taught in these tertiary institutions identifed with them to a similar but lesser extent. Unlike the academics and lecturers who were clearly professionals, students occupied an in-between status, neither wholly professionals nor marginalised elites whose roles were defned more exclusively in terms of their contributions to nation building and economic development.24 Student activism provides an important context for understanding the emergence of critical exhibitions in the early 1970s because many of them were also artists enrolled in academic art institutions such as the Indonesian Academy of Fine Arts (Akademi Seni Rupa Indonesia, ASRI) in Yogyakarta and the Faculty of Painting, Sculpture and Graphic Arts at Silpakorn University. These artist–students were the heartbeat of the new critical exhibition, a mode that was socially engaged, conceptual and, in the display of art, shifted towards public spaces as well as propelled artists to the intellectual forefront of broader movements concerned with poverty, democracy, the social and economic conditions of the people, anticolonialism and nation building. 1974: The Birth of Critical Exhibitions in Southeast Asia

more egalitarian society and were against proAmerican policies which they viewed as being neo-imperialist and pro-capitalist. The New Left—which departed from the Marxist focus on the labour movement and class struggle, as well as communism’s tendency towards authoritarianism to broaden the range of reforms to include democracy, human rights, gay rights and freedom of speech—could be seen in the Philippines and Thailand. Mao Zedong’s ideas on art were particularly infuential on the New Left in the Philippines and Thailand, derived from his 1942 Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art that called for the arts to serve the people. The second wave that began around the late 1960s and continued throughout the 1970s saw student protestors who were initially sympathetic to the developmentalist goals of regimes turn against these very same regimes. In their eyes, these governments had become too authoritarian and corrupt. These students sought for reformation through institutional critique, counter-hegemonic discourse (in the form of manifestos) and social engagement to restore the meaning and relevance of art to people’s lives. Their aim was to restore these regimes to their ideological origins by “returning to the people”; this was most evident in countries like Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines. The emergence of the critical exhibition began in the context of the second wave of student protests, although its roots could be traced to the frst wave of student movements in Southeast Asia. The Rise of Artist–Student Activism and the Emergence of Critical Exhibitions The Black December Incident in Indonesia

The late 1960s and 1970s was marked by waves of student movements in Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Burma and Singapore. The frst wave was a leftist one beginning in the late 1950s through to the early 1970s, in which students fought for a

1974 is a historically signifcant year for student movements across Southeast Asia. Suharto’s New Order was established in the wake of a coup that ended the rule of Sukarno and the Communist Party of Indonesia (Partai Komu-

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nis Indonesia, PKI) in 1965. The coup which occurred on 1 October resulted in the death of Indonesia’s highest-ranking generals, whose bodies were unceremoniously thrown into a well. The PKI was held responsible and banned in 1966. A purge ensued with thousands of communists killed or imprisoned, regardless of whether they were proven or suspected. The military, as led by Suharto, pursued a developmental regime focused on economic growth and destroyed the ability of the working class, farmers and the economically disenfranchised to represent themselves politically. But its overall developmental strategy soon appeared to excessively beneft foreign investors and select elites.25 The New Order was perceived as having deviated from its original ethos of reforming Indonesia for its people, to become corrupt and authoritarian. This culminated in the Malari affair on 15 January 1974. The “vanguard in vacuum” created by the New Order and its repressive policies allowed students to assume the role as leaders of society, a moral force that would rescue the nation. Widespread rioting and student protests broke out in Jakarta and across campuses in the early 1970s, criticising the government for its corrupt activities as well as and ignoring the plight of the poor. Connections between the student movements raging in Indonesia and artist–students were clearly made in FX Harsono’s solo exhibition titled FX Harsono: The Life and the Chaos of Objects, Images and Words, organised by the Erasmus Huis, the cultural centre of the Netherlands in Jakarta, in 2015. This solo exhibition followed recent awards: the Prince Claus Awards of the Netherlands (2014) and the Joseph Balestier Award for the Freedom of Art in Singapore (2015). Both awards recognised Harsono’s role as a socially engaged artist whose works address the issue of democracy and the need for counter-hegemonic histories that are alternatives to state-controlled narratives and give a voice to the marginalised and disenfranchised. This exhibition featured a 222

timeline that started with the Malari Incident as the catalyst, and context in which one could understand the soon-to-occur Black December Incident. Harsono was one of the leading proponents of the Black December Incident in 1974. This has been cited by art historians as the precursor to the emergence of the New Art Movement (Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru, GSRB) in 1975.26 Prior to the Black December Incident, groups of young artist–students in Yogyakarta and Bandung had begun to experiment with new art forms that challenged the aesthetic and theoretical conventions of modern art, which were largely defned by painting and sculpture as taught in the art academies. These artist– students critiqued their academic art curriculum as being too conservative and restrictive for limiting fne art to disciplines defned as painting, sculpture, printmaking and graphic arts. They advocated alternative art forms that offered new ways of using non-art materials such as found objects and organic materials from everyday life that the rakyat or people could easily relate to. One such group was based in Yogyakarta and formed the Group of Five (Kelompok 5), which comprised Hardi, FX Harsono, B. Munny Ardhi, Nanik Mirna and Siti Adiati, all students from ASRI. The Group of Five proceeded to organise exhibitions in many cities such as Surabaya and Solo, questioning the institutional structures of ASRI that were shaped by the practices of painting and sculpture. The mass media covered their activities with great interest. In 1974, members of the Group of Five were involved in a dispute between the students and the ASRI administration, culminating in the Black December Incident. At the 1974 Grand Exhibition of Indonesian Painting, the jury’s decision favoured works by more established artists such as Widayat, Abas Alibasyah and A.D. Pirous. The Black December Manifesto was issued in reaction, proclaiming the following:

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25 Edward Aspinall, “Moral Force Politics and the Struggle Against Authoritarianism,” in Student Activism in Asia, 160. 26 Sumartono, “The Role of Power in Contemporary

1. Diversity is undeniable in Indonesian art, even if diversity does not by itself signify a desirable development. 2. For the sake of a development that ensures the sustainability of our culture, it is the artist’s calling to offer a spiritual direction based on humanitarian values and oriented towards social, cultural and economic realities. 3. Artists should pursue various creative ways in which to arrive at new perspec tives in Indonesian painting. 4. Thereby, Indonesian art may achieve a positive identity. 5. Obstacles in the development of Indo nesian art come from outdated concepts retained by the Establishment by art business agents as well as established artists. To save our art, it is now time for us to pay tribute to the established by giving them the title of “cultural veterans.”27 14 artists, including FX Harsono, signed the document. The protesting artists sent a wreath on the day the fve winners were announced. The wreath read: “Our condolences upon the death of the art of painting.” The fve winners were Widayat, Irsam, Aming Prayitno, Abad Alibasyah and A.D. Pirous. This protest by these 14 artist–students can be seen

27

Yogyakartan Art,” in Outlet: Yogyakartan within the Contemporary Indonesian Art Scene (Yogyakarta: Cemeti Art Foundation, 2001), 21–2. Ibid., 23–4.

in context of the broader student movement of 1974 that peaked with the Malari Incident. Like the larger student movement, the 14 artists who issued the Black December Manifesto were seeking to reform ASRI and its perceived conservatism. The Manifesto was welcomed in Jakarta and Bandung, with the exception of ASRI which suspended those students who signed it. Just eight months after the Black December Incident, the Group of Five and other artists from Bandung, together with noted art critic and lecturer Sanento Yuliman, established the GSRB and organised an exhibition in August 1975 at the Jakarta Arts Centre (Taman Ismail Marzuki, TIM). Works presented in this exhibition were socially engaged, raising issues concerning injustices beyond the feld of art to include socioeconomic and political issues aligned with the Black December Manifesto’s call for artists to develop socially engaged artistic practices. Works shown by the GSRB artists included a wide range of art forms (such as installation art) that questioned the defnition of art circumscribed by the aesthetic conventions and practices of painting (fg. 16.2). The use of everyday materials in art expanded what were traditionally considered as art materials, such as oil and watercolour paints, to include found objects that embodied local cultural and political meanings.

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28 Sinsawat Yodbangtoey, ed., Building and Weaving

29 30 31 32 33

the 20 Year Art Legacy, The Artists’ Front of Thailand 1974–1994 (Bangkok: CON-tempus, 1994), 8–33. Prajak Kongkirati, “The Cultural Politics of Student Resistance,” in Student Activism in Asia, 231. Ibid., 237. Poshyananda, op. cit., 165. Ibid., 164. Ibid. These cheap and widely circulated books were collectively termed “one-bhat books.”

The Artists’ Front of Thailand The Artists’ Front of Thailand (AFT) was formed the year after the military dictatorship of Thanom Kittikachorn, Praphat Charusatien and Narong Kittikachorn was toppled by a student movement in October 1973. The AFT opposed art that was produced by those in power and big businesses for capitalism, and called for art to be relevant to the common Thai worker and farmer, and bring culture to every Thai.28 Like the artist-students who initiated the Black December Incident that led to the formation of the GSRB, the AFT grew out of a larger student movement, in this case one that successfully demonstrated against and brought about a change of government in Thailand. The establishment of Thammasat University, a product of the 1932 revolution led by the People’s Party, resulted in an open admission policy that gave all Thais, regardless of their economic background, the opportunity to receive a university education. This was unlike Chualalongkorn University, which catered largely to the elite.29 Post-war Thammasat University became a hotbed for student activism, with students from different economic classes, including the working class, spearheading anti-imperialist protests against Japan as led by Pridi Banomyong from 224

34

Giles Ji Ungpakorn, “The Impact of the Thai ‘Sixties’ on the People’s Movement Today,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 7, no. 4 (2006): 574. 35 George N. Katsiafcas, Asia’s Unknown Uprisings Volume 2: People Power in the Philippines, Burma, Tibet, China, Taiwan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Thailand, and Indonesia, 1947–2009 (Oakland: PM Press, 2013), 305. 36 Ibid. 37 Clare Veal, “Collective Ruptures: Visually Documenting the Precarious Nature of Thai Politics After 2010,” Modern Art Asia 12 (November 2012): 6.

the Free Thai Movement. Unlike other universities in Thailand that shifted their emphasis to hard sciences as dictated by the military regime, Thammasat University focused on expanding its departments of humanities and social sciences, whence many of the student protestors came.30 Both student movements in Thailand and Indonesia believed that they were a moral force above the corruption of which their governments were guilty; this gave them a sense of being privileged. They sailed on the powerful potential of youth, shaped by the ideas of the New Left, transforming society by challenging the institutions that propped up authoritarian capitalist and developmental regimes. On 14 October 1973, around half a million people, a large proportion of whom were students, gathered to protest. A violent massacre then broke out between the student and civilian demonstrators, and the military and police, which left many dead. While the protest resulted in the collapse of the military dictatorship, the ensuing act of suppression also ended the country’s attempt at a democratic transition in leadership. The military replaced elected interim prime minister Sanya Thammasak with a civilian dictatorship led by Thanin Kraivixien. Just after the massacre, the Dharma Group that artist Pratuang Emjaroen had founded in 1971,

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organised its third exhibition. Dissenting artists who were horrifed by the violent clashes that had just taken place gathered around Pratuang and joined the Dharma Group. The work Pratuang exhibited was a massive oil-on-canvas painting that stretched to almost six metres, titled The Days of Disaster (1973–1974). It employs potent symbols drawn from the very notion of “Thai-ness” as steeped in Buddhism. Buddhist iconography was reinvented by Pratuang to include a fag riddled with bullet holes, dismembered limbs with blood pouring out, and the face of Buddha covered in bullet holes, melting under the streaks of intense light penetrating it. Seen together, these powerful symbols make a political statement about this protest and its aftermath. Another painting, made a few years later, Red Morning Glory and Rotten Gun (1976, fg. 16.3) reinforces Pratuang’s revulsion towards violence and killing by hybridising realist and Surrealist visual languages. To decry the actions of the military and its betrayal of Buddhism, he uses a rotting gun and the back of a decapitated Buddha statue as symbols. In October 1974, the AFT organised a large display of more than a thousand paintings and posters on Rajadamnern Avenue to commemorate the student victory which occurred exactly one year ago. This critical exhibition challenged the gallery exhibition format by displaying artworks in public spaces, involving artists and the public, especially students, as a form of social engagement, and rethinking art as a form of performative action—a gesture of anti-imperialist and anti-authoritarian protest—against a military regime. Works by both artists and students were shown in this outdoor exhibition, demonstrating the close relationship between the AFT and student activists.31 Further evidence that the AFT was part of a broader student activism can be seen from the strong support that it drew from students in vocational institutes and the Po Chang School of Arts and Crafts.32 Kamchorn Soonpongsri was the chairman of the AFT. His thinking on

art had been shaped by earlier Thai socialist discourse that had been recycled and become popular with both the AFT artists and student activists, the most infuential of which was Chit Phumisak’s Art for Life and Art for the People, frst published in 1957 and widely circulated.33 The AFT was not alone in deploying critical exhibitions for political agitation. In October 1975, the Coalition of Thai Artists organised street exhibitions of “people’s art” along Rajadamnern Avenue as a symbolic gesture of democracy, displaying agitational banners against American military bases making air strikes in Vietnam.34 These critical exhibitions formed part of a larger ground-up initiative calling for “art for the people,” “art for life” and “songs for the people” (which effectively replaced foreign-language songs with Thai lyrics) and “theatre for the people.”35 Other forms of cultural resistance against the military regime by student activists “responded with conceptualism, surrealism, and other forms of experimentation—including the transformation of traditional forms that were rejuvenated as well.”36 Art historian Clare Veal locates these art groups like the AFT and the Coalition of Thai Artists as “modernists” as they had “defnite memberships; worked under the auspices of manifestos; and stylistically their works were within the parameters of Surrealist and Expressionist discourses, already largely accepted by the establishment art system. This meant that, despite their political radicalism, members of these artists’ groups were easily reabsorbed into offcial arts systems in the 1980s.”37 While some of the leading artists from the AFT and Dharma Group (for example, Pratuang) became established and recognised as artists later in Thailand, the moment of artistic resistance against the military regime in the 1970s deployed the critical exhibition as a new exhibitionary mode that abandoned the gallery for public spaces, using a range of artistic strategies that included social engagement and the conceptual.

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Veal locates the manifesto as a product of modern art within the Western context propounded by artist groups such as the Futurists and Surrealists. The art manifesto in Southeast Asia takes on a different meaning in the postcolonial context as artists deployed it in the 1970s as counter-hegemonic discourse, a form of cultural resistance against imperialism during the Cold War, most keenly felt in America’s military intervention in the Vietnam War. The critical exhibition became the vessel in which the art manifesto corralled its ideological force into action through its artworks and discourse. Art historians have, such as Patrick D. Flores in his study of exhibitions, focused on art manifestos by tracing its proliferation across the region as a “proxy for the work of art itself,” a “document of alterity” and a “dissemination of text as collective undertaking and the polemical fre it sparks.” Flores examines the manifesto as “a vehicle of agency,” driven by the “desire to re-think the world” in its rebellion against authority strategies of institutional critique.38 He is not alone in identifying the manifesto as a potent instrument wielded by artists in the 1970s. Sabapathy located moments of “contemporary turns” in Southeast Asian art in his exhibition Intersecting Histories: Contemporary Turns in Southeast Asian Art (2014) within the ambit of exhibitions and the manifesto as a form of exhibitionary discourse. Both Flores and Sabapathy cite manifestos, some of which were directly produced from exhibitions such as Towards a Mystical Reality: A Documentation of Jointly Initiated Experiences by Redza Piyadasa and Sulaiman Esa (1974), and GSRB (1975), and yet other manifestos or treatises were issued and disseminated publicly by artist collectives and artists like the Kaisahan, AFT and Cheo Chai Hiang in the Philippines, Thailand and Singapore respectively. Both Flores and Sabapathy refer to the primacy of exhibitions as sites hospitable to the production of such exhibitionary discourses. 226

The Rise of the Left in the Philippines July 1974 was a turning point in the Philippines. The United Progressive Artists and Architects (Nagkakaisang Progresibong Artists at Arkitekto, NPAA) and other mass organisations in the urban areas were dissolved as part of the the NPAA’s broader strategy to deploy their forces to the countryside. Peasants were new recruits and became the lifeblood of the organisation, a move aligned with the New People’s Army’s strategy to create a rural power base. The NPAA had been formed in 1971 as part of a struggle in the Philippines that rose up against American imperialism, in tandem with student movements all over the globe, such as in France, America and Japan, that likewise arose in response to American imperialism. Its infuence on students was exercised through educational institutions such as the University of the Philippines, University of Santo Tomas and St Mary’s College.39 The NPAA was a collective of artists and a cultural organisation that produced revolutionary propaganda in the form of portable murals, banners, illustrations, posters, comics, photography and paintings as anti-bourgeois art that depict the real social conditions of the proletariat. The transference of the NPAA artists from the urban centre to the countryside created a vacuum for another artist collective—the Kaisahan group—to establish itself in 1976 in metropolitan Manila and create artworks based on political and social themes. The Kaisahan comprised artists across different socioeconomic classes, some of whom included Renato Habulan, Edgar Fernandez, Al Manrique, Jose Tence Ruiz and Pablo Baen Santos. Besides exhibitions, they organised workshops, lectures and exhibitions on sociopolitical issues concerning the Philippines.40 Like the AFT, the Kaisahan produced a manifesto to state its ideology on the purpose of art—that it should be people-oriented and shape a national identity. The Kaisahan’s manifesto differed from the AFT’s in its desire

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38

39

40

Patrick D. Flores, “First Person Plural: Manifestos of the 1970s in Southeast Asia,” in Global Studies: Mapping Contemporary Art and Culture, eds. Hans Belting, Jacob Birken & Peter Weibel et al. (Ostfldern: Hatje Cantz, 2012), 264. Alice G. Guillermo, Protest/Revolutionary Art in the Philippines 1970–1990 (Quezon City: University of the Philippines, 2001), 51. Ibid., 62.

to open the aesthetics of political art to allow more room for creativity, whereas the latter focused on using art as a tool to instil what they considered to be Thai art, and to resist the power of the “big people” (such as those with economic and political authority) in favour of the “small people” (the working classes). In this aspect, the Kaisahan and GSRB shared the desire to expand the thinking and making of art by being socially engaged without necessarily reducing art to mere propaganda. Mao’s 1942 Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art infuenced both the Kaisahan and AFT to deploy art more democratically for the masses rather than for a small urban elite class, and, as mentioned, Mao’s ideas provided a powerful postcolonial attack on imperialism and authoritarian regimes in Thailand and the Philippines. In 1977, an exhibition titled Notes on the Hayuma Exhibit was held. It can be considered a critical exhibition for bringing together paintings from the Kaisahan artists and poetry from the Galian sa Arte at Tula (GAT) poets in an interdisciplinary collaboration to make art that was “relevant to the people and their lives.”41 This exhibition conceived of art as a vehicle for social change, an alternative to the art from the academies and salons, and intimated that art went beyond the gallery space to public spaces the

41 42

Ibid., 65. Notes on the Hayuma Exhibit by the Kaisahan and the Galian sa Arte at Tula poets in ibid., 244. 43 The University of Singapore and the University of Malaya became a national university for Malaya by legislation in 1962, with Tunku Abdul Rahman as the frst Chancellor. The University of Singapore eventually became the present-day National University of Singapore.

way the AFT went into schools, streets and plazas.42 The GSRB, AFT and Kaisahan were aligned in their emphasis on the “concrete and the everywhere,” an aesthetic based on the real conditions of the urban poor, for instance the pollution, struggles and desires of the common people as seen in Pablo Baens Santos’ Bagong Kristo (New Christ) (fg. 16.4). Their common aspirations for “the concrete” and “the real” were drawn from a confuence of ideas around socialism, informed by Mao’s Yan’an Forum, local socialist intellectuals, the energy of student movements, anti-imperialism against the Vietnam War, as well as the corruption and authoritarianism of developmental regimes. The Mystical Meets Nature: Conceptual Shifts in Malaysia Malaysia in the early 1970s experienced a mixture of three waves: nationalism, the rise of the Left and Islamisation. Meredith Weiss, a scholar on Southeast Asian political science, situates the rise of post-war Malayan nationalism in the formation of the University of Malaya (UM) in Singapore on 8 October 1949. The UM was eventually split into two autonomous campuses, the University of Singapore and the University of Malaya in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur respectively.43 The UM proved to be an im-

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228

44

Meredith L. Weiss, Student Activism in Malaysia: Crucible, Mirror Slideshow (Singapore: NUS Press, 2011), 176. 45 Nur Hanum Khairuddin, “Anak Alam: Behind the Scenes,” in Reactions—New Critical Strategies (Kuala Lumpur: RogueArt, 2013), 25. 46 Ismail Abdullah, “Pameran Catan dan Arca Anak Alam,” Dewan Budaya, Feburary 1980, 45. 47 Latiff Mohidin, Catatan Latiff Mohidin (Kuala Lumpur: Maya Press, 2010). 48 See “Experimentation the Anak Alam Way,” New Straits Times, 19 October 2013, accessed January 2015 , http://www.nst.com.my/opinion/columnist/

experimentation-the-anak-alam-way1.379212#ixzz 31n3oGvtr. 49 Ibid. 50 Hanim, op. cit., 29. 51 Ibid., 25. 52 Anak Alam, “Manifesto Generation Anak Alam,” in Reactions New Critical Strategies: Narratives in Malaysian Art Vol. 2, trans. Wong Hoy Cheong, 23. 53 Sulaiman Esa & Redza Piyadasa, Towards a Mystical Reality: A Documentation of Jointly Initiated Experiences, exh. cat. (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 1974).

portant institution for fostering a Malayan national consciousness and produced left-leaning journals like Fajar, published by the University Socialist Club. The leftist wave in the early 1970s was led by student activism propelled by international concerns engendered by the Vietnam War and conficts in the Middle East, such as the 1973 Arab–Israeli War. The student movement centred in universities was joined by other leftist forces, such as students and trade unions, which had convergent political interests. These left-leaning trade unions protested against imperialism, unfair state economic policies biased towards development and social injustice.44 The Malay Muslim Student’s Society and the UM Student Union actively organised protests for social justice and propoor policies, which the government tried to rein in by passing the Schools Societies Regulations in 1960 to little effect. Race riots in 1969 led to the introduction of the New Economic Policy in 1971, meant to reduce poverty, curtail the domination of certain occupations by specifc races and improve Malays’ access to higher education through quotas. The religious wave or Dakwah activism frst began in 1965,

led by the Pertubuhan Al Rahmaniah at the UM, which identifed Islam as a religion that could deal with social issues such as corruption and poverty. By the 1970s, Dakwah activism quickly became synonymous with Islamisation of the state due to its broad spectrum of religious activities, from personal religious study groups to moderately violent protests against perceived decadent Western cultural infuences like pop culture. 1974 also saw the formation of the Children of Nature (Anak Alam, AA) and heralded Towards a Mystical Reality, a critical exhibition organised by Sulaiman Esa and Redza Piyadasa. Several names were initially suggested for the group, including Angatan Pelukis Contemporary (Assembly of Contemporary Painters), Avant Garde Group and Angkatan Kreatif (Creative Assembly). However, Anak Alam, a name proposed by artist and poet Latiff Mohidin, was subsequently chosen.45 “Anak Alam is process, therefore it is full of possibility” was Ismail Abdullah’s assessment of this loose collective of artists, painters and theatre practitioners in his essay in Dewan Budaya, a magazine that featured critical writings on contemporary art

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and culture, published by the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (DBP).46 Formed on 1 May, the AA occupied a mansion named Taman Budaya located at 905 Periaran Tun Ismail in Kuala Lumpur. It focused on interdisciplinary practices and the process of art-making, evident in its frst exhibition in 1974, Nature Day, a twoday-and-night event with “spontaneous and creative activities by and for the whole family; events day and night, including enviro-sculpture, drama, pantomime, play reading, and mini-kata; poetry readings, bamboo gamelan, and much more.”47 The AA became a place for artists such as Latiff Mohidin, Yusof Osman, Zulkifi Dahalan, Mustpha Ibrahim, Siti Zainon Ismail, Tajuddin Ismail, Ali Rahamad and others to exchange ideas, exhibit and make art across disciplines. Street and experimental theatre, led by Omar Abdullah, Muhammad Abdullah and Khalid Salleh, among others, became an important part of the AA and were part of the student activist movement spearheaded by the UM’s Experimental Theatre and other campuses protesting against American imperialism, government corruption and circumstances that made it diffcult for university graduates to secure reasonably paid jobs.48 Teater Kecil was the brainchild of Omar and Muhammad who produced impromptu theatre in street spaces, bringing plays from the stage to the street and thus directly to the public, much akin to the broader leftist wave in Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia.49 The AA expressly shunned state bureaucracy, but ironically were supported by infuential cultural fgures and patrons like Usman Awang, a poet who also worked as the senior research fellow at the DPB, and Ismail Zain who served as Director of the Balai Seni Lukis Negara, now known as the National Visual Arts Gallery, Malaysia, and Director-General of Culture at the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sports.50 Like the other artist collectives across the region who produced critical exhibitions, the AA was frmly rooted in a student movement

that was locked in a struggle to produce socially engaged art for the common people, address the issues of corruption and resist the forces of imperialism. “The Anak Alam of that era was full of the words of ‘protest’” was how Raja Zahabuddin described them.51 The manifesto was also a potent vehicle for action and change deployed by the AA in their declaration to produce art that is not based on ethnicity: with no divisions of ancestry, of skin colour, of beliefs, of age, of gender and length of hair in this generation of nature’s children.52 This desire for art to be ethnically inclusive and constrained only by the artist’s ability to imagine was a response to the 1969 race riots and the 1971 First National Cultural Congress held to construct a Malaysian national culture and identity through art based on elements drawn from relevant cultures and Islam. Towards a Mystical Reality was organised by Esa and Piyadasa who both taught fne art at the Mara Institute of Technology (now known as Universiti Teknologi Mara) in Kuala Lumpur. The exhibition shared the anti-imperialist tenor of the other critical exhibitions organised by artist collectives in Southeast Asia, and produced a manifesto calling for Asian artists to “emphasise the ‘spiritual essence’ rather than the outward form” as an alternative way to think about and make art, based on a different concept of reality that is not scientifc but meditative and experiential, to break away from the hegemony of Western art and its art history.53 Although both Piyadasa and Esa were lecturers and not students, they were nonetheless part of the broader student movement and political environment that shifted towards art-making as a socially engaged and intellectually rigourous activity, a powerful political and cultural actor that contributed to the process of decolonisation.

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Conclusion This essay has traced the emergence of the critical exhibition within the changing and overlapping contexts of student movements, the rise of the New Left, decolonisation, emergent nationalisms, anti-imperialism, as well as cultural resistance against authoritarian and developmental regimes from the 1950s to the 1970s in Southeast Asia. The historical development of the salon, national, regional and internationalist-type exhibitions as earlier forms of modernist exhibitions that dominated the art worlds of the various countries in Southeast Asia continue to exist to this day, even if they have been eclipsed by the critical exhibition. In particular, the emergence of the internationalist exhibition format in the 1950s and 1960s was an important precursor to the critical exhibition in the 1970s. The internationalist exhibition imagined itself as part of two main trajectories in the form of social realism and abstraction that encouraged deepening knowledge about art theory and art history, even as these knowledges were Western-centric. Continuities between the internationalist and critical exhibitions could be seen in the production of art manifestos. The difference between these two modes of exhibitions was in how critical exhibitions deployed art manifestos not as a way to connect with broader art movements in the West but to engage with their existing social, cultural and political contexts. The postcolonial condition, driven by student movements across the region against imperialism and most concretely manifested

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in the Vietnam War, was supported by most authoritarian developmental regimes. Critical exhibitions embodied a powerful force that repudiated the slavish deference to Western ways of thinking about and making art, and explored new ways and approaches to conceptualise art that were different from the West, most boldly declared as its objective by the critical exhibition Towards a Mystical Reality. Other critical exhibitions rode on the tide of student movements as many of these artists who produced critical exhibitions were artist– students themselves, or lecturers in tertiaryeducation institutions. The infuence of socialism and the New Left in student movements proved to be a popular alternative to the Western model of capitalism, and the pursuit of economic development for its own sake without addressing the issue of poverty, resulting in the call for critical exhibitions that were socially engaged. This reframed exhibitions so that they were not only a way of displaying art but also vehicles of resistance and change for the common people. However, there was an internal contradiction. These student movements that resisted Western capitalism and its modes of art-making continued to refer to “Western” ideas of socialism and the New Left. “Art for art’s sake” was now reconfgured as “art for life” or “art for the people.” The emergence of critical exhibitions marked a shift away from earlier exhibitionary modes that were produced from colonial contexts, to the reality of actual social, political and cultural conditions of countries in Southeast Asia in a period of decolonisation and nationalist movements.

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16.1

Speaker

Date

Location

He Xiang Yi

26 October 1929

Singapore

30 October 1929

Singapore

1 November 1929

Singapore

Wang Ji Yuan

5 April 1938

Singapore

Zhang Dan Nong

October 1938

Singapore

Weng Zhan Qiu

28 January 1939

Singapore

20 March 1939

Singapore

3 January 1939

Kuala Lumpur

January 1939

Kuala Lumpur

30 January 1939

Singapore

11 February 1939

Singapore

13 February 1939

Singapore

14 March 1939

Singapore

29 March 1939

Singapore

19 August 1939

Singapore

23 December 1940

Singapore

13 February 1941

Kuala Lumpur

15 February 1941

Kuala Lumpur

25 February 1941

Kuala Lumpur

1 April 1941

Penang

3 June 1941

Singapore

8 September 1941

Singapore

Yu Shi Hai

October 1939

Singapore

Liu Hai Shu

18 January 1941

Singapore

30 January 1941

Singapore

1 February 1941

Singapore

12 March 1941

Singapore

29 March 1941

Singapore

2 May 1941

Singapore

Xu Qian

Xu Bei Hong

Total Number of Talks Singapore: 23 Malaya (Kuala Lumpur and Penang): 6

430

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16.1

Talks Given by Visiting Artists from China Held in Singapore, Penang and Kuala Lumpur (1938–1941)

16.2 FX Harsono Bunga Plastik 1975 Mixed media Dimensions variable

16.2

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431

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16.3 Pratuang Emjaroen Red Morning Glory and Rotten Gun 1976 Oil on canvas 133 x 174 cm Collection of National Gallery Singapore 16.4 Pablo Baens Santos Bagong Kristo (New Christ) 1980 Oil on canvas 122.4 x 86.6 cm Collection of National Gallery Singapore

16.3

432

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16.4

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433

28/3/17 2:55 PM

1

2

Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver & Rachel Weiss, foreword to Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s, ed. Philomena Mariani (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999), vii–xi. The writers point to a wide range of destabilising circumstances coincidental with the emergence of

this art. “The emergence of conceptualist art also coincided with broadly destabilizing sociological and technological trends propelled by large historical forces, as the political, economic and social landscapes of large parts of the world underwent signifcant, often traumatic, transition.” Ibid., vii.

(17)

Reading Conceptual Art in Southeast Asia: A Beginning T.K. Sabapathy

I When the National Gallery Singapore (hereafter the Gallery) invited me to write an essay on conceptual art in Southeast Asia for a proposed publication, I accepted without hesitation and, I must add, without much thought. I would, I assured myself, settle on an approach soon enough. After all I had dealt with aspects of conceptual art when examining practices of artists in Malaysia and Singapore, and when curating exhibitions featuring art produced in the 1970s, regarding it as new, different from the modern. Matters came to a head about a year ago when the Gallery requested an outline for a text. Without pausing, I submitted a page consisting of preliminary notions orbiting a citation of the foreword for a publication on Global Conceptualism, convened as an exhibition in New York in 1997.1 In it, curators and writers indicated interests in appraising conceptual art produced in locations globally, along comparative trajectories, and historically. 232

The citation has remained in my thoughts and increasingly assumed emblematic signifcance. Yes, it could serve as a point of entry for thinking on, researching and writing for the occasion. There is another matter springing from reading Global Conceptualism; it is personal and important. In this publication is a text on conceptual art in Southeast Asia, the earliest known to me. It is written by Apinan Poshyananda, for whom I have immense regard. Our paths crossed especially in the 1990s, when a handful of historians of art, curators and academics from countries in the region were earnestly, energetically engaged in representing art in Southeast Asia in national, regional and international forums. Apinan registered a voice signifcantly and was sought after, globally. A network was forged linking one another in the region and fostering scholarship—individually and at times collectively. Apinan and I have not met frequently enough these past 15 years, although each heeds what the other has written. In this situ-

Charting Thoughts

ation, reconnecting with Apinan has been via reading his essay; it has been vicarious. The pleasure in reading a text in this instance is sparked by connections such as these. Reading Global Conceptualism and Apinan’s account of conceptual art in Southeast Asia (South Asia is also included in it) has spurred thoughts on an approach for this occasion. Could I deal with this topic by reading writings on it? Who are the writers? What do they say? How is conceptual art represented in the region, textually? Is it conceivable, in our midst, to write on art by examining writings on art exclusively? Is art in Southeast Asia interpretable, inter-textually? These questions propel this account. I do not offer a theoretical exegesis on reading texts on conceptual art in Southeast Asia. I offer a kind of guide for reading a handful of writings, while suggesting that deeper registers for reading these and other writings may be developed. I examine texts from three sources in which Southeast Asia is declared as of primary consideration in writing on conceptual art; without exception, they are published in conjunction with exhibitions, which are predominant sites for writing on art, here. Even as Southeast Asia is fagged as of abiding interest in these publications, focus is on individual countries that constitute the region or constitute the region partly. The command of country is powerful. Be that as it may, I have tended to read country-based accounts relative to thinking on the region. This is not an exhaustive treatment of the topic; it marks a beginning of a study of textual representations of a category of Southeast Asian art. It is with deep regret that I omit discussion of Concept Context Contestation: Art and the Collective in Southeast Asia (edited by Iola Lenzi and published by the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre in 2014), which features a constellation of texts on conceptual art. Reading and discussing texts from the three sources have consumed more attention than anticipated;

I had run out of time and needed to hand in this essay; schedules for readying submissions could no longer be delayed. This publication is undoubtedly important for appraising conceptual art; I aim to deal with it on a future occasion. II In 1997 an exhibition titled Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s was convened in the Queens Museum of Art, New York. Its impetus may be discerned in the foreword of the publication issued in conjunction with the exposition. It is useful to read an extract from it, as it is pertinent for the present; the extract is the very one that appeared prominently in a draft submitted to the Gallery and was mentioned earlier. The exhibition traces the history of a key development in 20th-century art in which art’s response to both its traditions and its immediate milieu shifted from a consideration of the object to that of the idea. This shift with its inevitable destabilization of artistic convention occurred in locations around the world in two relatively distinct waves of activity: the frst from the late 1950s to around 1973, the second from the mid-1970s to the end of the ’80s.2 The claim is that over a span of nearly 40 years (i.e. from about the end of the 1950s until the 1980s), disturbances were registered in art worlds virtually everywhere. Disturbances instigated by artists who produced work (I use the term here, elastically) in which interest is in the idea rather than in artistic form as embodying meaning and signifcance. The shift from seeing art as an aesthetic entity or artefact to encountering art that is an idea is recognised as heralding a turn towards the conceptual in art. A move such as this took root and prevailed in many locations in the world. So much so, a

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new term was coined to deal with it as marking a signifcant moment in 20th-century art, namely: conceptualism. The writers of the foreword devote attention to terminology, distinguishing conceptual art from conceptualism; it is important to heed their distinction. While conceptual art refers to formalist practices developed in the aftermath of increasing reductionist tendencies in producing works as art, conceptualism signifes a wider swath of involvements, attitudes and expressions. Yes, the role of the art object is decreased and its material integrity degraded; there is more. Conceptualism is esteemed as reaching out even further, nudging art into assuming connections with other constituencies or realities that are embraced as forming milieus in which artists pursue their practice, such as the social, the political and the economical. Artists yearn for open, immediate connections with various publics, collectively and informally. The appeal of conceptualism springs from attributes and principles such as these. It is acknowledged and installed in discourses on art as profoundly altering what art is or “destabilising” it, in many respects.3 These disturbances did not occur simultaneously in all locations in the world. The writers of the foreword gauge them as surfacing in two consecutive although distinct, temporal waves. Their claim is also that movements giving rise to these disturbances and their outcomes are globally extant, substantially and suffciently consistent to represent them as an exhibition set along historical perspectives and write about them historically. The conceptual in art is susceptible to (art) historical explication. The 1997 show in New York bears testimony to these claims. Global Conceptualism features works signifying conceptualist attributes, traits, tendencies, properties and principles, by artists from “locations around the world.” Locations are categorised variously; at times they are identifed as countries (Japan, South Korea, the 234

Soviet Union). At times they are gathered as country-clusters, in which instances the components that make up the clusters are regarded not necessarily as equal to one another (Australia and New Zealand; mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong). At times locations are geographically subsumed as regions (Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Latin America, South and Southeast Asia) and even as continents (Africa, North America). It is not clear how these variables could yield satisfactory exhibitory and textual representations of the conceptual in world art. The intention is, nevertheless, to widen the terrain for dealing with the topic by devising platforms for appraising the conceptual comparatively, and do so with curatorial vigour and critical discrimination. In this vein, the aim is to remap a signifcant chapter in 20th-century art without only endorsing practices and productions, and texts from sites in Europe and the United States as reigning paradigms for defning world art. Global Conceptualism is undeniably ambitious. The project’s complexity and diffculties are acknowledged in the foreword. Nevertheless, redrawing the map of world art in order to represent the conceptual with requisite historical sensibilities is clearly stated as a goal. Hence the exhibition (and the accompanying publication) “intends to revise conventional historicisation of conceptual art through the strategic addition of multiple, poorly known histories presented as corollaries rather than appendages to a central axis of activity.”4 This is not to say that the exhibition surveys the geographies (known and newly known) of conceptual art, comprehensively; this is impossible. The exhibition consists of “emblematic works and movements” specifc to locations.5 Southeast Asia enters a stage featuring global conceptualism in New York in 1997 along these passageways. It is represented by Apinan Poshyananda, a historian of art and curator. It is a strange entry on a number of counts. I highlight two of them.

T.K. Sabapathy

Ibid., viii. 3 4 Ibid., xi. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid.

7

Firstly: How and why might South and Southeast Asia appear as con-joined? A basis for coupling the two regions is not clearly stated either by the exhibitors or by Apinan. A consideration that might be interpreted as testimony for connecting the two appears at the end of the foreword, where it says:

Apinan treads gingerly when treating the two as connected locations. In his writing he shies away from relating them directly and consistently; preferring, instead, to juxtapose them beside one another discreetly. An exception to such an arrangement is noted when he highlights tensions/crises/violence instigated by religious fervor demonstrated in public domains, aimed at forcibly asserting the dominance of one religion over another. Spurred by encountering such events or situations, Apinan names a number of artists who produce very different works. Montien Boonma (from Thailand/Southeast Asia), for instance, creates environments for contemplation and introspection. On the other hand, Vivan Sundram and Sheela Gowda (from India/South Asia) create conceptualist works consisting of “fragments of riot scenes, an image of a dead victim, and a monumental gateway.”7 And so on. South and Southeast Asia are not symmetrically aligned; Apinan’s principal interest is in Southeast Asia. The second count by which the entry of these two enjoined locations is gauged as strange is their absence in the exhibition. The catalogue does not furnish data and information of works by artists mentioned and discussed by Apinan. When we consult the checklist of works in the exhibition, there are none from South and Southeast Asia. Artists from these two regions are not registered in sections devoted to artists’ biographies. The publication features chronologies of events deemed as signifcant landmarks for the advent of the

We have invited Dr Apinan Poshyananda to contribute an essay to this catalogue on the activities of conceptual artists working in South and Southeast Asia today. Since the end of the Cold War, South and Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and other rapidly developing areas have seen the rise of identity politics, ethnic cleansing, nationalism, and the theocratic state. Currently, like others before them, artists in these regions are adopting conceptual practices in their work, opening new chapters in their ongoing history.6 This does not qualify as an explanation. It is made up of surmises and generalisations hastily assembled in order to justify a decision rather than knowingly illuminate or secure South and Southeast Asia as con-jointly fecund locations for generating conceptual art practices. In any case we might ask how “identity politics,” “ethnic cleansing” and “a theocratic state” in and of themselves prompt or instigate artists to produce work that is conceptual in tenor! As listed in the foreword, these do not lead to the provision of answers to these questions.

Apinan Poshyananda, “‘Con Art’ Seen from the Edge: The Meaning of Conceptual Art in South and Southeast Asia,” in Global Conceptualism, 147.

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8

Unless we read the following as an explanation: “Limitations of physical space, and of the possible scope of inquiry of a single exhibition, preclude the inclusion of the dozens or hundreds of other artists who are un- or underrecognized.” Carmnitzer, Farver

conceptual in art in various locations; South and Southeast Asia are not represented. Four pages in the publication contain bibliographies pertinent to discourses on the conceptual in locations named as making up global conceptualism; here too, South and Southeast Asia are absent. The absence is not noted or mentioned by anyone from the Queens Museum of Art or the writer of the essay; the silence is incomprehensible.8 Rather than speculate on it, I propose to deal with Apinan’s writing as the only testimony of the inclusion of South and Southeast Asia in this project; extensive geographies and complicated histories are, in this instance, represented textually. I focus on Southeast Asia. Apinan’s is the earliest text on conceptual art in Southeast Asia. There are earlier studies on conceptual artists in locations-as-nations in the region; writers of these accounts occasionally and feetingly look across borders at movements in neighbouring locations. By and large, their attention is focused frmly on matters that are local. In these regards Apinan’s writing for this occasion stands apart from extant publications on conceptual art and conceptualism as an artistic phenomenon. It stands apart for other reasons as well. It bears hallmarks of the author’s irrepressible involvement with wordplay and with idiosyncratic coining of words and phrases. The abbreviation of conceptual art as “con art,” for example, is characteristic of Apinan’s aim at defating names, terms, labels installed in histories of art with defnitional aura or status by 236

& Weiss, op. cit., xi.

9 Poshyananda, op. cit., 146. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., 147.

writers in institutions in Europe and the United States. “Con art” immediately conveys prospects of encountering deceit, the dubious and the unreliable; its insertion in quotation marks, however, indicates we need not read it literally to imply these meanings. The title of his essay reads as: “‘Con Art’ Seen from the Edge: The Meaning of Conceptual Art in South and Southeast Asia.” As a word gesture “con art” may strike as coarse and crude; in all likelihood such an impact is intended. These are devices the author employs to stir readers into assuming wary, watchful stances when encountering dominant ideologies, systems and apparatus for interpretation, in the worlds of modern and contemporary art. He begins his account by noting that while conceptual art is understood in artistic terms as giving increasing prominence to the idea in a work over form or over things created as materially signifcant, such a view is expanded to include other considerations. Southeast Asian artists are not mere recipients of conceptualist impulses from the West. They have actively shaped them while residing and working in locations in the West and have relayed these involvements on their return. Artists have also created conceptualist works spurred by circumstances that are specifc to locations in the region. In some of these outcomes, the conceptual slides into other, unorthodox kinds of practices such as installation and performance. These may not be pursued or developed in terms of clearly delineated categorical involvements.

T.K. Sabapathy

In this regard, he remarks that conceptual art is translated in the Thai language as sinlapa ruapyad and “refers variously to installation, performance, and the use of readymades.”9 It may well be that Apinan is pointing towards conceptualism as spurring a wide range of experimental practices and actions intended to counter prevailing orthodoxies in art worlds in the region, affliated largely with the modern. Hence, four of the six illustrations in his essay are of artists shown in performative actions (Heri Dono, FX Harsono, Santiago Bose and Kamol Phaosavasdi) in the 1990s. Apinan suggests that actions by artists in the early 1970s, levelled at challenging, and replacing authoritarian institutions in art (and in the political sphere), led to new practices, some of which are affliated with conceptual tendencies. By doing so, the conceptual as such in Southeast Asia is seen as conforming to the second wave, proposed in the foreword of the exhibition’s publication. The New Art Movement (Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru, hereafter the GSRB), in 1975, in Jakarta (Indonesia) and the student uprisings against the military dictatorship in Thailand in 1973 and 1976, are featured prominently for ascertaining shifts: changes that affect art profoundly in locations in Southeast Asia. These have been examined closely in subsequent writings by several writers and installed as signifcant in nascent historical accounts of recent art in the region. Apinan features an enlarged detail of a work by Jim Supangkat titled Ken Dedes (produced for the inaugural GSRB event) as a frontispiece illustration for his text. This production has assumed emblematic stature in discourses of the conceptual and in signifying new, contemporary developments in Southeast Asia. While acknowledging conceptual art practices as distinct, Apinan demonstrates that they are also advanced in relation to other unconventional ways of producing art; these interrelations are complicated and entangled. The task of analysing them awaits future researchers.

We leave reading Apinan with two impressions. The frst is that towards the end of the 20th century, or at the time of writing his views, conceptual art practices are “widely accepted in the art arenas of Southeast Asia. To varying degrees, artists in Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore have adapted conceptual strategies as vehicles for critique and refection on their rapidly changing societies, and several international exhibitions in Asia and Australia have legitimized these forms of conceptualism based on local idioms.”10 The second impression hoists the conceptual in Southeast Asian art onto historically conscious registers. Hence we are urged to acknowledge that artists in the region “recognize that conceptual art in the West has its genealogy, but their own interpretations of such art have often derived from different trajectories. Artists have developed conceptualist practices to the extent that various networks have formed within the region.”11 Attention is on relations between artists and their practices, on surveying and analysing them so as to yield an understanding of conceptual art as it is a phenomenon in this region. We leave Apinan for the present and move away from New York to read texts from sites in Southeast Asia. III In 2007, ten years after Global Conceptualism was staged in New York, Ahmad Mashadi curated an exhibition titled Telah Terbit (Out Now): Southeast Asian Art Practices during the 1960s to 1980s in Singapore (part of the title is derived from an artwork by FX Harsono named Telah Terbit). The show was organised as a special event as part of the inaugural Singapore biennale in 2006. It is frequently cited as an exemplar for curating and exhibiting Southeast Asian art. The topic for the exposition and its publication is the contemporary in the region’s art.

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12 Ahmad Mashadi, Telah Terbit (Out Now): Southeast Asian Contemporary Art Practices During the 1960s to 1980s (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 2007). 13 T.K. Sabapathy, “Intersecting Histories: Thoughts on the Contemporary and History in Southeast Asian Art,” in Intersecting Histories: Contemporary Turns in Southeast Asian Art, ed. T.K. Sabapathy (Singapore: School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 2012), 46–7. 14 In a foreword to this exhibition’s publication, Kwok Kian Chow amplifes the twin topics set out by Mashadi. I cite a section at length, as it illustrates varying accents in discussions of conceptual art. “FORM in the context of this exhibition relates to conceptualism, a term used in the art world to designate

In the exhibition Mashadi boldly sketches chronologies for the contemporary, commencing in 1962 when Jose Joya and Napoleon Abueva participated in the Venice biennale that same year, and rounding his survey in 1980 with the Contemporary Asian Art Show at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan. This is not to say that Mashadi shows that the contemporary dries up and fades in 1980 but that the two decades spanning the 1960s and the 1980s may measure its frst coming.12 I have commented on this exhibition elsewhere.13 For the present, interest is on the treatment of the conceptual in art in this show and the writing on it. To talk of conceptual art is to talk of the contemporary in art. The contemporary is topically exhibited and written along two routes. One is labelled as form and the other as fgure; both are conceived as turning away from the modern. Mashadi employs them as signifying distinctive traits and particular values for seeing the contemporary. He also employs them as propelling contemporary art practices in the region, historically and critically, along competing contemporaneous trajectories. Form has to do with conceptualist thinking and presentation whereby artists are introspective, refexive, criti238



the questioning of the central position of materiality in art. In conceptualism artists started to explore the boundaries of art, and questioned the relationship of art practice, history, criticism and aesthetics. The reexamination of the conceptual assumptions of art then used form (or ‘undoing’ of form) to critique a modern art that privileged abstraction. By doing so, artworks were deemed to have taken on commentary on values ascribed to conventional forms along with the social systems that substantiated such values. The title [re-form] given by the curator designates this new understanding. FIGURE is mainly concerned with the idea of the fgurative or representational, in the sense of recognizable objects, to specifcally refer to contemporary

cal in regarding the making, the appearance, the material constitution and reception of art and artworks. Figure has to do with representations of strife, confict, exploitation of peoples, primarily by fgural and narrative schemes.14 Mashadi conveys his thoughts on the contemporary and his intentions for the exhibition in the following disclosure. The exhibition is divided into two interrelated sections. [re:form] includes works that explicate the articulation of the visual language which includes a rethinking into the constitution of art and its theoretical and material references. [re:fgure] looks at attempts to situate contemporary practices into the contextual grounds of social and political engagements, through re-privileging of the fgurative and narrative.15 He draws attention to the contemporary as made up of two major intersecting trajectories; conceptual art is ascertained along one of them, namely: [re:form]. It is not, in other words, possible to consider it in isolation, on its own. In dealing with this matter, I forward four observations.

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practices in situating itself in the context of social and political activities, and how this is related to the renewed emphasis on the fgurative and narrative in works which also critiqued the privileging of abstract art in the 1960s and 1970s. Figurative art was also a means to reach a broader base of audience. Social realist art and religious art are two such cases that often use fgurative techniques. In these cases, fgurative art is used for its narrative and descriptive purposes. Figurative art is also often the choice for artists when they are seeking to elicit strong emotions from the viewer in reference to certain events and social messages.” Foreword to Telah Terbit (Out Now), 9–10. 15 Ahmad Mashadi, introduction to Telah Terbit (Out Now), 11.

16

Firstly, conceptual art is a subset in the contemporary art feld; historically and geographically it signifes the contemporary. Secondly, it is distinguishable in relation to other art practices that are also claimed as new and of its time. Mashadi positions it alongside the fgural as embodying varieties of realism. Thirdly, conceptual art practices intersect with and bleed into other media and spheres, demonstrating inter-disciplinary tendencies.16 When saying this we are reminded of Apinan’s explanation of the translation of conceptual art in the Thai language, when it refers to installation, performance and the use of the readymade (in which instances conceptual art as such may well have elided into conceptualism). Fourthly, conceptual art emerges in Southeast Asia historically. Mashadi’s interest is in the region. He delineates a regional map of the contemporary in art by means of an exhibition, positioning conceptual art as one of two landmark developments, raised prominently between the late 1960s and the 1980s, in it. Even as his interest is internally focused, this is not to say that he is ignorant of or indifferent to connections between Southeast Asia and the geographies and histories that make up other

locations. Apinan’s brief is, on the other hand, to nudge conceptual art practices and artists in South and Southeast Asia into assuming relationships with those in locations globally. When we read what each has to say, we hear their texts resonating somewhat with one another although each is differently oriented. In their accounts, conceptual art is distinctive in the 1970s, cresting as a frst wave in that decade in the region and as part of a second wave globally.

For discussion of complexities related to inter-media and interdisciplinary ambitions see Alex Coles & Alexia Defert, eds., The Anxiety of Interdisciplinarity (London: BACKless Books & Black Dog Publishing, 1998); Gunalan Nadarajan, “Not Modern: Theses on Contemporary Art,” in Contemporary Art in Singapore (Singapore: Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, Lasalle-SIA College of the Arts, 2007), 19–23. 17 Tony Godfrey, who is from the United Kingdom, was appointed to teach and coordinate a master’s degree course in contemporary art in Sotheby’s Institute of Art Singapore. The institute was established here in 2007. In 2011 it was closed. Godfrey continues to reside in Singapore and in locations in Southeast Asia.

IV In 2012 Marcel Duchamp was envisioned as having visited Southeast Asia. No, this is not a spectre conjured from my feverish adoration or veneration of an artist of undeniable renown and enduring enigma. I am not afficted by such a malady. It is a topic of an exhibition conceived and curated by Tony Godfrey in 2012 in Singapore. Titled matter-of-factly and with tongue-in-cheek certainty as Marcel Duchamp in South-East Asia, it springs from a programme of the Equator Art Projects based at Gillman Barracks in Singapore, for which he was the director of exhibitions.17

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18 Tony Godfrey, introduction to Marcel Duchamp in South-East Asia (Singapore: Equator Art Projects, 2012), 4. 19 Ibid. 20 FX Harsono, “Aku Tak Kenal Duchamp (I Do Not Know Duchamp),” in ibid., 28. 21 Ibid., 4. 22 Tony Godfrey, Conceptual Art (London: Phaidon, 1998).

Godfrey’s premise for this enterprise appears in an introduction disguised as a conversation with himself; it is made up of answers to questions set out sequentially in a publication bearing the show’s title. In it, Duchamp’s visit is cast fctively and bandied as an absurdist device for remembering this artist. Underlying such jocular, benign posturing are historically weighted and culturally demanding intentions. These are borne by convictions that Duchamp’s “presence lingers here as elsewhere. [Hence] this is an opportunity to think about him and his work and show something that can help us think usefully and pleasurably about that lingering presence.”18 The exhibition was to consist of two components. One would show about one hundred objects and prints by Duchamp, the frst such exposition in Southeast Asia. The other, parallel component would display Southeast Asian artists’ works that “in some ways refect on the work or legacy of Marcel Duchamp.”19 The frst mentioned part was deferred and did not materialise. Duchamp was not materially present in Southeast Asia. What we see are imprints of his lingering presence, residual concretions of his legacy. Might this be a not-so-disguised manoeuver to demonstrate the paternity of certain kinds or categories of art practices in the region? Is Duchamp’s visit to Southeast Asia a measure for legitimising “con art” from the edge (echoing Apinan’s bemused anxiety)? 240

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In conjunction with Godfrey’s imagined visit by Duchamp it is useful to read The Duchamp Effect: Essays, Interviews, Round Table, eds. Martha Buskirk & Mignon Nixon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press & October Magazine, Ltd., 1996). Agung Hujatnikajennong, “The Duchamp Look: Revisiting Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru Indonesia,” in Marcel Duchamp in South-East Asia, 33.

These are not merely tub-thumping, defensive questions posed for effect (Duchampian and otherwise). One artist in this show was riled enough by such perceived impositions to make a submission spurred by denial. FX Harsono titled his gesture Aku Tak Kenal Duchamp (I Do Not Know Duchamp). This is not all. The denial is substantiated by a fery accusation and an equally fery disavowal. It appears in the exhibition’s publication on a page facing an illustration of Harsono’s work. This is what he says: My participation in this project is caused by my desire to assert that Western dominance is still felt in the Asian art scene. A statement that I do not know Duchamp is an assertion that ideologically and historically I am not related to Marcel Duchamp at all. So why do I have to make such a work related to Duchamp? I could choose not to participate in this activity, but instead use this exhibition as a means to express my disapproval of all efforts that try to demonstrate the superiority of the West over other nations.20 A vociferously protesting participant, a self-proclaimed outcast, Harsono does not turn his back on moves to incarnate Duchamp in Southeast Asia. He registers, instead, a dissenting voice, projects a disavowing presence, pro-

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claims severance of lineal connection with an artistic fatherhood and resists being culturally disempowered in and by an exhibition that appears as staged for venerating a godhead. His submission may be gauged as aimed at dispelling the lingering presence of Duchamp in the region. Not all artists who decided to participate were similarly incensed. There were submissions conceived as homage to this artist; some others were emulations of particular works by Duchamp. I leave these matters and turn to interests in conceptual art in this exposition. Are there any and how are they spoken of? In developing answers to these questions I look at writings published in Marcel Duchamp in SouthEast Asia, especially those in which conceptual art is mentioned and discussed. Its frst mention is in Godfrey’s introduction, appearing boldly and commandingly. What is more, its paternity is clearly, singularly underlined. Joseph Kosuth’s voice is enlisted to announce its origin and advent. His oftencited declaration that all art after Duchamp is conceptual was republished for this exhibition, signifying, no doubt, its reigning resonance in and for this region; and underscoring Kosuth as a formative agency for transposing Duchamp into assuming conceptual art’s fatherhood. Godfrey bolsters the authority of these moves by saying “Duchamp created the paradigm shift in and how we think about and make art.”21 Duchamp is the primal cause for creating and apprehending art anew, then and now, everywhere. It follows that if he is not actually present (say in Southeast Asia), Duchamp as an idea, Duchamp as a presence is pervasive and consequential for making and beholding art in Southeast Asia. Thoughts such as these may well have prompted Godfrey when composing his introduction. Needless to say, Harsono thought otherwise. A note has to be entered on Godfrey’s involvement with Duchamp and conceptual art. It did not spring unaccountably. In 1998

he published a book-length account of conceptual art, providing a critical survey of the principal trajectories along which this category of art was developed in Europe and the United States, especially in the latter half of the 20th century. It remains a signifcant publication on the topic. In it Duchamp is installed importantly. Marcel Duchamp in South-East Asia is a platform devised by Godfrey to further his interest in this artist and in conceptual art in the region, and for securing credentials for representing art practices here.22 Agung Hujatnikajennong endorses the authority of Duchamp in the contemporary art world. His interest in writing for the show’s publication is to deal with “conceptualism as a discourse in Indonesian art.” Such a discourse is, he says, spurred by the impact of Duchamp. Hujatnikajennong states this as a given, as selfevident, without scrutinising it. He then nominates the GSRB, which is installed with landmark status in recent Indonesian and Southeast Asian contemporary art, as exemplarily manifesting conceptualism.23 He cites Duchamp as directly affecting decisions and actions by artists in the GSRB at its inaugural exhibition in 1975. He points to their employments of discarded, ordinary, everyday materials which are inserted in an exhibition space and displayed as objects enlisting some interest in the realms of art. These things and materials are derived from Duchamp’s arrangements of readymades. However, we remember that at the time Duchamp featured them in exhibitions, they were not represented or interpreted in conceptual art terms; they were recognised as such in Europe and the United States in the 1960s and in Southeast Asia in the 1970s. It would be tenable to propose Duchamp as historically signifcant for the GSRB through complex relays of conceptual art and conceptualism’s developments within and without Southeast Asia, and not directly. In his discussion Hujatnikajennong highlights rapid changes within the GSRB, espe-

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cially when gauging its goals in its 1978 show titled Pameran Presantasi (Presentation Exhibition), when its scope extended beyond the domains of art. The conceptual traits that propelled its 1975 inaugural show sprang, in part, from seeking to counter, bypass conventions of the modern as these were associated with institutions in Indonesian art; in part, they were spurred by actions for creating alternative, open platforms for producing and appraising art. The aims for the 1978 presentation were expansive. Hujatnikajennong says that they have to do with “the totality of the feld of art, where the process of creation, mediation and art appreciation are inseparable from the feld of economic and political power.”24 Conceptual art and conceptualism in Southeast Asia tend to be distinguished by locating them amongst these intersecting “felds,” and interpreted as related to them. Hujatnikajennong concludes his assessment of the GSRB and of conceptualism in Indonesia on this note. In doing so, he turns to Pasaraya Dunia Fantasi (The Fantasy World of the Marketplace), which was staged in 1987. A manifesto was published for the occasion, signaling its bequest to the world of art. “At this point,” says Hujatnikajennong, “conceptualism turned into a political statement aimed against the elitism of high art.”25 Lee Weng Choy writes on conceptual art in Singapore. It is the only text in Marcel Duchamp in South-East Asia in which this category of art as a subject is declared up front. The title of his essay is “Missing and Public: Conceptual Art in Singapore.” The qualifcations he enters alert readers not to expect a recounting of conceptual art in a location in the region in 500 words, neatly encapsulating history for easy, undemanding reading. He does deal with the historical, though, in order to signal that when writing history we do not necessarily show the past as such, as unravelling continuously along a single, uninterrupted plane. What do we do when writing history? 242

Lee Weng Choy replies: When we write history, what we produce is not just a picture of the past; what we conjure is a snapshot of a present comprised of a complicated, unfxed past. History pivots on the question, who are our contemporaries? And the answer is not just those contemporaries in the conventional sense, near to us in time and space, but also those with whom we fnd some remote resonance and relation—regardless of how distant in history and geography.26 Writing history in this vein is chiefy aimed at justifying, validating the present; it is a view that prevails in Lee’s thinking and in accounts of the contemporary in art. It does not exclude or invalidate other interests in thinking on history. Hujatnikajennong’s account of the GSRB’s historicalness is, vis-à-vis Duchamp and conceptualism, aligned along the very trajectory proposed by Lee. There are differences separating the two. While Lee proposes that connections between the contemporary and the past may historically be felt as distant, at times remote and complicated, the GSRB’s link with Duchamp is said to be direct and patent. For Lee, the present resonates with history; it is important to discern this resonance even when routes along which relations between the two appear circuitous and entangled. The conceptual credentials of his two nominees from Singapore—namely: Lim Tzay Chuen and Ho Tzu Nyen—are forwarded and appraised along such pathways. What did the two artists produce? Lim intended to ship the Merlion, a sculptural representation of a recently devised mythical animal form, installed at the mouth of the Singapore River and symbolising the city-state (which he named Mike), to Venice as his (and Singapore’s) entry for the biennale there in 2005. Permission to do so was refused (by the Singa-

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24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 34. 26 Lee Weng Choy, “Missing and Public: Conceptual Art in Singapore,” in Marcel Duchamp in South-East Asia, 43.

pore Tourism Board which commissioned its creation and is its custodian). In its absence the artist displayed a signboard saying, “I wanted to bring Mike over” on one side and illustrating a printed icon of the Merlion on the other, and two toilets—one male and one female (fg. 17.1). These were placed in various locations in the area designated as the Singapore pavilion. The absence fagged in the essay’s title alludes to the non-appearance of the Merlion or Mike in Venice. Of course the Singapore pavilion was not completely emptied, as there was a signboard and two toilets standing in for another intended presence! Considerable publicity was sparked by the absence of Mike. Lee submits the publicity that was circulated as bearing signifcance related to conceptual art and to understanding such art. Conceptual art is, in this instance, constituted by texts and the reading of them. We are reminded of another absence and the provision of writing as ameliorating nonappearance of art, intended as conceptual. We zoom back to Global Conceptualism and recall the non-show of South and Southeast Asia in Queens Museum of Art in New York in 1997. When discussing it I remarked that the two regions were represented only textually. The public encountered conceptual artists and art from Southeast Asia, in that exhibition, when reading Apinan Poshyananda’s written account. Then too, as in Venice, conceptual art is apparent, textually.

27 Ibid., 46. 28 See especially Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Infu-

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ence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Lee, op. cit., 46.

We are led to Ho along this very register. Lee introduces this artist by saying: “I want to end not with an artwork of Ho’s but a text he wrote for a web-anthology project.”27 In it Ho talks about prevailing sensibilities amongst writers who write on artists and art in Singapore, historically. He highlights anxieties infecting writers, especially when examining artistic infuences (he singles this writer, i.e. Sabapathy). Ho points out that there is a tendency to adopt defensive stances when discussing infuences. This arises from fear; to say an artist has been infuenced by another (especially from the West) is to cast that artist as inferior and to diminish or deny originality in one’s practice. Ho urges writers to set aside anxieties regarding infuence (he is deeply affected by Harold Bloom’s thesis on the topic) and to write history from seeing art without inhibitions and dynamically.28 Lee concludes his essay and his view of Ho by remarking “Ho’s own wish is for art critics and historians to face questions of infuence ‘free of defensive anxieties’. He dreams of ‘an art history without names’, when we no longer worry about missing fathers, but are able to look at what isn’t there, and enjoy the view.”29 There are matters in this concluding note that need attention. I will touch on the issue of “missing fathers” and skew its treatment towards the abiding interest in this essay, which has to do with reading conceptual art in Southeast Asia. “Missing fathers” could refer to

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Duchamp or to one of manifold personifcations of Duchamp. Lee begins his text by installing Duchamp as a fountainhead for talking about art that is recognised as conceptual art (although he notes that Duchamp is a conceptualist through adoption by artists in the 1960s in the United States) and about two artists from Singapore. When we regard Lim and Ho as they are presented by Lee, we lose sight of Duchamp and keep faith with conceptual art somewhat faintly. Hence when we read of Mike as missing in Venice and leaving a trail of texts and information, and of anxieties when writing on art in Singapore historically, Duchamp is so remote as virtually not to matter. If we are to regard these two artists in conceptual art terms as they appear in this writing, criteria for doing so are no longer beholden directly to Duchamp (as Lee intimates) but determined differently. Yet Duchamp is not completely absent or cast adrift in the telling of his visit to Southeast Asia, although his relation with conceptual art practices is not overtly, evenly discernible. I round off this account by reading one more text from Marcel Duchamp in South-East Asia in which we hear passing mention of conceptual art. It features Roberto Chabet prominently, heroically even. In and through him, Duchamp is venerated and incarnated in the Philippines as in no other location in the region. Chabet is esteemed as a conceptual artist; in association with Raymundo Albano, the two are hailed as “champions of conceptualist art.”30 In Ringo Bunoan’s telling, Chabet was the frst to employ arrangement of things/ objects recognised as readymades in a 1969 exhibition in Manila. Works that he produced and displayed in the 1970s are seen as closely related to Duchamp’s set-ups and gestures; so much so that Ringo Bunoan positions the two as assuming conjointly comparable presences. In doing so, Bunoan adopts an adorer’s worshipful attitude towards her master (Chabet).31 There is more! 244

Chabet memorialises Duchamp; here is a description of what may well have been an annual remembrance: Chabet celebrated Duchamp, literally, by organizing exhibitions on Duchamp’s birthday at the University of the Philippines College of Fine Art, where he taught for over thirty years. While he did not impose a Duchampian kind of practice, he did introduce a conceptual way of thinking about things.32 An immediate reaction to this report is to recall Harsono’s disavowal of Duchamp as a father. Chabet and Harsono are placed at polar ends in regarding an artist who is installed in some of these accounts as a progenitor of conceptual art. V I do not aim to end on this note. There is another matter germane to the topic in this essay, and it is more suitable for affording a pause in these readings of writings on conceptual art in Southeast Asia. It has to do with the description of birthday celebrations initiated by Chabet. Even as he venerates Duchamp, Chabet is said to avoid transferring his esteem onto his students and introduces, instead, “a conceptual way of thinking of things.”33 I appreciate Bunoan’s discrete positioning of Chabet and Duchamp with regard to the practice of conceptual art. She hints at separating Duchamp’s practice from the emergence of conceptual art in the late 1960s and 1970s (we recall Lee entering a similar observation, earlier). It is important to keep this in mind and furnish it with historical frames.34 I end on this note and with two observations. Firstly, a distinction is to be made between Duchamp’s provocations and arrangements that appeared and were presented in Europe and the United States early in the 20th

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30 Leonides V. Benesa, “Printmaking: Art for Many,” in Art Philippines: A History 1521–Present, eds. Juan T. Gatbonton, Jeannie E. Javelosa & Lourdes Ruth R. Roa (Pasig: The Crucible Workshop, 1992), 369. In 2015 a comparable view was presented by the National Gallery Singapore, in descriptive terms. “In the Philippines, conceptually oriented artists Roberto Chabet and Raymundo Albano developed an exhibition space and programme at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) that sought to promote a conducive environment to support new artistic approaches in the country, which would be regarded as a form of resistance to the Modernist tenor and internationalist ambitions (favoured by the Marcos regime) dominating the Philippine art scene during the Martial Law era.” Adele Tan, “Re:Defning Art,” in Between Declarations and Dreams: Art of Southeast Asia since the 19 th Century, ed. Low Sze Wee (Singapore: National Gallery Singapore, 2015), 62–3. There is tendency to claim Chabet as the originating wellspring for conceptual art and conceptualism in the Philippines. The situation is a little more complicated than it is customarily made out to be. David Medalla, for instance, is absented and yet felt as a spectral presence in inaugurations of new, unorthodox, experimental practices in the Philippines. Researched accounts may well signify Medalla as a

formative precedent for conceptual art and conceptualism in Southeast Asia. 32 Ringo Bunoan, “Duchamp: Re-Made and Unmade: A Partial History of the Readymade in the Philippines,” in Marcel Duchamp in South-East Asia, 17. 33 Ibid. 34 In her essay on Duchamp visiting and being sighted in Southeast Asia, Adele Tan remarks swiftly and grandly: “Duchamp’s presence is gleaned from the extensive engagement with other art movements such as Dada, Surrealism, Pop Art, Fluxus, Conceptual Art, and Arte Povera whose ideas made their way to Southeast Asia from the 1970s on.” Adele Tan, “Did Marcel Duchamp come to Southeast Asia? They Came, We Saw, He Check-Mated,” in Marcel Duchamp in South-East Asia, 66. Presence is the thing! 35 John Clark writes that modern art in Southeast Asia “exists in a context of severe historical disjunction between the different linguistic and cultural situations inherited from colonialism or neo-colonialism.” This is not to signal that writing histories of the region’s modern art is not feasible. The task is to write these disjunctions historically; or, as Clark remarks provocatively “there are also broken genealogies which serve as historical parallels between different countries in the region.” John Clark, “Modern Art in South-East Asia,” Art and Asia Pacifc, Sample Issue (1993): 35–6.

century from conceptual art movements which emerged in Southeast Asia in the 1970s. One is not necessarily manifested as the other without mediation. Secondly, the lineage of conceptual art (and conceptualism) in Southeast Asia does not settle upon Duchamp (or anyone else) as a primordial ancestor. Its genealogies have to be

mapped by tracking wellsprings and resources from diverse geographies and histories, including those within the region of Southeast Asia. In all likelihood, the ensuing schemes will not yield continuously linked lineages but broken and separate genealogies.35 These need separate studies. The texts I present for reading may foster such studies.

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17.1 Lim Tzay Chuen Mike 2005 Singapore Pavilion Courtyard 51st Biennale of Venice Image courtesy of the artist

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World Bank, The East Asian Miracle: Economic Growth and Public Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Folker Fröbel, Jürgen Heinrichs & Otto Kreye, The New International Division of Labour: Structural Unemployment in Industrialised Countries and Industrialisation in Developing Countries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). The original German edition was published in 1977.

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Fredric Jameson in Nico Baumbach, Damon R. Young & Genevieve Yue, “Revisiting Postmodernism: An Interview with Fredric Jameson,” Social Text 34, no. 2 (June 2016): 144. C.J.W.-L. Wee, “Capitalism and Ethnicity: Creating ‘Local’ Culture in Singapore,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 1, no. 1 (April 2000): 129-43. Tony Blair, The Third Way: New Politics for a New Century, Pamphlet 588 (London: Fabian Society, 1998), 7.

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The Singapore Contemporary and Contemporary Art in Singapore C.J.W.-L. Wee

Time is active, by nature it is much like a verb, it both “ripens” and “brings forth.” […] But since we measure time by a circular motion closed in on itself, we could just as easily say that its motion and change are rest and stagnation. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, 1924 The idea of contemporary art entails, as a presupposition, the existence of an idea of the contemporary. The structure of temporality, in turn, is to be comprehended as the way time is understood, or conceptualised, and lived out in society. The contemporary is therefore both an idea of the time in which we are in and a goal of reacting more effectively to the demands of the immediate present. What then is contemporary art in Singapore, and how does it relate to the sociopolitical context within which it functions, one in which culture as a notion from the 1980s becomes more prominent? 246

I frst want to suggest in this essay that “we” in Singapore since the 1980s, as the socalled East Asian Miracle unfolded, entered a new historical period that no longer felt a need to catch up with the paradigms of the advanced economies.1 The result of the postindependence Singapore government’s commitment to modernising the island-state’s society and culture in the name of an export-oriented industrial modernity was that the former colony seemed to have breached a Euro-American enacted divide between First and Third World global zones. Singapore, from the late 1960s, had been among the early countries to beneft from the increasing economic interdependence of the world system, initially described in 1977 as the New International Division of Labour (NIDL) and later as globalisation.2 Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) fowed into Singapore, and, arguably, by the 1980s, elites in the citystate felt more coordinated with the spaces and

Charting Thoughts

time of the metropolitan West. The literarycultural critic Fredric Jameson has noted: It seems to me that everybody recognizes some kind of postmodern break, whatever name they give it, that takes place in 1980 or so, in the Reagan/Thatcher era, with the advent of economic deregulation, the new salience of globalization, and so on. [… I]t does seem to mark the end of the modern in all kinds of ways, from communications technologies and industry all the way to forms of art.3 The systematic subsumption of Singapore under capitalism, unsurprisingly, lead to the volatilisation of society and its culture, broadly understood as both ways of living and the arts: capitalism requires the absorption (or totalisation) of the world’s multiplicities or heterogeneities for standardised predictability.4 Consequently, I also wish to suggest that culture’s volatilisation at least partially explains the emergence of contemporary art in the city-state, as artistic space opened up for new expressions of the local that captured the effects of economic transformation—the incomplete fragments of life in the historical present wrought by rapid modernisation from the late 1960s. The 1980s increasingly see an artistic move away from the destabilised prominence (if not quite orthodoxies) of Nanyang “Style” modernism (the hybrid techniques of Chinese colour and ink and the School of Paris), social realism inspired by mainland Chinese arts developments and what might be called the Singapore lyrical exotic—paintings of the Singapore River and Chinatown. The newer art that emerged can be loosely described as a fexible art practice that breaks with a modern art that was medium-specifc and object-based to take on a transmedia or perhaps trans-category orientation. Its fexibility in engaging with the contemporary moment comes from recognising that while art is con-

stituted by concepts, this does not mean that art’s aesthetic dimensions should be eliminated. Rather, it can lead to an expanded use of seemingly non-aesthetic material for expression and art-making. Contemporary art also drew upon what might be called an “alternative” or perhaps suppressed tradition of modernism as seen in the legacy of Surrealism, the Dada movement and Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968). We can say that aspects from a combination of the historical avant-garde of the 1910s and 1920s, the postwar neo-avant-garde’s revision of avant-garde devices and conceptualism were taken up in Singapore, in which the principles of autonomous art were contested in the name of connecting art with life, though searchingly interpreted for the needs of the “local” in terms of content and cultural orientation. Perhaps this was art suitable for a society in which art did not have an established role. There was no direct repetition of the avant-garde, given the pre-war avant-garde’s critique of art institutions: such institutions were weak in 1980s Singapore. More sophisticated art institutions only emerged from the 1990s. It is with the above in mind that we can use “the contemporary” as a periodising term that enables an insight into where we “are” in matters of cultural identity and the modulating patterns of what being contemporary implies. And this brings me to my fnal issue: the importance of culture, broadly writ to include the arts and heritage, as part of the present that Singapore sees itself within. In 1998, former British prime minister Tony Blair wrote of “a dynamic knowledge-based economy” that is possible after traditional industrial manufacturing waned.5 Culture, combined with the stunning developments in information and technology, can contribute to a post-industrial economy in which the management of creativity, ideas and images mattered. Culture hence becomes a defning sign of the contemporary that the city-state must possess after the initial decades of pragmatic materialism. The state increasingly begins to deliver infrastructural and

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monetary resources for arts development from the 1990s that was literally unimaginable in the 1970s, in spite of an ongoing regime of censorship.6 While this extolment of culture might seem to contrast with the tension in the 1980s and throughout the 1990s between emergent art and the state’s desire to attain synchronicity with the advanced West, this tension has not completely dissipated—even as a current public-policy goal is to be a competitive global city with edgy contemporary art.

of the arts as a community activity to encourage individual creativity, and as part of a growing entertainment and leisure activity, came with the establishment of a Cultural Development Committee in 1980 by the [then-]Ministry of Culture. Not surprisingly, when the People’s Action Party (PAP) issued its election manifesto in 1984 called Agenda for Action … A Vision of Singapore by 1999, the catchphrase was “a cultured society” and the target “Singapore—City of Excellence.” The Agenda’s notable feature was to take Singapore beyond being a developed society in the economic sense; it is also to be “a society culturally vibrant,” “a cultured people fnding fulflment in non-material pursuits.”9

Culture, the Arts and the Will to be Contemporary In the revealing book titled From Third World to First, the frst prime minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015), wrote about the tight link between politics and capitalist development: “During the Cold War, when it was far from clear in the 1960s and ’70s which side would win, we aligned ourselves with the West. […] By the late 1980s, it was clear that we were on the side of the victors.”7 With that victory, the manifestly incomplete modernisation of a backward, colonial-era modernity also seemed to have been transcended, but some caution was still necessary: “[I]t will take another generation before our arts, culture and social standards can match the First World infrastructure we have installed.”8 Culture seemed to be the last barrier to overcome the system of Otherness that emerged during the age of European colonialism. But, by 2000, when From Third World was published, culture had more than come to the fore in the Singapore state’s will to be contemporary. In 1989, literary critic Koh Tai Ann examined how the People’s Action Party government—the party that has ruled Singapore since 1959, when self-rule was gained—changed their approach to cultural matters in the 1980s: The offcial sign that the 1980s would see more emphasis on the development 248

The need for individual creativity, the wish for “a cultured people” with “non-material pursuits” were to be markers of a genuinely developed society. These terms had less purchase in the decade before, when the sociopolitical and economic project of modernisation possessed philistine dimensions and the cultures it paid most attention to were multiracial cultures and inter-ethnic tensions. While art is a privileged conveyor of modern culture and values, petit bourgeois mores concerned with the disciplined manufacturing of products by multinational corporations rendered art and creativity irrelevant to economic growth. Koh went on to note that in March 1985, the state’s Sub-Committee on Services for the Economic Committee had “review[ed] the progress of the Singapore economy and [went on to] identify new areas of growth,” envisaging that “a vibrant cultural and entertainment services industry would enhance our image as a tourist destination, make Singapore a better place to live in, and also help to attract professional and skilled workers in Singapore.”10 The government had not gone soft: individualistic cultural development could support pragmatic

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Clarissa Oon, “Time to Review Arts Regulation: There is a Need to Exempt Major Arts Bodies from Licensing Requirements, and Release More Information on Controversial Cuts,” The Straits Times, 8 October 2015, http://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/time-toreview-arts-regulation (accessed 1 March 2016). 7 Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First: The Singapore Story: 1965–2000 (Singapore: Times Media Pte. Ltd. & Singapore Press Holdings Ltd., 2000), 13. 8 Ibid. 9 Koh Tai Ann, “Culture and the Arts,” in Management of Success: The Moulding of Modern Singapore, eds. Kernial Singh Sandhu & Paul Wheatley (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1990), 713. 10 Cited in Ibid., 715. 11 Chan Heng Chee, “The Arts Power On,” The Straits

Times, 4 July 2015, http://www.straitstimes.com/ opinion/the-arts-power-on (accessed 13 July 2015). The National Theatre was built in 1963 and had a distinctive cantilevered steel roof. It was demolished in 1986. Chan has been chair of the National Arts Council since September 2013; before that, she was ambassador for Singapore to the United States in 1996–2012. On being named as ambassador, she had this to say: “I’m anti-establishment and was a bit of a dissident before I was appointed ambassador. It came as something of a shock to me when I was offered the ambassadorship because I was highly critical of government in a society that is not used to being critiqued.” (“Verbatim: Singaporean Ambassador Heng Chee Chan,” Washington Life Magazine, December 2004, http://www.washingtonlife.com/issues/ 2004-12/verbatim/ (accessed 1 February 2016).

(then a favoured adjective in PAP discourse) development. Nevertheless, this mix of goals— high cultural and creative cultivation combined with the ongoing emphases on ethnic cultural expression to maintain a harmonious multiracial national identity—indicate that the 1980s was a decade of adaptation for policy on culture and the arts. Though the question of the instrumentalisation of the arts does not recede, then or now, we do witness the incremental formation of cultural policies less to do with race or ethnicity and more to do with the arts and, increasingly, with information, the media and what are now referred to as the “creative industries.” These changes have intensifed since the 1980s, and have transformed Singapore from being primarily a functional city of economic development in the 1970s to becoming, by 2000, not only a global city, but an aspirational Global City for the Arts. The current National Arts Council (NAC) chair, Chan Heng Chee, has noted:

ment, defence, housing, healthcare and education. The arts were not a priority, though along the way the Government built the National Theatre on the slopes of Fort Canning Hill. Visitors to Singapore saw a successful economy but a “cultural desert.”11

In the 1960s and 1970s, the focus of the Government was on economic develop-

“Cultural desert” was an expression much used to describe the city-state in decades past. The changing prospects for culture and the arts, we could venture to say, were enabled further from the 1990s because culture gained an enhanced role in the advanced West. In 1997, Tony Blair proposed that a “Cool Britannia” tagline be part of a national branding exercise in which the arts were repackaged with other more obviously proftable enterprises, such as advertising or writing computer software, into a category called the “cultural and creative industries”; and a Creative Industries Task Force was set up in the new Department of Culture, Media and Sport. The inclusion of the term “creativity” is to be noted, for “‘creativity’ escaped the snobby association of ‘culture,’ and gave more substance to the post-

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Robert Hewison, Cultural Capital: The Rise and Fall of Creative Britain (London: Verso, 2014), 39. 13 Ministry of Information and The Arts, Renaissance City Report: Culture and the Arts in Renaissance Singapore (Singapore: The Ministry, 2000), 4. Two objectives were stressed: the frst, to establish Singapore as a global arts city conducive to creative, knowledgebased industries and talent; and the second, to strengthen national identity and belonging among Singaporeans by nurturing an appreciation of shared heritage. Cf. Jinna Tay, “Creative Cities,” in Creative Industries, ed. John Hartley (Malden, Massachusetts: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 225. 14 National Arts Council, “About Us,” https://www.nac. gov.sg/naccorp/naccorp/aboutus/mission-vision. html (accessed 1 February 2016). 15 Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts, Report of the Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts (Singapore: The Council, 1989).

Committee on Visual Arts, Committee on Visual Arts (Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts) Report, November 1988 (Singapore: The Committee, 1988). Another specialised committee, chaired by the poet–academic Edwin Thumboo, undertook work on literary development, resulting in the publication: Committee on Literary Arts, Report of the Committee on Literary Arts (Singapore: The Committee, 1988). Visual and performing arts development has been more prominent than its literary equivalent, if for no other reason than just the simple fact that the physical infrastructure for their display is more spectacular. 17 Chinese-language theatre is represented, for example, by the 1960s and 1970s productions by Kuo Pao Kun (1939–2002); see Quah Sy Ren & Pan Cheng Lui, eds., The Complete Works of Kuo Pao Kun, Vol. One: Plays in Chinese—The 1960s and the 1970s (Singapore: Practice Performing Arts School and

industrial economy of signs and symbols.”12 While artists such as playwright Mark Ravenhill criticised the superfciality of this branding, in Singapore the state followed with the articulation of its own creative city policy, the 2000 Renaissance City Report, which reinforced the position of its 1992 Singapore—Global City for the Arts report:

head, and when substantial new administrative structures were put in place by the government, is 1989, with the publication of the Report of the Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts.15 The report’s weight was reinforced by the fact that the council was led by then-second deputy prime minister, Ong Teng Cheong. This report was based on the earlier work of more specialised committees, such as the Committee on Visual Arts’ report published in 1988, which observed that thus far cultural activities had largely been left to individuals and private groups.16 However, as we have seen, the varied impetuses that led to the new attitude to the arts were already taking place earlier in the decade, making the 1980s a dynamic decade for cultural change, when the city-state increasingly turned away from philistine modernisation. The times, they were a-changin’, with the prospect of reform in arts policy, and certainly some of the political elites in leadership seemed reassured that there was less need to fret over the teleological implications of 1960s modernisation theory: History had not left Sin-

We want to position Singapore as a key city in the Asian renaissance of the 21st century and a cultural centre in the globalised world. The idea is to be one of the top cities in the world to live, work and play in, where there is an environment conducive to creative and knowledgebased industries and talent.13 In 2016, the cultural vision for the city-state has not changed; the NAC’s website says its mission is: “To develop Singapore as a distinctive global city for the arts.”14 The key moment—now widely accepted— when the changes afoot in the 1980s came to a 250

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Global Publishing, 2005). In terms of the visual arts, the post-war Nanyang School has received much more attention than post-war social realist painting and woodblock caricatures. This is partially due to the more politically sensitive nature of some of the artworks produced by the Social Realists. (Or, alternatively, it might be said that the project to represent Nanyang—the South Seas, or broadly speaking Southeast Asia—was less sensitive than the social realist project to represent ordinary Singapore life.) Social realist painting attempted to capture the truth of everyday life and had, at the very least, a left-leaning, egalitarian bent. For more on such visual work, see Singapore Art Museum, From Words to Pictures: Art during the Emergency, exh. cat. (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 2007). 18 The phrase “Asian renaissance” was frst used in 1996 by then-deputy prime minister of Malaysia, Anwar Ibrahim; he wrote that the Asian rebirth in

the wake of economic progress should concern itself with “the revival of the arts and the sciences under the infuence of classical models based on strong moral and religious foundations; a cultural resurgence dominated by a re-fowering of art and literature, architecture and music and advancements in science and technology.” (Anwar Ibrahim, The Asian Renaissance (Singapore: Times Books International, 1996), 18.) This was an articulation with a stronger humanistic element than in Singapore. Singapore certainly seems to have won a reputation as a crosscultural facilitator which could help others to navigate this “century”; see, for example, Gabriele Giovannini & Emanuele Schibotto, “Singapore and the Asian Century: The City-State Has a Potentially Vital Role to Play in the West’s Engagement with Asia,” The Diplomat, 19 February 2015, http://thediplomat. com/2015/02/singapore-and-the-asian-century/ (accessed 2 February 2016).

gapore behind. A major sign of the times for Singapore was the fnal “end” of the politically and economically unstable mid-1940s to the 1960s, Singapore’s “post-war” period, it could be said. Those unsettling years saw the decolonisation of Malaya in 1957, the formal ending of the Malayan Emergency in 1960, the formation of the Federation of Malaysia in 1963 and Singapore’s economic survival after it left (or was ejected from) the Federation in 1965. The challenges posed in the name of The People by the Left in Singapore (including its artistic manifestations in Chinese-language theatre and post-war social realist painting and woodblock caricatures) effectively ended with the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 and the announcement of economic reforms called “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” at the end of 1978 in mainland China.17 It is said that the events of 1989 brought the Cold War to a close, but for East and Southeast Asia (if we avoid taking a too overtly Eurocentric perspective), China’s initial economic reforms mark at least the modulation of the Cold War’s most diffcult aspects.

The 1980s thus inaugurated the city-state’s post-war as well as post-independence period. Arguably, at this juncture, the “old” phase of Singapore’s recent modern history is left behind, and in place we see a strengthening will to being contemporary. The developmental goal then was to be a top player within the “Asian renaissance” in the much-ballyhooed “Coming Asian Century,” a phrase that could smack of triumphalism, and that, not accidentally, frst occurs in the 1980s.18 The global system of Otherness that colonialism created was substantially weakened during the height of post-war decolonisation, but the question of economic equality was still a thorny matter. The appearance of the world market intensifed the two-way interpenetration of First and Third World such that countries like Singapore wanted to obliterate the nonsynchronous socio-economic temporalities that the poles of London and Singapore represented. The 1980s economic game was different from the one played during the modernising haste of the 1970s. With “the end of an essentially modernist feld of political struggle in

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Fredric Jameson, “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue,” in The Cultures of Globalization, eds. Fredric Jameson & Masao Miyoshi (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1998), 55. Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London: Verso, 2013), 21. Theodor W. Adorno & Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London: Verso, 1979), 158, 161. Art and Globalization, eds. James Elkins, Zhivka Valiavicharska & Alice Kim (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010).

which the great ideologies [such as nationalism] still had the force and the great authority of the great religions,” and with less-modernised states like Singapore seeming less the past of modern states in the West, it might also seem time to proclaim the “disappearance of History as the fundamental element in which human beings exist.”19 However premature such proclamations seem, the attention that international media paid to the collective economic success that the four Asian mini-dragons of Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea had attained by the 1980s implied that Singapore and some parts of East Asia were inhabiting at least more of an equally shared present with the advanced economies. The above in itself does not mean that economic insecurity was left behind: staying contemporary, like becoming modern, feels like a race run on a treadmill. The island-state now had to be more of a transnational space than when it was an early benefciary of outsourcing during the pressing nation-building phase of the late 1960s and 1970s. Capitalism had penetrated social forms (“national communities,” “societies,” “cultures”) and consequently, global and regional economic interdependence was a reality, meaning that the older modern idea of self-suffcient nation-states went out the win252

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The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds, eds. Hans Belting, Andrea Buddenseig & Peter Weibel (Karlsruhe, Germany: ZKM/Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, 2013); and C.J.W.-L. Wee, “‘We Asians’?: Modernity, Visual Art Exhibitions, and East Asia,” boundary 2 37, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 91–126. As has been observed, “Transnationality is the putative socio-spatial form of the current temporal unity of historical experience.” (Osborne, op. cit., 26). Russell Storer, “Making Space: Historical Contexts of Contemporary Art in Singapore,” in Contemporary Art in Singapore, eds. Gunalan Nadarajan, Russell Storer, Eugene Tan & Yu-Mei Balasingamchow (Singapore:

dow—this was the cost of existing in the same time zone, as it were, with the market-oriented Anglo-American West. The game was upped such that economies should not just make things for export, using other people’s technology and business models (which worked in the 1970s), but had to be creative and innovative. And here art had a role: its very uselessness and perceived autonomy became component parts of a model of creativity, and in keeping with what was transpiring in cutting-edge metropolitan centres, state policy and rationality no longer negated autonomy but employed a “new systemic functionalization of autonomy itself,” as the philosopher Peter Osborne puts it.20 During the phase of industrialised modernity in the advanced West, the “principle of idealistic aesthetics [regarding the work of art]—purposefulness without a purpose”—was “replaced by exchange value,” which itself was part-and-parcel of the “commercial system.”21 Now, in postindustrial contexts, creativity and autonomy are taken to drive new commercial innovation. The three key art institutions of note to emerge since the 1989 Advisory Council report are the Singapore Art Museum (SAM; 1996), the Singapore Biennale (2006) and, the most recent, the National Gallery Singapore (2015), brought into existence at the cost of

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Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, 2007), 12. While it is reasonable to contend that “inter-nodal negotiations between the [contemporary] artists, state, public and commerce are entangled and most importantly, not necessarily adversarial[,] as TAV had shown [the] willingness to use funds from the state and corporations to gain a wider audience for their art,” this does not lead to the writer’s conclusion that artists in the 1960s and 1970s were more independent than contemporary artists (Seng Yu Jin, “Re-Visiting the Emergence of The Artists Village,” in The Artists Village: 20 Years On, eds. Kwok Kian Woon & Lee Wen, exhibition booklet (Singapore: Singapore Art

an astonishing S$532 million (then approximately US$370 million). The frst and third institutions showcase historical modern and recent contemporary art from Singapore and Southeast Asia, and the second—the premier globalised exhibition form—offers themed exhibitions that bring in the newest of emerging experimental art from the immediate region.22 Collectively, the three institutions interpret and present the inter-regional diversity of social experience as embodied by art within novel cultural spaces committed to the exploration of multicultural similarities and differences. Such forms of social experience, from where some still consider the semi-periphery of the advanced capitalist world, have been presented within the framework of a common world only recently.23 Thus, the three institutions are at least partially de-bordered or post-national spaces that present the complex and even disjunctive, multicultural contemporaneity of Southeast Asia.24 They are poster children of the city-state’s will to contemporaneity even while they simultaneously serve to articulate non-metropolitan representations of “our” own modernist and contemporary art. The presentation of contemporary art necessarily entails the possession of a domestic contemporary art to showcase as well—or

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Museum, 2009), 14.) (For a related and more detailed argument, see Yvonne Low, “Positioning Singapore’s Contemporary Art,” Journal of Maritime Geopolitics and Culture 2, nos. 1 & 2 (2011): 115–37.) The expectations of public fnancial support only reveal how artists, given their own (post)colonial backgrounds, expect the arts to be subsidised as a public good, as is the case in Britain and Western Europe in general; this is unlikely to be out of step with the assumptions of a large part of the citizenry. Koh was the founding chair of the NAC, and served from 1991–1996.

else it may seem that the cultural desert still exists. Ironically, if contemporary artists such as the near-iconic Tang Da Wu (b. 1943) and those who were part of the artists’ colony he was so involved with in 1988, The Artists Village (TAV), said to embody “alterity” in art, had not existed, arts policy would have had to invent them. Curator Russell Storer assesses the signifcance of TAV in the city-state’s recent cultural history thus: “With an emphasis on performance and installation, artists at TAV experimented with forms and ideas with a new level of criticality and openness, with Tang acting as a mentor fgure for many of the younger artists.”25 While contemporary art has benefted from increased state funding, the interactive conditioning of state-linked cultural institutions and artwork became more pronounced only from perhaps 2002, the year that the arts complex, Esplanade—Theatres on the Bay, was opened. The signature arts centre, now a literal and symbolic centre of the arts in the city-state, was constructed at the cost of S$600 million (then approximately US$400 million) and had to be defended by NAC chair, Tommy Koh.26 To return to the 1980s, though, the gradual appearance of contemporary art then was more directly concerned with the conditions

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of stern modernisation and less with art institutions; Singapore is in the position of having had artistic margins with avant-garde inclinations that presumably wanted to question artistic authority and conventions ahead of the authoritative arts-institutional centre that could sanction and canonise art. Contemporary Art’s “Arrival” and Flexible Postconceptual Art It has been argued, as I have noted, that from 1980 or so, capitalism more and more becomes “an omniscient form of our existence” that affects communication technologies to art forms.27 The question then arises of whether this is another Eurocentric statement: if capitalism is everywhere, is it really quite the same thing everywhere even in a relatively small region like Southeast Asia? I think we can say, in a qualifed way, that yes it was everywhere in the region because of the Cold War; but we must add that it appeared with different accents in different locales. A brief comparison of how contemporary art “arrives” in a few Southeast Asian countries from the 1970s will indicate the distinctiveness of Singapore’s relation to capitalism—owing to its deliberate capitalist self-subsumption—and the resulting specifcity of its contemporary art. What also arises as a question—one that cannot easily be avoided—is: what does it mean when art travels? Do we speak of a Singapore contemporary art or contemporary art in Singapore? The same type of question could be applied to, say, the Philippines or Indonesia. Such questions, though, should not presume any essentialist conceptions of contemporary art. The fexible art practices of the 1980s employed a number of post-formalist strategies in art-making. Drawing upon the practice of conceptual art, broadly taken, the strategies used were based on the understanding that art derived its critical meaning not from external aesthetic dimensions of the artwork, but from 254

its internal structure. However, the understanding that art need not be aesthetic unexpectedly freed up the thought parameters of what constituted “artistic material,” resulting in what has been described as the “postmedium condition” of art.28 In Singapore (and around the region) medium-specifc and object-based art are reincorporated as component parts of an expansive artistic practice that, following Peter Osborne, can be called postconceptual art. Singapore art thus went beyond the thoroughgoing antiaesthetic of a purist notion of conceptualism, towards being an expanded art that featured, in particular, performance and installation sculpture blended (or co-existing) with painting and drawing—within which, in both latter media, fguration might appear; while oil painting or easel painting lost its position of primacy, painting did not disappear as it should have, if we follow the theorisations of art development undertaken decades ago.29 The blended art practices facilitated engagements with the contemporary fragments of life that were part of the Singapore condition of rapid modernisation. The Contemporary Arrives—and Takes Off How art travels and is reshaped is not a predictable business. Historical contexts are different in various locales, and the lineaments of a EuroAmerican art history—often an art history seen from the point of view of institutions in the United States that have been dominant since 1945—unsurprisingly do not apply in a neat way to Southeast Asian contexts. Further, even the geopolitical term “Southeast Asia” cannot be invoked easily as a destination for art, given the cultural differences between the Malay Archipelago or maritime Southeast Asia (e.g. Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines) and mainland Southeast Asia or Indochina (e.g. Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam). If we stay with the Philippines and Indonesia, we might generalise that the 1970s witnessed the near-simultaneous appearance of:

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27 Jameson in Baumbach, Young & Yue, “Revisiting 28 29

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Postmodernism,” 144. Rosalind E. Krauss, “Reinventing the Medium,” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 2 (Winter, 1999): 296. See, as an example, Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). Ahmad Mashadi, “Framing the 1970s,” Third Text 25, no. 4 (July 2011): 410. The art that came out of this Cold War period from the Malay Archipelago was featured in a Special Pro-

two broad approaches [in art-making]— conceptualism and statement-making[, …] as well as realism [in more established medium-based art] and forms of activism. However, these approaches should not be seen as mutually exclusive, but instead as trajectories founded upon shared contextual concerns.30 That is to say, conceptually oriented work coexisted or even combined with realism to give rise to the plural or even eclectic practice of contemporary art that may not be easily recognised as such in the metropolitan centres. The overarching shared historical-contextual concerns for the 1970s were the Cold War that framed the results of decolonisation from the 1940s to the mid-1960s and the question of how national identity and culture should be expressed in a tumultuous region. Artistic experiments had to ascertain what the “post” in “postcolonial” implied for artistic processes. This was the crucial factor that mediated the post-war regional practices of both modern and contemporary art. The quasi-authoritarian governments that arose after the colonialists left, and were tolerated by the United States of America because of their anti-communism, complicated artistic-cultural thinking.31 Two brief examples illustrate the re-

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gramme of the inaugural 2006 Singapore Biennale, Telah Terbit (Out Now), held at SAM. See Ahmad Mashadi, Telah Terbit (Out Now): Southeast Asian Contemporary Art Practices during the 1970s, exh. cat. (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 2006). Patrick D. Flores, “Missing Links, Burned Bridges: The Art of the ’70s,” in Pananaw 2: Philippine Journal of Visual Arts (Manila: National Commission for Culture and the Arts, 1998), 53. Ahmad, “Framing the 1970s,” 413.

gional “art world’s overlapping—because combined and uneven—modes of production,” as art historian Patrick Flores phrases it.32 On 8 September 1969, the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP), constructed with fnancial support from the United States, was opened. As the nation lurched towards the declaration of martial law in 1972, the CCP was taken by some to be a cultural expression of the Marcos regime. Artists such as Pablo Baen Santos (b. 1943), one of the founders of the Kaisahan (Solidarity) Group of realist painters, were committed to the urban poor; for him and those likeminded, “[r]ealism was deployed in order to critique the state’s patronage of the arts through such institutions as the CCP, which tended to favour abstraction and conceptual practices that for many appeared artifcial, mannerist and overly indexical of international movements.”33 In this case, modernist abstraction and contemporary conceptual practices, though considered incommensurate as visual arts practices, are yoked together as parts of an international culture some saw as antithetical to a more genuine or representative national culture. In contrast, we can take the artists linked with the New Art Movement (Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru, GSRB) in Indonesia. After the

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Agung Hujatnikajennong, “The Contemporary Turns: About the Indonesian Art World and the Aftermath of ‘the 80s’,” in Beyond the Dutch: Indonesia, the Netherlands and the Visual Arts from 1900 Until Now, eds. Meta Knol, Remco Raben & Kitty Zijlmans (Amsterdam: KIT Publishers, 2010) Jim Supangkat, “Multiculturalism/Multimodernism,” in Contemporary Art in Asia: Tradtions/Tensions, exh. cat. (New York: Asia Society Galleries, 1996), 80. Jim Supangkat offers a timely warning that contemporary artwork from “developing societies” should not be pigeonholed as consistently being about “sociopolitical content”; the danger would be a stereotype “that developing nations are repressive states in which democracy cannot develop or expand. […] Whereas there was once a [colonial-era] distinction between ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ societies, using progress as the measure, now the division is between ‘developed’ and ‘not-yet-developed’ societies, using democracy as the measure.” (Ibid.) Osborne, op. cit., 21. James Elkins, “Afterword,” in Art and Globalization, 264.

ist Development, Singapore (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007), 33–52. 40 Cf. Rem Koolhaas, “Singapore Songlines: Portrait of a Potemkin Metropolis… or Thirty Years of Tabula Rasa,” in Rem Koolhaas & Bruce Mau, Small, Medium, Large, Extra-Large, ed. Jennifer Sigler (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1995); Rodolphe de Koninck, Julie Drolet & Marc Girard, Singapore: An Atlas of Perpetual Territorial Transformation (Singapore: NUS Press, 2008); and Wee, Asian Modern, 77–98. 41 Thomas Crow, “Afterword,” in his The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent (London: Lawrence King Publishing Ltd., 2004), 185. 42 National Museum of Singapore, “About Us,” http:// nationalmuseum.sg/about-nms/history (accessed 19 February 2016). 43 Susie Koay, “Urban Artists: 25 Years of Singapore Art: Some Observations,” in National Museum Art Gallery, Urban Artists: 25 Years of Singapore Art, exh. cat. (Singapore: National Musuem Art Gallery, 1990), 5.

fall of Sukarno and the suppression of communism, with Suharto’s New Order set up, art and cultural expression were depoliticised. In this environment, abstraction, combined with work that referenced spiritual expression and decorative local motifs and patterns, fourished. In 1975, the GSRB was established by FX Harsono (b. 1949) and others, and championed a pluralism of artistic expression that infuenced younger artists such as Dede Eri Supria (b. 1956), with the result that the use of ready-mades, found objects and site-specifc installations spread, becoming an art that was executed with local sociopolitical concerns and historical contexts kept in view.34 In both instances of national artistic development discussed above, art is politicised. The geopolitical realities that avant-garde and conceptualism elsewhere understood to concern itself with questions of autonomous art and the expressive artist—or also “the oppressive

values of modernism as refected in the policies of art institutions,” as the Indonesian critic– curator–artist Jim Supangkat puts it—are transplanted into different cultural and political registers.35 The Cold War, authoritarian anti-communist regimes and the fears of the Free World were inescapable in the region— though at the same time, we want to avoid implying that art from developing societies only deal with sociopolitical content.36 Arguably, the sociopolitical complexities of 1970s Southeast Asian contemporary art act out, in unexpected combinations of forms and styles, the possibilities inherent within “the more socially and politically complex perspectives of the historical avant-gardes”—but we might observe that such “perspectives” were “also revived in the 1960s and 1970s by a range of work [in the advanced West], which was either directly political in character, had strong anti-art elements, or embodied art-institutional and social

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critique.”37 If contemporary art with realist dimensions in Southeast Asia cannot be understood as truly sharing a contemporaneous moment with some of the neo-avant-gardes in the metropolitan West in the 1970s, the difference would seem to lie in Southeast Asian societies’ apparently laggard positions in modernisation’s telos. As happens when thinking of non-metropolitan modern and contemporary art, the issue of their “belatedness” arises (or their “particularity,” versus the “universal” art of the Euro-American centres). The art historian James Elkins acknowledges that: “Belatedness is a prickly concept: it forecloses sympathy and prohibits dialogue by offering a value judgement as a description. It trails a string of problematic concepts with normative implications, including the avant-garde, infuence, originality, and precedence.”38 How did Singapore compare with its surrounding environs? The expression of contemporary art in Singapore was rare in the 1970s, becoming more pronounced by the late 1980s. Despite this, the city-state shared artistic orientations in common with the region, and it is the PAP government’s success in engineering rapid growth that accounts for artistic differences. The commitment to rapid growth represented a choice of capitalist development with revised (and attenuated) social-democratic forms over even a “hard” leftism. Sociopolitical discipline and social engineering would create the culture to transform society.39 These choices made the city-state stand out in relief against the other national-cultural ideals that surrounded them. The upshot of the above leads us to the broad proposition that contemporary art arises, erratically and symptomatically through the 1970s, in varying degrees of reaction to the volatilisation of society and culture by a wrenching catch-up modernisation—which also entailed intense urbanisation, with the entire island losing the inherited division between town and country from colonial times—and to the search for new artistic means not only in the visual

arts, but also in theatre and literature, that allowed sharper engagements with sociocultural engineering.40 Artistic changes in the metropolitan centres from the 1950s–1970s, when many artists seemed determined “to locate their art as closely as possible to the boundaries between art’s traditional domain of imaginative perception and the base materiality of one’s means of signifcation,” then offered options by which artists could adapt to create an art that foregrounded the present’s fragments.41 Such matters formed the thematic core of an exhibition in 1990, Urban Artists: 25 Years of Singapore Art, curated by Susie Koay, then a curator at the National Museum Art Gallery (NMAG), and, later, the deputy director of the new SAM. The NMAG, established in 1976, was a cultural institution that exceeded the historical and ethnological orientation of its parent National Museum (with origins in 1849) in its commitment to visual art, until the opening of SAM in 1996 as a full-blown art museum.42 The exhibition is valuable as an authentic representative voice from the end of the 1980s that captures artistic transitions in both aesthetic media and content. In the exhibition booklet, Koay writes that the pre-independence environment of Singapore was ineluctably transformed after independence on 9 August 1965, and that art changed with it. Already, in 1960, the PAP started “a drive towards industrialization and rapid urbanization,” and because of “its sustained and offtimes [sic] ruthless urbanization programme, by the year 1988, a total of 86% of the population lived in these subsidized skyscraper towns.”43 The exhibition offers four categories of artists in examining the relationship between art and “the current culture”: frst, artists who directly transcribe the environment into their work; second, artists who indirectly or unselfconsciously utilise elements from their environment; third, artists who “isolate themselves to create an inner world within the urban setting”; and fnally, those whose work is

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44 45 46

Ibid., 5, 6, 10. Ibid., 6. Kwok Kian Chow, Channels and Confuences: A History of Singapore Art (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 1996), 92–4. Ahmad Mashadi posits that the critical artistic formations of the 1970s in West Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia, by and large, “may be seen as a collective critique against the formality, un-refexiveness and repetitiveness of what

in touch with the current environment [… in which] utility services compare favourably with those elsewhere [in the more advanced world]; [and] where the URA [Urban Redevelopment Authority] attempts to preserve […] the old Singapore with as much earnestness [the] HDB [Housing and Development Board] had earlier displayed in demolishing and rebuilding.44 That is, in a Singapore that felt itself caught up with metropolitan norms, the aim to wipe the slate clean of all history and cultural forms inimical to modernisation has been moderated, and a will to be contemporary has, in turn, fostered artwork that also wishes to be contemporary. This is the category most pertinent for my argument. One pronounced reaction to modernisation was nostalgia. By the 1970s, the depiction of tropical landscape was established in Chinese xieyihua-style painting, which attempted to capture the essence of a landscape or birds using rapid brushwork. As urbanisation progressed, the “[d]epiction of recurrent themes such as the old Chinatown and the Singapore River can be seen as escape avenues from the current plastic age,” according to Koay’s essay.45 She points out both the nostalgia and sense of loss embedded in such artwork. The 258

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was called ‘international abstraction’ and ‘provincial lyricism’ which had dominated art-making.” (Ahmad, “Framing the 1970s,” 415.) This contention applies to Singapore from perhaps the late 1970s as well; pictorial abstraction was notable and the “provincial lyricism” that is mentioned appears in the guise of watercolours of a Chinatown and a Singapore River from yesteryear. Koay, op. cit., 7. In their joint statement, the three artists say this:

Singapore River was a favourite of watercolourists, so much that in 1986, the Arbour Fine Arts Gallery featured younger artists in a private exhibition (infamously) entitled Not the Singapore River.46 Given the seemingly unavoidable presence of the Singapore River, Koay offers, as part of her second category of artists (those who indirectly register their environments), a 1975 oil painting done by Nanyang-style artist Liu Kang (1911–2004), Life by the River (fg. 18.1). The artist is regarded as a “pioneer” artist whose work combined Post-Impressionist technique with Chinese ink styles in depicting scenes of Bali or Singapore. Liu Kang’s painting offers a brightly coloured realist (though not naturalistic) scene of a village with a river going through it, with a variety of everyday life presented: people talk, wash clothes on the river bank, push their boats in the river, etc. The presence of community bonds is patent. Koay conjures up what is not in the scene: “Liu Kang’s works can be interpreted as an unconscious reaction to the regimented society of schematic HDB fats which dominates [sic] [the] Singapore skyline of the 1960s and 70s. His fgures are not individualized, purposely lacking distinct features that identify them, emulating the monotone of rows upon rows of fats.”47 Already, by the mid-1970s, the force of a gathering modernisation is felt.

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“Trimurti is a Sanskrit word describing three forms usually associated with the Hindu Godhead of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. […] There is a need to show that different things can exist together harmoniously and in perfect equilibrium. It is true that each artist has his own culture and religious background. Each is in itself unique, but as a language of the heart, mind and soul and as an expression of humanity, is universal. […] Expressing this unity, each artist shows one aspect of this universal manifestation.”

But of course not all rejoinders to modernisation are in the form of nostalgia embodied in the adapted modernism of the Nanyang Style or traditional visual languages. Those who “isolate themselves to create an inner world” (the third category in her catalogue) include a diverse set of artists—abstract painters, Chinese-style inkand-colour painters and even, we might be surprised, transmedia artists. Koay brings up an art exhibition/event of 1988, Trimurti, as one example of this third category. Three younger artists, S. Chandrasekaran (b. 1959), Goh Ee Choo (b. 1962), Salleh Japar (b. 1962), staged a collaborative work at the Goethe-Institut that combined painting, installation sculpture and performance art, unifed by the Sanskrit term trimurti, used to defne a manifestation of three forces: creation, preservation and destruction. Hindu, Chinese divinatory as well as MalayMuslim cultural and religious elements are explored by each artist, in the name of how such differences could also embody the unity of multiracial identities in Singapore.48 The three artists performed individually on 7 and 12 March 1988, during which they worked and reworked the central installation in the hall. Koay sees the event as part of a larger artistic trend, regardless of whether it appears in pictorial or transmedia guises: “the use of negative space was important and meaningful in experienc-

49 50 51 52

(S. Chandrasekaran, Goh Ee Choo & Salleh Japar, “Trimurti, 1988 Statements and Documentation,” in Trimurti and Ten Years, ed. T.K. Sabapathy, exh. cat. (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 1998), 11.) A retrospective of Trimurti was staged at SAM in 1998. Koay, op. cit., 8. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 11.

ing the beautiful as the forms themselves.”49 And therefore the three, while unusual in their attempt to blend Asian religious cultures with installation and performance art, “practise the same form of escape from the urban environment” as others.50 Artistic pluralism is a sign of an artistic transmutation. By the time Koay reaches her fourth category—“works [that] are inspired by the current environment”—the urge for artistic pluralism is more marked for both younger and older practitioners, even as the general artistic support for diversity is not unqualifed.51 Performance artist–painter–installation sculptor Tang Da Wu is in this fourth category, as is Teo Eng Seng (b. 1938) and younger artists with links to TAV. She brings up Teo’s The Net: Most Defnitely the Singapore River (1986, fg. 18.2) as an example of the artist as “educator” who “recontextualizes the realities of society and projects or magnifes the interpretation for the beneft of the viewer.”52 While she does not say more than this, Teo’s work is both an experiment in material and a revaluation of key Singapore art content. The Net is an installation comprising a fshing net mounted and stretched out on a wall with variously coloured pulped paper as sculptural elements fguring as debris or detritus “caught” in the net. Teo, who had abandoned painting in 1979, calls this medium “paperdyesculp.” The

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53 John Low, “‘Non-Visible Bodies/Spaces’: Interview

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with Teo Eng Seng,” in The Substation, Open Ends—A Documentation Exhibition of Performance Art in Singapore (Singapore: The Substation, 2001), unpaginated. This proposed artwork is now generally referred to as 5′ x 5′ (Singapore River) (1972). The Modern Art Society, started in 1964, led the way in championing abstraction, “though such a goal was never explicitly claimed or articulated by the Society; even so, its propagation of a new aesthetic implied abstract strategies and outcomes.” (T.K. Sabapathy, “Contexts and Issues,” in Cheo Chai-Hiang: Thoughts and Processes [Rethink-

work questions both the use of conventional art media and the clichéd image of the Singapore River to represent local identity, given how polluted the river had become by 1986. But while Teo is anti-conventional, he is no avant-gardist trying to eradicate art’s aesthetic difference from life. When interviewed in 2001, and asked to comment on the increasingly visible artistic diversity by the 1980s, he acerbically replied that this “diversity” was partly the result of poor art education—a lack of suffcient technical training—starting in the 1960s, and going into the 1970s, when “[f ]resh idea[s] came in and what is that fresh idea—talk. Talk a lot? Come out with very big words.”53 Koay’s emplacement of Teo alongside committed experimental artists such as Tang Da Wu is signifcant for its answer to the question, why does the contemporary take off? Even if Teo was critical of the perceived lack of conventional skills in contemporary art practices, he still found in some of the new ways of artmaking a renewed critical capacity to engage with present-day concerns without resorting to nostalgia. With the above in mind, we briefy can revisit three contemporary art events that were symptomatic of artistic dissatisfaction in order to bring out a number of common points 260

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ing the Singapore River], eds. T.K. Sabapathy & Cecily Briggs (Singapore: Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts & Singapore Art Museum, 2000), 18.) Isabel Ching, “Tracing (Un)Certain Legacies: Conceptualism in Singapore and the Philippines,” Diaaalogue, Asia Art Archive, July 2011 http://www.aaa.org.hk/Di aaalogue/Details/1045 (accessed 12 February 2016). Curator Low Sze Wee notes that “there is some contention [as to] whether [the proposal] was in fact rejected. Some contend that it was left out of the exhibition due to [an] administrative oversight.” (Personal communication with the author, 27 February 2016).

in diverse arts practices that make them “contemporary.” In the frst of these events, Cheo ChaiHiang (b. 1946)—a member of an art group that privileged abstraction, the Modern Art Society—in 1972 submitted a proposal for the Society’s annual exhibition by mail for an artwork to be titled Singapore River.54 (He was then living in Birmingham in England, where he was in an art school.) The proposal was for a work, measuring 5 feet by 5 feet, to be drawn partially on a wall and partially on the foor of the exhibition hall. It not only brought up the question of art’s materiality but also questioned how the Singapore River might be reconceived, given both its importance in Singapore’s history as an entrepôt and its multitudinous (and clichéd) appearance in nostalgic and touristic visual renditions of Singapore.55 The proposal was rejected.56 What image that has presentday social facticity might be contained suitably within Singapore River’s conceptual square? Teo’s presentist re-examination of the river is not without precedent. The second event occurred in September 1979, when Tan Teng Kee (b. 1937, Malaysia), held an informal outdoor exhibition sponsored by the Goethe-Institut in a feld outside his

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57 T.K. Sabapathy, Sculpture in Singapore (Singapore: 58

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National Museum Art Gallery, 1991), 26. National Gallery Singapore, “Tan Teng-Kee, ‘The Picnic’,” curatorial wall text for the exhibition A Fact Has No Appearance: Art Beyond the Object, held at National Gallery Singapore, 21 January to 19 June 2016. Storer goes on to add: “Tan did not consider himself as a conceptual artist and never created another event in this mode, in Singapore or elsewhere.” (Russell Storer, “Melting into Air: Tan Teng-Kee in Singapore,” in A Fact Has No Appearance: Art Beyond the Object, eds. Clarissa Chikiamco, Russell Storer &

home of roughly 30 of his Constructivist-styled metal sculptures and 30 abstract oil paintings. This event is now referred to as The Picnic (1979). He also painted a 100-metre long painting entitled The Lonely Road that, unpredictably, he offered to cut up into smaller and more affordable sizes. Even more unpredictable, T.K. Sabapathy opines, “was the incineration of his three-dimensional constructions [at dusk]; [… Tan] embarked upon an action which completely undermined […] the existence of a work as an object. As a phenomenon it is singular in Tan’s artistic career and unique in the story of art in Singapore.”57 The curatorial text for a 2016 exhibition that featured Tan reads: “[The Picnic] has been described by art historian T.K. Sabapathy as the frst ‘happening’ or performance event to be held in Singapore. Yet the exhibition came about by circumstance.”58 While recognised as “the frst event of its kind in Singapore,” as curator Russell Storer notes, it remains hard to justify an appellation as specifc as a “happening” to an event that was singular, sponsored by a cultural organisation and had art for sale. Nevertheless, the event signifed an eclectic and exploratory chaffng at conventional artistic restrictions, even as there is no complete forsaking of art’s aesthetic dimensions.59

Adele Tan, exh. cat. (Singapore: National Gallery Singapore, 2016), 58.). In a 2016 interview, Tan says: “I tried many things and developed my own aesthetic. I do not know if this is modern art, conceptual art or performance art. Different people have different views. As an artist, I was just making art that appealed to me. Art that was about openness of spirit.” (Deepika Shetty, “Fiery History of Singapore Art,” The Straits Times, 21 January 2016, “Life” section). For an overview of Tan’s work, see T.K. Sabapathy, Tan Teng Kee: An Overview, 1958–2000 (Singapore: Sculpture Square Ltd., 2001).

And in the third event, Tang Da Wu, after art studies in England, presented, in 1980 at the NMAG, works from 1979, arranged as an environmental installation exhibition titled Earth Work (fg. 18.3) that piqued curiosity among art audiences. The exhibition included Gully Curtains, a set of seven pieces of linens that he had hung in a gully over three months at a construction site in (what was then semi-rural) Ang Mo Kio, and The Product of the Rain and Me, square wooden boards covered with dried mud in the shape of circles, held in place by glue while the rain had largely washed away the mud that surrounded the circles. (The circles referred to the idea of infnity from the Yi Jing (or I Ching), the ancient Chinese Book of Changes.) Drawings made using earth pigments also were displayed. The very title that Tang chose deliberately invoked and indicated his artistic reworking of 1960s land art, or earth art, for his own purposes. A 2016 restaging of Earth Work featured a letter that Tang wrote to the then-Ministry of Culture, dated 27 March 1980, requesting a grant-in-aid for the exhibition: [The proposed exhibition] is my observation of the Singapore red earth, it is very special. I am interested in the changes of

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Presumably a reference to the Tao Te Ching (or Daodejing). This is a fundamental text for both philosophical and religious Taoism. Tang Da Wu, Letter to the Director, Ministry of Culture, 27 March 1980 (letter on display, Earth Work 1979, National Gallery Singapore, 22 January to 29 May 2016). Unfortunately, the flm that resulted was lost. Curator Charmaine Toh suggests that: “Earthdance is possibly the earliest example of video art in Singapore. [The flm’s signifcance lies in that r]ather than simply using the camera to document, Tang was clearly conscious [in his account to her] of the medium itself, taking it into account in the creation of work. Using the camera’s viewfnder, Tang marked out the trapezoid area of the feld framed by the camera. He then flmed himself repeatedly running along the

edge of the marked-out area, creating a furrow in the earth.” (Charmaine Toh, “Notes on Tang Da Wu’s Earth Work,” in Earth Work 1979: Tang Da Wu, ed. Charmaine Toh, exh. cat. (Singapore: National Gallery Singapore, 2016), 12–3.) 62 T.K. Sabapathy, “Regarding Exhibitions,” in The Artists Village: 20 Years On, 8. 63 The space for the Village was lost in 1990, as the land it was on was acquired by the state for development. 64 Sabapathy, “Regarding Exhibitions,” 7. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid., 7–8.

the earth due to the rainfalls, the heat and the gravity, apart from its physiographical aspect. [sic] […] My way of working isn’t scientifc, it is very much philosophical, base[d] upon my “zen” studies and infuence[d] by “Tao” and “I Ching.”60 I am also making a [sic] 8mm flm call[ed] “Earthdance” as complementing to “Earthwork.”61

grading environmental impact, with no reconciliation offered between the value of the red earth and the urbanisation that has exposed it to erosion.62 The result is an artwork in which the historical present of fracture and fragments is privileged, and this presentism is not vitiated by the “philosophical” studies undergirding the circular shapes used in it: the Chinese cultural texts are not marshalled, as they might be, to valorise a timeless realm. The three works or events display the embryonic elements that become characterised as contemporary art in Singapore by the late 1980s and may be thought of both as a transmedia enterprise and art that will treat the incomplete fragments of historical contemporary life. Together, these events are a proleptic index of what will emerge in 1980s Singapore as the contemporaneity of contemporary art. It would appear that the destabilisation of the entire city-state in the modernisation drive also made the Nanyang Style or the Singapore lyrical exotic less feasible as artistic-cultural resources to engage with the present.

An experimental and a putative transmedia or trans-category art practice is wedded, through Tang’s plain, ingenuous and idiosyncratic rhetoric, to an environmental awareness inspired by Chinese texts and ideas, using earth from a construction site that was the result of the state’s ongoing urban development. It is worth noting that Tang, like Cheo, had been a member of the Modern Art Society; he appears to follow Cheo in pronouncing, implicitly, the end of “the sovereignty of [modernist] painting, institutionalised by exclusionary aesthetic values and positions,” while simultaneously delivering a quiet critique of urbanisation’s de262

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Contemporary Art and Flexible Postconceptualism If the 1970s offer the tentative appearance of contemporary art, the late 1980s offer both more artists and artists engaged in pluralistic or heterogeneous art exploration. The question here is whether there was any understanding— if only tacit or implicit—as to what contemporary art’s remit was to be; and given what was being said of the new art’s “alterity” and agenda of aesthetic transgression, how frmly alternative was this art exactly? These questions are raised in a subtle and searching essay, “Regarding Exhibitions,” by the long-time observer of Singapore art, T.K. Sabapathy. When TAV was established in their founding premises by Tang Da Wu and his artist wife, Hazel McIntosh, in a village in thenrural Sembawang in June 1988, it became a magnet of what was regarded as the alternative in not only artistic but larger cultural terms: the Village’s notoriety in art circles also drew non-arts attention.63 Sabapathy tells us that the ten artists who participated in TAV’s inaugural show—Tang himself, Amanda Heng (b. 1951), Vincent Leow (b. 1961) and Baet Yeok Kwan (b. 1961) among them, all of whom have since progressed to various levels of distinction—had uneven art practices, and were attracted to TAV by particular interests, and undoubtedly, by the prospects of working with Tang. What was the general lure of the Village? Sabapathy suggests the following: openness and space for advancing individual practices, combined with collegial yet competitive interaction; “provision of a milieu that was physically expansive and psychologically salubrious as it was set apart from the uniform, restrictive and reductive urbanization of Singapore in the late 70s and throughout the 80s”; and “non-dogmatic operatives—although methods for producing and thinking on art were steered along refexive paths.”64 The Village embodied in its rural location the (at least temporary)

ability to escape the disciplined homogenising modernity of the city-state, with its uniform slab- and tower-blocks of fats. TAV both signifed and gave literal space for critical refection. As the Village was claimed to be, as Sabapathy writes, “a pre-eminent site for prospecting alterity, it is tempting to cast it as a radical agency; in which circumstance, its radicalism is posited in terms of subverting or transgressing […] prevailing conventions, systems and institutions by advocating activist strategies. Nothing is further from the case.”65 The last phrase does not mean that Sabapathy dismisses the signifcance of the work and the artists associated with TAV, but emphasises that its artistic “radicalism” was not as thoroughgoing as it might appear, even if its larger sociocultural impact drew “watchfulness or surveillance.”66 He offers his refections on two exhibitions that took place in 1989 for which he was present: the inaugural Open Studio Show (in January) and the Drawing Show (in December). That the inaugural show was staged in a literal village meant that art escaped the exclusionary confnes of a high-cultural space, and could be “diffused” and “dispersed”: the very mode and location of its exhibitionary condition signifed freedom for both artists and audience. This also transgressed curatorial norms: the audience interacted with the art in a nonhierarchical and non-ritualised manner, with the result, Sabapathy observes, that art’s autonomy was not “sequestered.”67 However, to his surprise, the show included some paintings and “sculpture-like formations” that possessed “continuing or residual affliations with prevailing modern conventions,” even while other works showed clear conceptualist inclinations.68 Tang displayed his own drawings and paintings; “interest in engagement with painting as such was not trivialized,” as one might expect.69 Amanda Heng even had six drawings of male and female nudes on display, “rendered brusquely, violently, and as a partial entity,” and “the body is seen as invasively manipulated, even abject.”70

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Gender issues are foregrounded, but while the drawings are hardly conventional, they were executed while she was a student at the thenLa Salle School of Art.71 While the drawings, in retrospect, help us to see the continuity in Heng’s work as it develops in the 1990s and later, when she starts practising performance and installation art, life drawings undertaken in an academy nevertheless “lodged oddly with anticipations of TAV as a site for alterity.”72 The co-existence of apparently incompatible art forms, even if laced with subversive or unusual content, also occurs with other youthful artists with partial or no affliation with TAV. Sabapathy brings up the four-artist show, Man, Objects and Images, held at the NMAG in August 1988. There was a willingness, as in the inaugural Open Studio Show, to break with the “prevailing […] curatorial operatives […] customarily seen in art galleries here.”73 Tang Mun Kit (b. 1955) coordinated the exhibition “and articulated their aims or premises.”74 The title chosen for the show, in eschewing “metaphorical associations,” signalled an interest in presenting how both more conventional art forms (paintings as done by Wong Shih Yaw [b. 1967]) and found objects (Tang’s “rehabilitated discarded materials and found things […] [which] were cool, unostentatious, yet sustaining”) could be pressured to offer “fresh thinking” on art.75 Artistic “impurity” appeared also in the heterogeneous form of artist-organised shows. What, as such, is the “contemporary turn” we witnessed in the late 1980s, when the conventional and the various anti-formalisms are yoked together, Sabapathy suggests, with “distinctiveness”?76 Sabapathy’s critical queries make clear that the contemporary turn actually was not keen on the absolute anti-aesthetic of a “pure” conceptual art. The issue of art’s necessary constitution by concepts is accompanied by, minimally, a practical understanding that all art requires some type of materialisation and presentation. Arguably, that which was initially thought of 264

in the 1960s as “post-formalist” strategies offered some Singapore artists the idea of the anti-aestheticist use of aesthetic and nonaesthetic material to engage with questions of art-making in particularly unprecedented areas of investigation such as: the environment and modernisation; gender and sexuality issues; cultural and ethnic identity—concerns not exactly addressed by abstract pictorialism or, in fact, by any of the forms of historical modern art in Singapore. The contention that Peter Osborne offers us that contemporary art is postconceptual art is helpful in siting the indigenous and indigenised re-formations of contemporary art in Singapore. We can begin with the “failure” of conceptual art: It was the ironic historical achievement of the strong programme of “analytical” or “pure” conceptual art to have demonstrated the ineliminability of the aesthetic as a necessary, though radically insuffcient, component of the artwork through the failure of its attempt at elimination.77 Osborne then adumbrates upon this “ineliminability”: “The aesthetic concept of art […] mistakes art’s necessary aesthetic appearance for the ground of its apparently autonomous, and hence infnite, production of meaning, which is in fact historically relational, rather than ‘positive’ in an aesthetic sense.”78 That is, while art is constituted by concepts, it also must have some “felt, spatio-temporal” presentation, and therefore materiality is ineliminable in that sense; this in turn leads us to the “critical necessity of an anti-aestheticist use of aesthetic materials,” which then further leads to an “expansion to infnity of the possible material forms of art.”79 There is no problem of artistic unity posed in this expanded feld of art production, for the “unity of the individual artwork [is distributed] across the totality of its multiple material instantiations, at any particular time.”80

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From 2007, the school became known as LaSalle College of the Arts. 72 Sabapathy, “Regarding Exhibitions,” 8. For an introduction to Heng’s work, see Singapore Art Museum, Amanda Heng: Speak to Me, Walk with Me, exh. cat. (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 2011). 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid. 75 Sabapathy, “Regarding Exhibitions,” 9. For an introduction to Wong’s work, see C.J.W.-L. Wee, “Christianity, the Work of Wong Shih Yaw and Contemporary Art,” in The Inoyama Donation: A Tale of Two Artists, ed. Low Sze Wee, exhibition booklet (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 2006), 20–9. 76 Sabapathy, “Regarding Exhibitions,” 9. At this junc-

ture, we can also recall Trimurti, which was brought up by Susie Koay in her catalogue essay referenced earlier: there too we see a clash of elements—religion and essential(ised) cultural-ethnic identities are explored in the name of a harmonious multicultural identity that (admittedly) seems to remain more a series of juxtaposed multi-racial identities, which are hardly the predictable contents of contemporary art. 77 Osborne, op. cit., 49. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid., 48. 80 Ibid. 81 Karim Raslan, “The Singaporean Dilemma,” in his Journeys through Southeast Asia: Ceritalah 2 (Singapore: Times Books International, 2002), 85.

While the visual-artistic situation in Singapore did not participate in quite such a complex discourse on contemporary art, an understanding of the issues Osborne sets out reveals how re-energising and, for some, liberating the postconceptual was as it offered fresh critical means for the exploration of the present condition of Singapore in the 1970s and the 1980s.

development as one in which there is “a deliberate de-emphasising of the [peninsular Southeast Asian] region—in terms of language policies, culture and politics”:

Conclusion: And the Contemporary Now …? The contemporary as a goal is shaped by the particular relations to the immediate past and to a desired future. For 1980s Singapore, the contemporary was affected also by the sense of possibly “fnally” living in the same historical moment as the advanced West, in contrast to its neighbours’ slower economic development— and therefore in contrast to the region’s more “backward” time. Through the concerted focus on export-oriented industrialisation (EOI), the city-state sought to escape the fear that “geography is destiny.” One Malaysian culturalpolitical commentator, Karim Raslan, has characterised Singapore’s post-independence

The [Singapore state’s] fxation with the global agenda has made many [younger] Singaporeans [especially] lose sight of the imperatives of geography, turning their backs on the region. The [regional] hinterland is steadily being forgotten […]. For example, less and less Singaporeans can speak Malay—even pasar [bazaar] Malay eludes them.81 The differences in Singapore contemporary art from that of Indonesia and the Philippines in the 1980s can be accounted for, to a reasonable extent, by the developmental and global agenda of the PAP government. The contemporary in the frst quarter of the 21st century must not be assumed to be the same as that of the 1980s–2002. This essay in fact could be said to have asked, “What was the contemporary and contemporary art in the 1980s?” The 2000s witness a turn in the

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Wee, “‘We Asians?’”

contemporary moment, one in which the experience of the global city becomes flled not only with shopping centres but also possesses museums turned into almost mass-popular spaces—in a time when the beautiful, in an image-driven, mass-mediated culture, no longer has quite the same capacity to undermine or surprise, as it did in the late 19th and most of the 20th centuries. A major issue now, given that the city-state has become global and informational in form, having used its economic capacity to create art institutions still not quite possible elsewhere in the region, is whether Singapore contemporary art is able to practise a double-coding in which its own artistic signifcations are maintained even as they are situated in the contemporary art museum or the Singapore Biennale and accrue new collective sociocultural meanings— and also beneft from the sizeable funding the state puts into the arts. There is, therefore, also the major art institutions to think about. The emergence of East Asian and Australian biennales and museum exhibitions from the 1990s showcasing modern and contemporary Asian art, alongside Singapore art institutions, indicate that self-refexive investigations have emerged on how “the rest of the world” produced and still produces its modern culture out of related quasi- or directly colonised experiences, whatever the limitations in funding and other institutional capacities.82 The relationship of 266

Supangkat, “Multiculturalism/Multimodernism,” 79.

artists in the region to art institutions is not necessarily one in which, as Jim Supangkat observes of Indonesian artists, “like many contemporary artists worldwide, were questioning the authority of art institutions”: modern Indonesian art museums “hardly exist at all,” and that “has created the general impression that the status of modern or contemporary art is not understood by the Indonesian people. As a result, all artists in Indonesia—even the most radical—hope for the greater development of art institutions.”83 Singapore art institutions need to negotiate the politics of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) regionalism and postcolonial nationalisms to curatorially write over older and newer contemporary art’s own signifcations to project the utopian horizon of sociocultural connection, while struggling to not allow such projections to take on only the dystopian form of the market. The contemporary now poses new conundrums that could not have been fully anticipated in the 1980s.

Thanks go to Lee Wen, Elizabeth K. Helsinger and Low Sze Wee for responses to an earlier version of the essay, and to Peter Schoppert, Kwa Chong Guan, Ahmad Mashadi and Koh Nguang How for related ongoing discussions and assistance with materials. Also thanks to Charmaine Oon for the careful and thorough copyediting.

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18.1 Liu Kang Life by the River 1975 Oil on canvas 126 x 203 cm Gift of the artist Collection of National Gallery Singapore 18.2 Teo Eng Seng The Net: Most Defnitely the Singapore River 1986 Paperdyesculp and net 350 x 350 cm Gift of the artist Collection of National Gallery Singapore 18.3 Exhibition poster of Earth Work 1980

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1

See most notably Jeffrey Hantover, “Contemporary Vietnamese Painting,” Uncorked Soul: Contemporary Art from Vietnam, exh. cat. (Hong Kong: Plum Blossoms, 1991), 19–37 and Nora A. Taylor, Painters in Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press; Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2009). 2 Nguyen Quân, “The Avenues of Painting in Vietnam,” in Tradition and Change: Contemporary Art of Asia and the Pacifc, ed. Caroline Turner (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1993), 113. 3 For comparison with similar studies of the economic growth in relation to culture in the region, see C.J. W.-L. Wee, “Creating High Culture in the Globalized

‘Cultural Desert’ of Singapore,” TDR, The Drama Review 47, no. 4, Winter (2003): 84–97. 4 Sally Goll, “Art in the time of Đổi Mới,” Far Eastern Economic Review, 7 May 1992, 36. 5 Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet, “Village-State Relations in Vietnam: The Effect of Everyday Politics on Decollectivization,” Journal of Asian Studies 54, no. 2 (1995): 396–418. 6 Boi Tran Huynh, “Vietnamese Esthetics from 1925 Onwards,” (PhD diss., Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, 2005). 7 Trường Chinh, “Marxism and Vietnamese Culture,” reprinted in George Dutton et al., Sources of Vietnamese Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 522.

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Continuity and Change: Vietnamese Art in the Age of Đổi Mới Nora A. Taylor

Nearly every essay on Vietnamese contemporary art written in the past twenty years has marked the onset of economic reforms, known as Đổi Mới, instituted by the Vietnamese government in the mid-1980s, as the birth of contemporary art.1 To situate the emergence of contemporary art within the context of changes in the nation’s economy runs the risk, however, as prominent artist and art critic at the time Nguyễn Quân noted, of associating aesthetic achievements with the opening of an art market.2 Although there is no doubt that the arrival of international tourists, art critics and collectors had a profound impact on local artists and the domestic art scene, one cannot tie the course of art history directly to the socioeconomic changes in the country even though journalists in the early 1990 did not hesitate to confate the two.3 Sally Goll, for example, in 268

the Far Eastern Economic Review, noted when observing a group of artists in a Hanoi cafe that “there was nothing subversive—or even unusual—about this gathering of Vietnamese artists and intellectuals […]. Nevertheless, this clubby, art-flled afternoon testifes to the liberalizing effects of Đổi Mới.”4 For art historians, Đổi Mới has become a convenient milestone in the chronology of Vietnamese art to distinguish it from times when the country was experiencing political turmoil. Certainly, Đổi Mới provided a period of greater mobility, freedom and opportunities for artists that continue to evolve today. One could consider, therefore, Đổi Mới as a gateway to the art historical period that we call the “contemporary,” as it provided an avenue for experimentation and contact with art communities around the world. This does not mean that these elements were non-existent be-

Charting Thoughts

forehand but rather, simply that Đổi Mới created an impulse to effect changes in art alongside the socio-economic tranformations taking place elsewhere. But these changes, as some scholars have argued, did not occur simultaneously, nor were they put into place at the same time. It is therefore diffcult to pinpoint accurately the date for renovation per se, nor can we consider it a phenomenon that can be applied across the board to all sectors of society. In this essay, I will regard Đổi Mới as a time period and examine the artists that were productive during this period of the 1980s and 1990s. I will then question to what degree the different aspects of Đổi Mới can be applied to artistic breakthroughs, and consider this time as one of both continuity and change. What is Đổi Mới? The Vietnamese term Đổi Mới, literally “new change,” was applied to the renovation policy made offcial by the Vietnamese government in 1986. According to political scientist Benedict Kerkvliet, the policy was devised in response to the country’s declining economy in the late 1970s. When state farms and factories began to see a drop in production levels, coinciding with border clashes with China and the withdrawal of aid from the Soviet Union, the party was concerned for the welfare of the population, especially after decades of hardships in the aftermath of war and the international trade embargo. It needed to devise a plan for economic stability within the domestic sphere, and a plan for gradual decollectivisation was put into place.5 The fact that the Vietnamese government began planning for market reforms a half-decade prior to the institutionalisation of Đổi Mới suggests that the renovation policy was neither as innovative as it was made out to be nor was it a sudden decision, but rather, a series of planning efforts that led to a progressive move toward liberalisation.

The same thing can be said of the arts. No offcial Đổi Mới art policy was ever instituted, but the lifting of certain restrictions that had been imposed on the arts since the 1950s was interpreted as a gesture toward liberalisation on par with the tolerance for private enterprise. In her unpublished doctoral dissertation, the late art historian Boitran Huynh-Beattie argued that 1975 was a far more signifcant date in the history of Vietnamese art and 1992, a bigger catalyst for change.6 1975 marked the end of the war of reunifcation, and a time of social and political upheaval was followed by a period of restructuring and reconstruction. After the Communist Party victory and ensuing establishment of the nation’s capital in the northern city of Hanoi, cadres were sent to the South to establish order and implement the new government guidelines. Many of those in the South who had collaborated with the previous regime had either fed the country or were sent to re-education camps. This is a far cry from the kind of liberalisation that one would expect from a period of renovation, but the kind of art historical change that Huynh-Beattie was referring to entails the resumption of meetings between artists from the North and those from the South, an exposure to each other’s work for the frst time since the country’s division in 1954. An entire generation of artists in both Hanoi and Saigon had trained without much knowledge of the work of their contemporary peers across the border. Huynh-Beattie’s argument that 1975 marked a signifant change in Vietnamese art history was based on her study of the Saigonese art world prior to 1975. Between 1954 and 1975, artists in Hanoi were subject to certain regulations set forth by the Vietnam Fine Arts Association, a union founded in 1957 under the government’s umbrella of cultural organisations called the Fatherland Front. Trường Chinh (1907–1988), second-ranked Communist leader at the time, published a treatise on the need for artists to include what he called “National Sentiment” in their work.7 The cri-

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teria for what was considered acceptable under that banner were representations of farmers, workers and soldiers in a positive light. Abstract compositions and nudes were strictly forbidden. These restrictions appeared after a crackdown on artists and writers that had made demands for greater creative freedom through the clandestine publication of two journals: Nhân Văn and Giai Phẩm. Several writers were arrested, one was jailed and artists were prevented from joining the Arts Association which was tantamount to being banned from exhibition.8 The Nhân Văn Giai Phẩm affair, as it was known, left a deep scar in the psyche of an entire generation of artists, some of whom never recovered. 1975, for artists in the North, meant confronting the differences between their experiences over the past 20 years and those of their colleagues in the South and contemplating the possibility of a Vietnamese art world that would be more open and free. The perception of many artists in the North was that the Saigonese art world was more tolerant and experimental in nature.9 For artists in the South, however, 1975 marked the beginning of a 15-year period of subjecting themselves to the regulations set forth by the Arts Association established in the North, of which they now were encouraged to join. Their work changed as a result. For example, Nguyễn Trung was compelled to make fgurative work whereas he had previously started to experiment with abstraction. Prior to 1975, Saigonese artists had explored aspects of modern painting of which their colleagues in the North had been deprived. More exposed to international art movements thanks to the distribution of French art magazines, some artists recalled being fascinated by the lyrical abstraction of the School of Paris because it combined Chinese calligraphy with Western oil painting.10 Many of the artists residing in Saigon between 1954 and 1975 had actually come from or were educated in Hanoi at the Trừơng Đại Học Mỹ Thuật Hà Nọi or l’École 270

des beaux-arts de l’Indochine, founded by the French artist Victor Tardieu during the colonial period, which closed in 1945 and reopened in 1954 under the name of Hanoi College of Art, later became the Hanoi University of Fine Art and today is known as the Vietnam University of Fine Art.11 One of the innovators of the technique of lacquer, Nguyễn Gia Trí (1908– 1993), a native of Hanoi and an early graduate of the school in 1934, fed to Hong Kong in 1945 after independence and moved to Saigon after 1954 where he spent the remainder of his life. Trí is credited with enabling Vietnamese art to remain true to its national origins while making room for creativity (fg. 19.1). A few artists such as Tạ Tỵ (1920–2004) fed Vietnam altogether after the Communist takeover as they did not feel that they could comply to the Socialist aesthetics that were demanded of artists. Tạ Tỵ settled in California where he became known for his Cubist style, which he had developed as early as the 1950s (fg. 19.2). 1975 thus forced a reconsideration of the very premise of Vietnamese modern art. It was not, however, until 1992 that changes in policy toward the arts came into effect. That year marked the frst time abstract art and nudity were permitted to be exhibited; an abstract art exhibition was held at Hông Hạc Gallery that included artists from the North and the South. The year before, in 1991, the frst exhibition of Vietnamese contemporary art held outside of Vietnam took place. Organised by Plum Blossoms Gallery in Hong Kong and titled Uncorked Soul, the exhibition focused on the theme of unleashed creativity after years of repression. It included artists from the North, Centre and South. The accompanying catalogue, with an essay by Jeffrey Hantover, reiterated the idea of Đổi Mới as a kind of Glastnost or Perestroika, akin to the reforms that took place in China and the Soviet Union that gave artists greater freedom of expression. Stephen McGuinness, owner of the gallery, travelled to Vietnam with the

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8

See George Boudarel, Cent feurs éclosent dans la nuit du Vietnam. Communisme et dissidence 1954– 1956 [A hundred fowers bloom in the Vietnamese night] (Paris: Jacques Bertoin, 1991) and Peter Zinoman, “Nhan Van–Giai Pham and Vietnamese ‘Reform Communism’ in the 1950s,” Journal of Cold War Studies 13, no. 1, Winter (2011): 60–100. 9 Boitran Huynh-Beattie, “Saigonese Art during the War: Modernity versus Ideology,” in Cultures at War: The Cold War and Cultural Expression in Southeast Asia, eds. Tony Day & Maya H.T. Liem (Ithaca: Cornell SEAP Press, 2010), 81–102. 10 Nguyen Trung (b. 1940), personal communication with author, July 2008. 11 Nguyen Quang Phông, Các họa sĩ Trường Cao Đăng Mỹ Thuật Đông Dương [Painters of the Fine Arts College of Indochina] (Hanoi: Nhà Xuật Bản Mỹ Thuật, 1993).

12 See Thomas Berghuis, “Considering Huanjing: Po-

idea of looking for artists that defed the rules of the party. By comparing artists in Vietnam with those in China and the Soviet Union, Uncorked Soul reduced Vietnamese artists to two categories: “offcial” and “unoffcial” artists. Yet the situation was far more complex, even in China.12 Artists sanctioned by the State were not always compliant and artists who were segregated from the State were often more patriotic. The boundaries between what is considered “offcial” art and “unoffcial” art are often blurred. An example exists in the case of Bùi Xuân Phái (1920–1988), a 1945 graduate of the l’École des beaux-arts de l’Indochine. Phái never joined the Arts Association and refused to comply with the aesthetic rules set out by the Party. Known for his experimentations with School of Paris-style modernist compositions and prolifc output, he was marginalised by the revolutionary zealots and told that his Hanoi street scenes were too sad (fg. 19.3).13 Similar to the Nhân Văn Giai Phẩm writer Trần Dần (1926–1997) whose poem “Certain Victory” famously contained the verse “I do not see the street/ nor the houses/ only the rain

falling on red fags,” for which he was chastised and banned from publishing, Phái’s melancholy tone went against the positivist rhetoric of the time that pushed for heroism and victory.14 His only solo exhibition took place toward the end of his life, from December 1984 until January 1985, and he was awarded the Hồ Chí Minh Prize posthumously in 1996. For many young artists of the Đổi Mới generation, Phái symbolises a type of artistic heroism for never compromising his aesthetic values for politics. Perhaps one could think of Phái as emblematic of an idea related to Đổi Mới, that is, he went against the aesthetic values established by the State from 1945 until 1984. It was not until after his death, however, that he was rehabilitated and allowed to show his work, and was thereby accepted as legitimate, even patriotic, by the Arts Association. In this case, Đổi Mới can mean the transition from a didactic system of rules governing artistic styles to one that is more permissible of difference. Notably, Đổi Mới here does not equate to total freedom of expression in an anarchic sense. Rather, it is a means of maintaining a

sitioning Experimental Art in China,” Positions 12, no. 3 (2004): 711–31 and Hou Hanru, “Towards an ‘Un-Unoffcial Art’ De-ideologicalisation of China’s Contemporary Art in the 1990s,” Third Text 34, Spring (1996): 37–52. 13 Nora A. Taylor, “Framing the National Spirit: Viewing and Reviewing Painting under the Revolution,” in The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam, ed. Hue-Tam Ho Tai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 109–34. 14 Trần Dần, “Nhất Định Thắng” [Certain victory], as cited by Anh-Thuân Trần, “Certain de Vaincre de Trần Dần: Un renouveau littéraire 30 ans avant le Đổi Mới” [Trần Dần’s certain victory: Literary renovation 30 years before Đổi Mới] (master’s thesis, INALCO, 1999), 118–9.

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15 Sherry Buchanan, Tran Trung Tin: Paintings and Po16

ems from Vietnam (London: Asia Ink, 2002). Arlette Quynh Anh Tran & Nora A. Taylor, “Blue Space Contemporary Arts Center Archive (Beta),” Asia Art Archive Special Collections, http://www.aaa.org.hk/

certain measure of cultural identity while allowing for individual creativity. In other words, Phái was rehabilitated because his art could easily be described in a patriotic language. His paintings of Hanoi streets, for example, could be reinterpreted as true, albeit nostalgic, representations of the actual streets of the capital. Painters often described them as demonstrating “love” for his city, even if they did not correspond to the national sentiment present in the paintings by the artists recognised by the State. Phái remained profoundly critical of the restrictions placed on artists after 1954 and never abandoned his modernist style. One can therefore identify Phái as a Đổi Mới artist before the Đổi Mới period, casting further doubt on the very defnition of Đổi Mới as a 1980s invention. He could therefore be considered the forefather of the artists who have become associated with Đổi Mới by the establishment, such as the Gang of Five: Đặng Xuân Hòa (b. 1959) (fg. 19.4), Trần Lường (b. 1961), Hà Trị Hiếu (b. 1959), Hông Việt Dung (b. 1962), Phạm Quang Vinh (b. 1960). Although these artists were not initially considered offcial artists in the conformist sense of the word, they had studied at the art school and were members of the Arts Association. There were other artists who did not join the Arts Association or follow the criteria demanded by the Party, but although ad272

17

Collection/SpecialCollections/Details/6 (accessed 7 September 2015). Natalia Kraevskaia, Mai Chi Thanh & Nora A. Taylor, “Salon Natasha Archive,” Asia Art Archive Special Col lections, http://www.aaa.org.hk/Collection/SpecialCollections/Details/17 (accessed 7 September 2015).

mired by the younger generation of artists, did not (unlike Phái) offcially receive any posthumous national accolades. Self-taught artists such as Trần Trung Tín (1933–2008) and Vũ Dân Tân (1946–2009) rarely fgured in anthologies or surveys of contemporary art, let alone given exhibitions in national art spaces during their lifetime. Tín, born in Hanoi, started to paint during the 1960s and 1970s after witnessing the horrors of war. Like many others of his generation, he had joined the Resistance movement as a youth but became disillusioned after seeing the misery that followed.15 His painting style can be described as naive in the sense that he had no formal training as an artist. His compositions lack perspective and his fgures are often depicted very crudely with rudimentary shapes and lines (fg. 19.5). Yet his subject matter remains poignant and has been described by writers as capturing the tortured sentiments of war. He later moved to Saigon where his wife, Trần Thị Huỳnh Nga, thanks to a grant from the Ford Foundation, opened an independent art space on the Hồ Chí Minh City Museum of Fine Arts grounds to support younger artists.16 Her husband’s position as an outsider artist helped her understand the predicament in which experimental artists fnd themselves, and the lack of support for unoffcial artists. Like Phái, Tín can be seen as a transitional artist from the preto the post-Đổi Mới period.

Nora A. Taylor

Salon Natasha and Đổi Mới before Đổi Mới As the aforementioned examples above demonstrate, artistic experimentation did not arrive in Hanoi or Saigon overnight. It is important to understand that artistic reforms were not initiated by the State but rather, came from individual artists who found creative ways of bypassing the system that later paved the way for what we now call the Đổi Mới generation. One of these trailblazers was Vũ Dân Tân and the independent art space that he co-founded with his Russian-born wife Natalia (Natasha) Kraevskaia, Salon Natasha. Tân had lived in the Soviet Union from 1987 to 1990. Inspired by the shifts in art that took place after the reforms known as Perestroika were announced by Mikhail Gorbachev, he decided to turn his studio on Hàng Bông street, in the heart of Hanoi, into a space for artistic experimentation.17 In his view, Đổi Mới and economic reforms had still not impacted the arts in the way that Perestroika had stimulated the surge of artistic expressions and creative freedom among Russian artists. He thus turned his home into a public art space that would be free of State and offcial interference. He and his wife called their space a “salon” in order to avoid confusion with a private gallery and evoke the salons of 17th-century France and 18th-century Russia— places of gathering and conversation for artists and writers where ideas freely fowed. Over the next decade and a half, Salon Natasha became a place that hosted a variety of experiments in art-making which was unique and existed nowhere else in the Vietnamese art world. Tân and Kraevskaia transformed the artist’s studio and home into an open space that welcomed creative expression and artist-led initiatives from their friends and extended network. More than a site of creation, Salon Natasha became a veritable nexus of people and ideas that went far beyond its four walls (fg. 19.6). Since Salon Natasha was housed in a private home, the authorities had relatively little

jurisdiction over the actitivities that took place there, nor were Tân and Natasha always obligated to fle for permission to exhibit works. They did periodically fle for permission but found the process opaque as it did not seem to apply to the private sphere. This relative lack of surveillance gave artists the liberty and confdence to try and fnd new ways of making art. Salon Natasha exercised a literal open door policy as it availed itself to anyone interested. To this day, the door to 30 Hàng Bông street remains open to visitors, whether wandering in by accident or friends of the artist coming to say hello, locals and foreigners alike. Because Salon Natasha was an independent entity, it is rarely credited for participating in, let alone initiating, artistic reforms. But the artists that had made work or exhibited at Salon Natasha are all known for their bold experimentation and independent creative spirit. The 1990s were especially productive for these artists as no other platform existed. The connections that were made there also had a profound impact on Vietnamese contemporary art’s global outreach, for it was at Salon Natasha that artists encountered and collaborated with an international art community. The foremost examples include Vũ Dân Tân’s invitation to participate in the Second Asia-Pacifc Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane, Australia in 1996 and Nguyễn Minh Thành’s participation in the Third Triennale of 1999. If Salon Natasha’s doors had not been open to international visitors, curators would not have been introduced to the Salon Natasha artists. It was also the open atmosphere of Salon Natasha that stood in contrast to the stuffness of the offcial Arts Association spaces and the commercial “shop” nature of the galleries, attracting the international art community. Although both Vũ Dân Tân and Natalia Kraevskaia are to be credited for the success of Salon Natasha, we can also examine separately the infuence of Tân as an artist on the development of contemporary art and the impact

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of the salon itself. Let us, therefore, look back at Tân’s creative practice. He grew up in the house that became Salon Natasha. Located in the heart of Hanoi, it had already been a gathering place for writers thanks to the intellectual pursuits of his father, publisher Vũ Đình Long (1896–1960). Tân did not study fne arts formally but had a penchant for language, poetry, music and drawing, and thanks to his employment in the animation flm studios of Hanoi Television, was able to travel to Cuba and the Soviet Union. Prior to the opening of Salon Natasha, his home and studio received a steady stream of visitors including Bùi Xuân Phái and artists who were more interested in its informal setting than the spaces set up by the Arts Association. Not truly a naive or outsider artist like Trần Trung Tín, Tân’s art can be seen as aligned with the spirit of Dada and the anti-art movements of the 1920s. He was always looking for playful ways of creating art, often combining it with language, poetry and music. He was a pioneer in many ways as he never followed the academic tradition in which most artists in Vietnam were trained, bypassing the formalist education of the art school and jumping straight to the modernist and contemporary vocabulary of the avant-garde. It is diffcult to classify him for that reason, other than that he embodied the very notion of artistic freedom since he held no creative or social ties to the establishment. He was best known for his paper, cardboard and metal cut-outs, objects he made from recycled cigarette, whisky and appliance boxes or containers. He fashioned these into animals, masks or suits (fg. 19.7). The idea was to use ordinary household objects as art material—a variation on Marcel Duchamp’s notion of the readymade. Nonetheless, the choice of material was not always accidental. During the 1980s before the onset of economic reforms, cigaretttes and whisky were prized blackmarket goods, rare commodities from capitalist countries. Like Duchamp, the artist refected 274

on the commodifcation of art especially in light of the onset of the art market during the Đổi Mới period. Starting in 1994 and spanning the period of a decade, he made a series called Money, which consisted of small drawings composed like currency bills from different countries, decorated with made-up icons and wordplay on the names for the currency and their respective countries. These were intended to be humourous substitutes for dollars, euros, pounds and roubles, as a commentary on the false power of bank notes and the dynamics of global exchange. The Money series embodied Tân’s belief that the power of friendship transcends borders more effectively than money. He is not the only artist to refect on the commercialisation of art after the Đổi Mới period; it so happens that the other artists that addressed the issue of money in their work were also associated with Salon Natasha. Nguyễn Văn Cường (b. 1972), a regular participant of Salon Natasha activities, created a series of works titled New Frontiers that poked fun at the anti-social evils campaign launched by the government in the mid-1990s. In depicting money, in the case of Tân, and cartoonlike caricatures of Benjamin Franklin, in the case of Cường, their art pointed at the ironies of cracking down on prostitution and drug addiction due to the rise of capitalism under Đổi Mới. While the government championed free enterprise, these artists were quick to note that money also has its downside (fg. 19.8). Cường’s New Frontiers series was created during his residency at Pacifc Bridge Gallery in Oakland, California, in the United States in 1998, where Tân also had a residency the following year. There, a recycling company offered Tân a 1961 Cadillac that he painted gold and cut into, as if it were one of his cigarette boxes, giving it wings out of its own metal body. The title of the piece and its nickname play with the words “car” and “nation.” Icarus and RienCarNation both contain the words “car,” with the latter musing on the French word for “nothing”

Nora A. Taylor

or “rien,” thereby simultaneously stripping it of its national identity while giving it new life. The car was shipped to Vietnam but held at the port of Haiphong for some time before being released with its motor removed. Tân considered the motor to be its heart and kept the motor in his home as evidence of the car’s life. The residency at Pacifc Bridge was symptomatic of the kind of transnational projects in which Tân and Salon Natasha were involved. In 1996, Tân was one of the frst Vietnamese artists invited to participate in the Second Asia-Pacifc Triennial. There he met artists with whom he formed close bonds and who subsequently invited him to participate in other projects elsewhere. One example includes his meeting with Indian artist Vivan Sundaram (b. 1943) who asked him to join a Sahmat Collective project called “Gift for India” in 1997.18 These opportunities linked Tân to a global network of artist communities, independent of offcial diplomatic or commercial circuits. Over the next decade and to some extent, until today, Salon Natasha became a veritable hub for exchanges between Vietnamese and international artists. This artistic fow that emanated from Salon Natasha parallels, rather than intersects, the artistic reforms that were instituted by the Arts Association, and in many ways could arguably be considered more liberal than those initiated by offcial organisations. Merely allowing for an art market to thrive and lifting a few restrictions such as bans on abstraction and nudity do not match the kind of opening to experimentation, access to global contemporary art networks and free thinking that Salon Natasha created. These multiple avenues toward renovation only confrm that Đổi Mới cannot be defned by a single policy, idea or time period. It is worth noting that the artists who became associated with Đổi Mới fell into two categories: those who were members of Salon Natasha, and those who were quickly adopted by the art market. And if we compare the two, the Salon Natasha artists in effect took greater

risks. Aside from Vũ Dân Tân and Nguyễn Văn Cường, one can count Trường Tân (b. 1963), for example, who was the frst openly gay artist unafraid to address taboo subjects of homosexuality and religion in his work (fg. 19.9) and Lê Hồng Thái (b. 1966), who became one of the earliest experimenters with abstract lacquer paintings (fg. 19.10). Salon Natasha was also a connecting point for international artists, writers, art historians and students who came to live in Hanoi. German artist and educator Veronika Radulovic (b. 1954), for example, thanks to an agreement with the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) in Germany, taught at the Hanoi University of Fine Arts between 1993 and 2005. She was instrumental in developing curatorial projects and workshops with her students, many of whom became affliated with Salon Natasha artists such as Nguyễn Quang Huy (b. 1971) and Nguyễn Minh Thành (b. 1971). Finnish artist Maritta Nurmi (b. 1953) who came to Hanoi in 1994 often participated in Salon Natasha projects. French artist Eric Leroux (b. 1959) who lived in Hanoi teaching French from 1991 to 1998, initiated a number of events at Salon Natasha. International artists were welcome participants in Salon Natasha activities; unlike the offcial art institutions, being a Vietnamese citizen or Arts Association member was not a criteria for exhibiting there. The Offcialisation of Đổi Mới If we consider Đổi Mới to be a gateway toward the development of contemporary art and a transition from strict regulations and compliance with nationalist aesthetics to a freer form of expression, then Salon Natasha artists can be thought of as pioneers of the movement. However, if we take the more offcial defnition of Đổi Mới as economic reform, we can then turn to the more commercially successful artists as examples of renovation in the arts. These artists are not necessarily the artists that curators and

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18

Jessica Moss & Ram Rahman, The Sahmat Collective: Art and Activism in India since 1989 (Chicago: Smart Museum, 2013). See for example, Geeta Kapur, When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2000) and Simon Soon, “When Was East and Southeast Asia’s Modernism in

Art?: Comparisons and Intersections,” in The Modernist World, eds. Stephen Ross & Allana C. Lindgren (London: Routledge, 2015), 78–87. 20 Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity: An Unfnished Project,” in Habermas and the Unfnished Project of Modernity, eds. Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves & Seyla Benhabib (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 38–58.

art historians would see as contemporary in the sense that they still cling to modernist ideas and have been surpassed by the current generation in terms of aesthetic inovation, but they do fulfll the idea of Đổi Mới as a transitional period between the modern and the contemporary, between the local and the global. The list of those artists is too long to include here but we can think especially of the artists in Saigon whose work came to be recognised only after the mid-1990s but who had started experimenting with abstraction at least a decade prior such as Nguyễn Trung (b. 1940) and Đỗ Hoàng Tường (b. 1960), or hyperrealism as in the case of Đỗ Quang Em (b. 1942). These, together with the artists from Hanoi such as the Gang of Five mentioned earlier, became commercially successful precisely because their work stood as evidence of change from the previous generation of nationalist painters. They might not have been noticed had it not been for the Uncorked Soul exhibition in Hong Kong or without the pioneering art criticism of Nguyễn Quân (b. 1948), himself a mathematician-turned-painter who spent formative years in East Germany before returning to Vietnam after the war. Quân and his knowledge of Western art history had a strong infuence on a group of artists that gathered around the home of poet-translator Trần Dường Tường (b. 1932)

in the early 1990s. Not exactly an experimental art space like Salon Natasha, it was symptomatic of the kinds of informal spaces in which artists and writers congregated in the pre-Đổi Mới era. Café Lâm was another such legendary place where Phái and others traded drawings for cups of coffee in the 1970s and 1980s. What Đổi Mới did was make offcial the openness to different kinds of art that Salon Natasha and other spaces and gatherings provided. Like the recurring question that scholars of Asian art have been unable to answer since the 1990s— “When was Modernism?”—it is diffcult to ascertain when was Đổi Mới.19 The 1990s were formative years mostly because of the economic boom that the opening to the West provided, but as this essay has shown, artistic innovations occured at times in the 1980s in Hanoi, the 1960s in Saigon, and in the case of offcial institutions, one may consider that reforms have yet to occur. Vietnam still has no contemporary art museum and the Arts Association is composed mostly of wartime artists and/or conservative former graduates of the national art schools. New Media arts and performance are not part of the art school curriculum and all exhibitions still need permission from the Ministry of Culture before opening. Perhaps, akin to the modernity Jürgen Habermas described, Đổi Mới is likewise an “unfnished project.”20

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Nguyễn Gia Trí Landscape of Vietnam c. 1940 Lacquer on board 159 x 119 cm Collection of National Gallery Singapore Tạ Tỵ Nude Oil on canvas 49 x 36.5 cm Collection Saigon, Nguyen Thi Lan Huong

Bùi Xuân Phái Hanoi Street 1985 Oil on cardboard 17 x 24 cm Collection of Natalia Kraevskaia Image courtesy of Natalia Kraevskaia Photographer: Natalia Kraevskaia 19.3

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Đặng Xuân Hòa Human Objects No. 12 1992 Gouache on paper 80 x 100 cm Collection of Singapore Art Museum

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Vũ Dân Tân and Bùi Xuân Phái at Salon Natasha in 1986. Image courtesy of Salon Natasha Photographer: Unknown

Vũ Dân Tân Box 1998 Recycled cigarette boxes, ink and synthetic paint on paper, wooden box with glass lid 30 x 40 cm Private collection Image courtesy of Natalia Kraevskaia Photographer: Natalia Kraevskaia

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19.8 Nguyễn Văn Cường Cultural Pollution 2000 Ceramic 28 x 10 x 12 cm (5 pieces of identical size) Collection of Singapore Art Museum 19.9 Trường Tân Untitled 23 1994–1995 Chinese ink and gouache on paper 54 x 78 cm Collection of National Gallery Singapore

Lê Hồng Thái Alone 1994 Lacquer on board 90.2 x 180.3 cm Collection of Singapore Art Museum

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1

2

“History” is written with “hi” in parentheses to denote my understanding of history as a subjective and fallible arrangement of stories, whose reception is more-over contingent on a constellation of variable factors. In this paper, the word “Burmese” is used to mean the language, culture or people of Myanmar, instead of “Myanmar” whose spelling is undifferentiated from the country’s name. John Okell’s system of romanisation is referenced for the transliteration of Burmese words, with the exception of names and titles. To date, Ranard’s study is the most comprehensive survey of Burmese painting in the 20 th century. See Andrew Ranard, Burmese Painting: A Linear and Lateral History (Chiangmai: Silkworm Books, 2009). When modernist artist Khin One (1947–2000) wrote

his book on modern abstract art in 1970, it was “seikta-za-pan-gyi” that was chosen as the title, and it is debatable if it should be translated as “modern art, abstract art or modern abstract art” or “modern painting, abstract painting or modern abstract painting.” The misnomer is believed to have arisen from Aung Soe’s non-fgurative illustrations for Kyi Aye’s short stories in Shumawa magazine in January and February 1953. To trace the evolution of his art through his thousands of illustrations, see “Online Database of Illustrations by Bagyi Aung Soe: A (Hi)Story of Art From Myanmar: 1948–1990,” http:// www.aungsoeillustrations.org (accessed 3 February 2016). On Aung Soe and illustration in Myanmar, see Yin Ker, “L’ ‘art fou’ ou l’art moderne birman selon les illustrations de Bagyi Aung Soe” [“Mad” art or mod-

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Unpacking the Legacy of an Exceptional Artist from Myanmar: Bagyi Aung Soe (1923–1990) Yin Ker

There is no spell more potent than that cast by mysterious symbols of which the meaning has been forgotten. Sir Ernst Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art, 2002 When you call a thing mysterious, all it means is that you don’t understand it. Lord Kelvin, The Life of Lord Kelvin, 1976 The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Albert Einstein, Living Philosophies, 1931 In the emerging (hi)story of 20th-century Burmese art, Bagyi Aung Soe (1923–1990) is unparalleled, exceptional (fg. 20.1).1 He was hors concours when alive, and continues to be regarded as such by Myanmar’s artists, afcio278

nados and amateurs of art. Today, he is chiefy commemorated as the pioneer, leader or father of modern Burmese art, Myanmar’s most prolifc illustrator for over four decades from 1948 to 1990, and the begetter of the misnomer “seik-ta-bay-da” or “seik-ta-za-pan-gyi,” meaning psychotic painting, which is still loosely used to mean any work of art that is not a painting in the naturalistic style.2 He is no less remembered for his prodigious persona that earned him the reputation as the enfant terrible of Yangon’s art world: the charismatic movie star who delighted in playing the villain, the beloved teacher of art history and graphic art at the Rangoon Institute of Technology and Rangoon University, the trendsetting bohemian with shoulder-length hair, the mercurial rebel who dropped his lower garment in public, the soft-spoken gentleman dressed like a Himalayan yogi one day and a trendy urban-

Charting Thoughts

ern Burmese art with reference to the illustrations of Bagyi Aung Soe], in La question de l’art en Asie orientale [The question of art in East Asia], ed. Flora Blanchon (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris Sorbonne, 2008), 387–404. Aung Soe’s title as forerunner of modern Burmese art departing from the tradition of Impressionistic oil and watercolour painting is only contested by Kin Maung (Bank) (1908–1983), whose depictions of local subject matter in Western modernist styles are no doubt unprecedented in the context of their debut in Mandalay in the 1940s, but whose lack of synthesis with any home-grown mode of image making casts doubts on his credibility as a contextually sensitive artist of modern Myanmar. Sonny Nyein likewise broached the topic in his talk titled “Myanmar Modernism to Contemporary Art”

ite the next, the mad sage incarcerated at the psychiatric hospital on numerous occasions, the tempestuous alcoholic who sent his peers running for cover, the free-spirited maverick who distanced himself from commercial engagements, the impoverished genius who drew at teashops, the artist of the common people who accepted the equivalent of fve dozen eggs or less for each work, and the devout Buddhist who took to meditation like a duck to water and subsequently made Buddhist practice the path and goal of his art. He made such an impression on his contemporaries that novelist Shwe Aung Thein modelled the protagonist in The Madman (1969) on his persona. Without a doubt, Aung Soe stood out in multiple ways, and his memory is a complex one. How is the art historian to make sense of his artistic legacy in relation to his untrammelled life and art as played out in postcolonial and socialist Myanmar? This paper addresses the question of Aung Soe’s legacy in tandem with his exceptionality in two parts: the frst half refects on the challenges and implications; the latter half scans his career and oeuvre to elicit the most salient traits of his exceptionality in conjunction with his legacy.

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(Burmese) at River Ayeyarwaddy Gallery in Yangon on 21 June 2015. On Kin Maung (Bank), see Ranard, op. cit., 217–25; for a discussion on the differences between the two artists’ approaches to the modern, see Yin Ker, “Tantao xiandai Miandian yishu de xingqi: Jinmaung (1908–1983) yu Angsuo (1924–1990)” [Kin Maung (Bank) (1908–1983) and Bagyi Aung Soe (1924–1990): Two models of “Modern” Myanmar art and the question of its emergence], Modern Art Quarterly 173, June (2014): 62–75. The same observation can be made of Fua Haribhitak (1910–1993), Aung Soe’s Thai counterpart who similarly studied in Śāntiniketan, though a decade before him in 1941 and 1942. For a list of texts by and on Aung Soe, see “Online Database of Illustrations by Bagyi Aung Soe,” op. cit.

­— If Aung Soe has been perceived as peerless, it is also because he has neither predecessor nor successor. While it is untrue that his art left absolutely no discernible echo in modern and contemporary Burmese art, the imprints have been implicit, random or feeting: Moat Thone’s (b. 1956) sweeping strokes of alternating thicknesses in his illustrations, Htein Lin’s (b. 1966) indigenous esoteric symbols in his “prison paintings” from 1998 to 2004, or Aung Soe’s neighbour and student Bagyi Lynn Wunna’s (b. 1970) emphasis on forceful line work, for example—none of which measures up to expectations of an artist of his stature.3 In other words, Myanmar’s reputed leader of modern art did not beget any momentous movement. The Burmese’s reticence with respect to the exposition of his artistic vision and distinction is no less glaring and suggests an incognisance accentuated in contrast by their unreserved admiration for him. The many articles written on him are essentially anecdotal and even hagiographic in tone and intent.4 Understandably, recollections of his life’s tragicomic episodes are easier to engage with than concerted research on his

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5

On several occasions, Aung Soe referred to his art as the fruit of “all the traditions of the world.” Due to diffculty in hearing during the later years of his life, he communicated in writing. These written exchanges in the hands of family, friends, students and collectors remain unpublished. Kaung Nyunt, “The Artist–Illustrators of Periodicals: Bagyi Aung Soe,” unidentifed publication (c. 1987): 128–36. Bagyi Lynn Wunna, oral communication with Yin Ker, May 2016. Kin Maung Yin, oral communication with Yin Ker, January 2001. Bagyi Aung Soe bemoaned this fact in “Burmese Painting,” Padauk Pwinthit, October ([c. 1987] 2006): 86–7. In 1978, Aung Soe published two anthologies: one of his previously published articles and another

one of his illustrations. See Bagyi Aung Soe, From Tradition to Modernity (Yangon: Khin May Si Sapay, 1978); Poetry Without Words (Yangon: Wun Shway Ein, [1978] 1993). 10 Inspired by Rabindranath Tagore and Nandalal Bose, Bagyi Aung Soe wrote: “Nature will choose the good traditions out of the old, and sincerity and truth out of the new [modern]. Not everything old is decadent, not everything new [modern] is revolutionary. We have to search for the soul in the old, and foster the progress of the new [modern].” Bagyi Aung Soe, From Tradition to Modernity, 217–22. 11 See Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (San Francisco: The Book Club of California, 1917), 94. 12 The Legacy of Bagyi Aung Soe: 20 th Death Anniversary (Yangon: Swiftwinds, 2010).

practice and art, whose confuence of conventionally incompatible felds and processes— tradition and modernity, natural sciences and tantra, eroticism and wisdom, spiritual transformation and artistic creation—stupefes and disconcerts (fgs. 20.2–20.7). Synthesising the linguistic rationales of a multitude of pictorial idioms, they embraced what he referred to as “all the traditions of the world” from the East and the West, the ancient and the modern worlds.5 Aung Soe’s equivocal and seemingly contradictory responses to queries about his works did not facilitate insight into his art either. For example, in spite of maintaining that there is always a meaning behind each drawing or painting, he would argue: “It is because you absolutely demand to know that I invented an explanation; in fact, there is no meaning to this drawing.”6 His colossal production numbering thousands of works is likely to have been another deterrent. Beyond his art’s arcane nature and the governing authorities’ ignorant disapproval, which constricted scrupulous studies of it and its infuence, tendencies in his compatriots’ reception of him and his art have been compelling

factors. Looked upon as resolutely enigmatic and beyond the understanding of mere mortals, everything about Aung Soe—his words, his actions, his art—has been taken for granted as extraordinary and inimitable, even deifc. The penetration and implantation of the modern myth of the artist, against which Myanmar’s political isolation between 1962 and 1988 was impuissant, have cast his idiosyncrasies as the hallmark of artistic genius. This apotheosis bolstered his aura as the artist par excellence, but garbled his art in the process: on the one hand, Aung Soe’s exceptionality sealed his fame; on the other, it eclipsed his art. The latter was furthermore bedimmed by his alcohol dependency which was only overcome around 1985.7 Modernist Kin Maung Yin (1938–2014), for example, admitted to not taking the artist seriously for this reason and only realised what the Burmese art world had lost after his death in 1990.8 Aung Soe was not oblivious to the misconceptions and incomprehension shrouding his art. Towards the end of his life, after almost four decades of writing and publishing in periodicals of signifcant readership, he lamented that no artist had read his many articles, some

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of which had been republished in 1978 in an anthology titled From Tradition to Modernity.9 While various Burmese artists have cited his publications for initiating them to the works of artists like Jamini Roy, Amrita Sher-Gil and Kitagawa Utamaro, he apparently did not consider them to have understood what they had read. Indeed, if his thesis on the necessary symbiosis of the old and the new in artistic creation had been understood, Burmese arts today would not remain stranded in the stalemate of antagonism between traditional and contemporary forms and expressions.10 Exceptionality concurs with solitariness, whether as a contributing factor, a corollary or both. It precipitates displacement in a no man’s land due to incomprehension, and triggers mystifcation. For a Burmese artist operating on the fringes of Euro-American centres of art, exceptionality additionally implicates exponential exclusion from the Euro-American or “international” narrative, whose homogenised and homogenising modi operandi curb imagination and impede the exploration of innovatory contextualised (hi)stories of art capable of accommodating difference, unevenness and the nonpareil. In 2016—more than a quarter of a century after Aung Soe’s demise—his art continues to be framed within exoticised niches such as “Burmese art,” “Southeast Asian art” and “Buddhist art,” whose historiography remains unchecked and whose premises are in urgent need of housekeeping. In fairness, if knowledge about these categories of “art” has yet to be even articulated in and on their own terms, how can Aung Soe’s exceptionality be integrated into their hackneyed narratives without escaping truncation? If Aung Soe’s countrymen have mainly upheld his memory in a panegyrical mode, it is also because there are no stable points of reference to articulate his exceptionality. The fact that none in the country is known to have trained in art history aside, the theoretical tools of the discipline premised on the Greek eidos, as interpreted and

propagated by historians of Western art like Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Heinrich Wölffin, offer Aung Soe no relief. To begin with, his unwonted synergy of disparate pictorial strategies and processes from varied spaces and times resists and eludes prevailing art historical frameworks conditioned by an exclusively modern Euro-American experience and agenda; its transcendence of dualistic thinking and dichotomies such as the fgurative and the abstract fouts the very fundamentals of modern thought and art. His groundbreaking conception of the modern as autonomous of the West, as inspired by the teachings he received at the Viśva-Bhāratī University in Śāntiniketan, whose founder Rabindranath Tagore (1861– 1941) argued that “true modernism is freedom of mind, not slavery of taste” and “independence of thought and action, not tutelage under European schoolmasters,” is moreover a potential embarrassment to today’s experts and institutions of art and higher learning that have yet to wean themselves off the anachronistic premises, frameworks, narratives, affliations and practices bequeathed by imperialist powers.11 How was it assumed that political decolonisation would amount to the restoration of intellectual sovereignty? Collateral casualties. The commemorative anthology published in Yangon on the occasion of Aung Soe’s 20th death anniversary in 2010 bears the title The Legacy of Bagyi Aung Soe: 20th Death Anniversary.12 But for an artist whose impact on the development of art in his own country has been curtailed by his prodigiousness, and whose prominence in the “international” (hi)story of art has been diminished by the coincidence of his peripheral location and his defance of its rules and regulations, is there still a legacy to speak of? If we must speak of Aung Soe’s “legacy,” it is a peculiar one that begs investigation, clarifcation and justifcation. What did he leave behind that has been valued, preserved and perpetuated? What might be the medium of this legacy, given that it eludes visual detec-

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tion to a large extent? A key means by which to elucidate the nature and import of this legacy is to unpack his perceived exceptionality, whose paradoxical offshoot is precisely his faint visibility in the works of his fellow and succeeding artists, as well as his faltering destiny in the nascent (hi)stories of Burmese and Southeast Asian art. It is necessary to begin with the conditions and factors lending to the acknowledgement of his exceptionality, and its metamorphosis into what might now be understood as his legacy. Contextual studies of Aung Soe’s frst public is not an option in this endeavour, since an artist is entirely dependent on his or her audiences with regard to both the validation of his or her artistic talent and the commemoration of his or her legacy; exceptionality is conditioned by myriads of factors and agencies. As such, Aung Soe’s exceptionality must be examined and understood against the context of the Yangonite art world where many avant-garde artists from Upper Myanmar like Paw Oo Thet (1936–1993), Win Pe (b. 1936) and Paw Thame (1947–2014) relocated.13 To investigate the conditions, mechanisms and dynamics giving rise to his exceptionality, this paper takes heed of, though not without adapting, what Alan Bowness refers to in The Conditions of Success: How the Modern Artist Rises to Fame as the “successive circles of recognition through which the exceptional artist passes on his path to fame”: peer recognition (by fellow artists), patronage (by Yangon’s writers, poets, editors and artists), and fnally, public acclaim (which in Aung Soe’s case, includes readers of publications featuring his illustrations and articles, amateurs of art and fans of his movies).14 Our refections on the legacy of Aung Soe, in conjunction with his exceptionality, proceed from visual and textual sources alongside frst-hand oral accounts. The veridicality of anecdotes on Aung Soe must be ceaselessly probed and tested, since no informant is entirely disinterested and unbiased; all aspirations of objectivity remain mere aspirations, includ282

ing this paper’s. To begin with, recollections are not unlike hazy refections projected onto stained mirrors. In itself, memory is a site of perpetual transformation, and each era constructs, deconstructs and reconstructs the (hi) stories it inherits. As such, in a space-time like Aung Soe’s whose memories have been writ in the ephemerality of oral transmission, the pursuit of absolute truth is futile. Already in his lifetime, there was more than one Aung Soe, and there will be more to come—none of which is more or less authentic than another. Even our appreciation of his life and oeuvre as it now stands is constantly evolving in response to fresh recollections shared by informants and newly discovered works. Indeed, art historians merely tell stories of mosaics of stories, some of which are more veridical than others, but none entirely so. While this is no concession to dispense with rigorous historical enquiry, Claude Lévi-Strauss’ argument that “it is vain to go to historical consciousness for the truest meaning” is an opportune reminder of the limits of our endeavours as meanings, being socially made, are never “the right one.”15 Conditioned by variable constructs subject to manipulation, misinterpretation and transformation, this paper’s objective is less to separate myth from reality, than to distil perspectives on Aung Soe’s exceptionality with respect to his legacy based on its author’s grasp of the state of affairs to date. Its merit is hence limited to the exploration of the topic’s terrain and boundaries, as well as the methods and directions of enquiry that are likely to problematise our perspectives on Aung Soe’s art in relation to the (hi)stories of modern Burmese and Southeast Asian art within which it is embedded. Given that the locus of this topic lies outside the centres of Euro-American art history, it is inadequate to rely on methods that have generally enriched studies of art thus far. In this impasse whereby the very tools that are supposed to serve actually derail and pervert, those of disciplines like anthropology and soci-

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Yangon’s art scene is not representative of all Myanmar. Artists like Kin Maung (Bank) and intellectuals like Ludu U Hla (1910–1982) from Mandalay were also active in exploring new aesthetic expressions beftting modern times. While the two former capitals are generally perceived in opposition, it would be simplistic to overlook shared aspirations and the movements of artists between them. Given that there was no substantial art market to speak of during the socialist period between 1962 and 1988, the second and third of Bowness’ scheme of four circles of recognition that are patronage by dealers and patronage by collectors have been re-

ology offer invaluable problem-solving stimuli. Sociologist Nathalie Heinich’s research on the factors conditioning the status and fame of the artist in the Western world deserves special mention, although an experiment utilising her framework for the study of Aung Soe has yet to be implemented.16 Inevitably, in the context of Myanmar, the scarcity of precise data such as the dates of exhibitions, the sale of works and reviews further complicates the undertaking, although the possibility of gleaning insights with the potential to unwind the stalemate remains. Recourse to the strategies of other disciplines must not however be confused with their practice in place of art history’s; for is it not natural and mandatory of any conscientious study to consult the perspectives of affliated disciplines while remaining rooted in its own feld of study, whose revitalisation is precisely dependent on dialogues, debates and negotiations with unaccustomed and even contrary patterns of thought? For the same reason, the rubric of “interdisciplinary studies,” “multidisciplinary studies” or “transdisciplinary studies” is superfuous. Shepherding the appropriated strategies whose application awaits rationalisation, but not necessarily theorisation, is art historian Michael Baxandall’s “inferential criti-

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placed by patronage by Yangon’s intelligentsia and artists: editors commissioned illustrations and artists ran galleries. See Alan Bowness, The Conditions of Success: How the Modern Artist Rises to Fame (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989), 11. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 253. See notably Nathalie Heinch, La gloire de Van Gogh [The glory of Van Gogh] (Paris: Les éditions de minuit, 1991). See Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).

cism.”17 In rejecting the “clerkly apparatus” of eminent but contextually irrelevant predetermined models in favour of the authority of the common experience, and engaging with the subject matter as an evolving process in an experiment whose results must remain wide open to scrutiny, it prioritises contextual signifcances, relativises the hegemonic, circumvents topdown procedures and is capable of conjoining with or absorbing other theoretical strategies and frameworks. It is hence the most appropriate tool of thought to grapple with a persona and art like Aung Soe’s that straddle times, spaces and disciplines. Although Baxandall articulated this framework in relation to visual experience of a pictorial order, its underlying universality and organicity are entirely apropos to this paper’s probe into what might constitute the legacy of an exceptional artist located in the marginal site of 20th-century Myanmar. There is no overarching theoretical framework adopted in this investigation beyond the rule of thumb consisting of intimate engagement with or immersion in materials via scrupulous close-reading, the sustained crossexamination of the processes of distillation of postulations which must remain open to scrutiny (as argued by Baxandall), and fnally,

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On the pertinence of the Śāntiniketan model for interpreting Aung Soe’s art and practice, see Yin Ker, “Bagyi Aung Soe: Strategies for an Autonomous Artistic Modernity” (paper presented at the conference Southeast Asia and Taiwan: Modernity and Postcolonial Manifestations in Visual Art, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, 21 November, 2015).

19 For an analysis of Aung Soe’s vision of modern art,

the formulation of made-to-measure strategies attuned to the singularities of materials in connection with their endlessly evolving matrixes. Neither is there the intention to contrive one along with a precise methodology addressing artistic exceptionality and legacy that might also serve the study of other artists abiding as shadowless spectres invisible to specialists of the Euro-American “international” circuit, Southeast Asian or otherwise. The circumstances for Aung Soe’s art and, in general, oeuvres on the fringes of the canon, are in themselves unusual and exceptional by “international” standards. If the theorisation of the exceptional is deemed imperative, then that of the contended unexceptional and “normal” must precede, but “normal” according to who, what, when and where? Still, it is not merely because the feld is raw and the points of reference are defcient; it is also due to the necessity to respect the state of fux in which these nodes of art historical enquiry thrive. The exceptional fickers and futters; legacies wax and wane at rhythms less predictable than the earth’s rotation about its own axis around the sun. In point of fact, is it not their nebulousness that amplifes their hold on our imagination as well as their appeal in this (hi)story of art that is being (re)written? While legacies may be chronicled without fuss, their sui generis character risks being straitjacketed if theorised, for ossifed formulae promote scientifc plans of action through homogenisa-

tion, regimentation and moderation! If writing were a pharmakon, what more of frameworks, theories and systems? In lieu of formulaic shortcuts, it is perhaps fux that we must work with and learn from. The regeneration of knowledge and the expansion of consciousness call for more than positivist methods. The propensity to seek out and rely on hard and fast theories and methodologies in writing (hi)stories of art, as if there were possibly a panacea capable of conquering art’s multidimensional complexities, is acute. How many papers and lives have been mobilised to disentangle local manifestations, agents and (hi)stories of art from the sweeping EuroAmerican narrative and its methods, or to devise adapted methodologies and theories of art? But how is the substitution of one model with another not the perpetuation of the paradigm of hegemonic discourse? Today’s science is possibly tomorrow’s myth. Is it meaningful to assign future scholars of art (assuming that the construct of “art” endures) with more theoretical relics to be undone? Not even the universalistic model of Tagore’s Śāntiniketan which fts Aung Soe’s art like a glove can claim to be the answer.18 Each accomplished artist is exceptional and merits an adapted narrative based on scrupulous study and cross-examination; each (hi)story of art must move freely between the macro and the micro, between the artist and the historian or storyteller of art without

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see Yin Ker, “Modern Art According to Bagyi Aung Soe,” Journal of Burma Studies 10 (2006): 83–157. 20 See Min Thu Wun, “The Beginning of the Story of Bagyi Aung Soe,” unpublished manuscript in Burmese, c. 1991.

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being subsumed by any one system of thought. Indeed, it is our blind faith in frameworks, theories and systems, all of which are inexorably conditioned by prejudices and have, in truth, fared no better than fashion come and gone, that begs intervention. Surely, the art historian’s vocation is not to run artistic productions through theories and methodologies, as do computers with fles using software programmes. Besides, writing (hi)stories of art through a series of localised responses targeting specifc problems that arise from an evolving process, in lieu of the execution or pursuit of a specifc theoretical framework, restores creative thinking. The ideal would be mobility between shifting vantage points and methodologies so as to behold and interpret the evolving phenomenon in its fullest dimensions; it is diversity and dynamism that must be embraced. To draw on multitudinous ways of thinking and writing extracted from various disciplines and traditions without theorising any is moreover analogous to the procedures of Aung Soe and many of his non-Western peers, who took full advantage of the smorgasbord of artistic practices and products streaming piecemeal out from the Western world. For these reasons, this study of the legacy of the exceptional Aung Soe gravitates towards syncretism, synthesis and synergy, rather than theorisation. Theories and methodologies, if any, are internalised. — Aung Soe’s fame was not posthumous. If this paper brings into focus his debut in Yangon, it is because he was even then perceived as outstanding; the germ of his legacy was already sown in his early career. His ascension to the foremost position in modern Burmese art began in 1948 when he broke into the art world as an illustrator for the progressive literary magazine Taya founded by Dagon Taya (1919–2013), the leader of the New Literature (sa-pay-thit) movement lauded as the khit-san

of khit-san (“khit-san” meaning to test the new age). Barely three years later, at the tender age of 27 in 1951, he received from Zawgyi (U Thein Han) (1908–1990) and Min Thu Wun (U Wun) (1909–2004), the country’s foremost intellectuals and esteemed exponents of the khit-san literary movement, the mandate to rejuvenate traditional Burmese art in the form of an Indian government scholarship to study in Śāntiniketan. The question begs to be asked: how did a fedgling artist come to be perceived as a more eligible candidate than the many better-established artists like U San Win (1905–1981), U Ohn Lwin (1907–1988, fg. 20.8) and U Ba Moe (1912–2000)? Subsequently, in spite of prematurely terminating his studies in India without informing the authorities and causing much embarrassment to his benefactors, how did Aung Soe go on to win the favour of Yangon’s intelligentsia, become lauded as the poet’s artist and be granted carte blanche in illustration—the platform for avant-garde pictorial experimentations in Myanmar for almost the entirety of the 20th century? Eventually, how did he come to be hailed as the leading exponent of modern Burmese art, in spite of the incomprehension surrounding his singular conception of the modern inherited from Śāntiniketan?19 Not even Min Thu Wun who held Tagore in admiration seemed to have understood.20 In other words, what was it about Aung Soe that made him the darling of Myanmar’s art world? What made his fellow artists applaud and love, but also fear him? How about the Yangonite intelligentsia’s indulgence of him? In the absence of professional art critics in Myanmar, it was her intelligentsia made up of journalists, writers, poets, editors and artists whose verdict sealed an artist’s destiny. Lastly, how did the layperson uninitiated to art also come to revere him? These questions are less about Aung Soe’s meteoric rise from anonymity to distinction per se, than the forces bracing his rise and sustaining his glory beyond the grave: the ethos of a community

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grappling with the Trojan horse of modernity steeped in colonial cultural and intellectual indoctrination. While Aung Soe’s earliest surviving works from the 1940s in the form of pencil sketches and unicolour illustrations demonstrate frm line work, a talent for portraiture, effective communication of the subject’s psychological state and even bold stylistic experimentations, none can be deemed exceptional in terms of subject matter or execution. They are above the average and possibly excellent, but certainly not exceptional; fgurative representations of urban life and romanticised landscapes were then run-of-the-mill, and remained so for decades to come. Regardless, by the late 1940s, Aung Soe came to be known as the artist devoted to devising new pictorial strategies beftting the new era into which the country had entered.21 This preoccupation echoed the writers’ aspirations to modernise literature since two decades prior, and in all likelihood, it was what made Zawgyi and Min Thu Wun decide to endorse the dilettante assisting artists on their outdoor painting trips.22 Their decision is in spite of the fact that there is no known work by Aung Soe from this period that hints at any interest in traditional art or evinces the slightest aptitude for the reinvigoration of Burmese art in the manner of the Bengal School in India. Even though the literary giants were not alone in their high opinion of the young artist—senior artist U Ba Yin Galay (1915–1988) was so impressed that he debated with Dagon Taya on the most appropriate artistic education for him—there was certainly an element of a leap of faith.23 Admittedly, Aung Soe’s early success was not due to artistic accomplishment alone. Comparative studies of his works with his peers’ do not yield convincing explanations; qualities pertaining to his ingenious personality and a visionary outlook also set him apart. There is no doubt as to Aung Soe’s artistic credibility, especially his gift for rendering poems pictorially, but the reasons for his pre286

rogatives within the Yangonite literary circle, which led to illustration becoming the showcase for his artistic experimentations over four decades, must likewise be sought beyond his art. Throughout his life, he favoured illustration over the art gallery in spite of the latter’s greater fnancial returns, empathised with the poets’ and writers’ precarious fnancial situations and accepted nominal fees for illustration that no other artist would. He additionally wrote for magazines, declaring: “The recompense of writing in magazines is the youth’s respect; I die happy.”24 Understandably, poets, writers and artists held him in high regard, and editors reciprocated in kind by according him the freedom to illustrate as he deemed ft, independently of the text in question as he would a work of art. Even when alcoholism, ill health, brushes with censorship and competition with younger artists caused him to lose favour with some editors in the 1980s, others like Maung Wuntha (1945–2013), editor of Atway Amyin magazine, continued to commission illustrations from him (fg. 20.5). Demonstrably, illustration was a feld operating through networks of friendships and favours, and within this closely knit community, virtue ethics such as compassion, altruism and gratitude mattered. Is it not Aung Soe’s veneration of the maxim inherited from his frst guru U Hla Bau (1904– 1949), “Truth is the only beauty,” that Shwe Min Tha made the focal point in his article on the artist?25 Indeed, as inscrutable as his art may remain to many, his qualities like integrity, candour and generosity have been plain for all to see, and they outweighed the less decorous aspects of his life. Through his countless illustrations gracing the most widely circulated magazines like Myawadi and Ngwaytayi, as well as his movies in the dozens, even the bus driver, student, hawker and farmer unacquainted with art came to know and adore him. No doubt, in extolling Aung Soe, it is also him, in addition to his artistic distinction, that the Burmese seek to honour; it is not only his contributions as an

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21 Ma Thanegi, written communication with Yin Ker,

Tauris Academic Studies, 1996), 14–8.

October 2015. On the khit-san movement’s modernisation of Burmese literature, see Anna Allot, “The Study of Burmese Literature,” in Southeast Asian Languages and Literature: A Bibliographical Guide to Burmese, Cambodian, Indonesian, Javanese, Malay, Minangkabau, Thai and Vietnamese, ed. Ernst Ulrich Kratz (London:

23 Dagon Taya, oral communication with Yin Ker,

artist that mark him as exceptional, but also his relentless efforts at being a better human being. As said, homages to Aung Soe’s artistic genius are abundant, but precisely what did the Burmese understand of his art that led them to regard him as unparalleled? As early as the 1950s after his return from India, his illustrations were distinctively innovative in conception and outstanding in skill; one need not rely on his signature in the form of a circle surrounded by eight smaller circles to identify them. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he continued to dazzle his audience with the sheer quantity of his output, his technical virtuosity and stylistic versatility: Burmese classical and folk art, Japanese woodblock print, Pop Art, children’s art and much more (fgs. 20.2 and 20.3). To the Burmese, an artist’s ability to wield diverse skills, styles and tasks is a hallmark of exceptionality, not amateurism as deemed by the Euro-American canon, and Aung Soe incarnated this fair like no other. Mostly fgurative, these works were by and large accessible. The same cannot be said, however, of Aung Soe’s signature works from the 1980s aimed at rendering manifest—not merely picturing— Buddhist teachings such as the Three Marks of Existence (Pāḷi: anicca, dukkha, anattā) (fgs. 20.4–20.7). This he christened “manaw maheikdi dat painting,” meaning, in Burmanised Pāli, the painting of the fundamental elements through the power of intense mental concen-

tration. They were nothing that Myanmar or even the world beyond had ever seen. None to date in Myanmar has formulated his or her understanding of manaw maheikdi dat painting’s manner of operation with the exception of Lynn Wunna, and even then, only at random in conversations. While this is possibly due to the lack of profciency in articulating the signifcance of this abstruse pictorial idiom in art historical terms, could it also be that the basis for the recognition of Aung Soe’s artistic exceptionality derives from something other than a rational understanding of his art’s formal properties? Could his art’s exceptionality be more a matter of the instinctive appreciation of its force, energy or power instead? To begin with, the very nature of manaw maheikdi dat painting is the inexpressible beyond form and concept, which must nonetheless take form in order to be known. It is the mediation between truth, form and language that is every Buddhist image maker’s insoluble problem and struggle; the inability or reluctance to formulate how these mysterious images might be traces of spiritual transformations is also symptomatic of language’s limitations, which is markedly different from ignorance. Over and above outdoing his peers in terms of the esotericism of his pictorial idiom, his colossal output and the wide reach of his audience thanks to the medium of print that was socialist Myanmar’s window to the outside

22

December 2007.

24 Bagyi Aung Soe, written communication with unknown interlocutor, c. 1985. Collection of Maung Maung Soe, Bagyieain Foundation. 25 Shwe Min Tha, “Bagyi Aung Soe: The Truth that Touches,” unidentifed periodical (c. 1991): 63–5.

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26 On Śāntiniketan’s concept of art and the artist, see R.

Siva Kumar, Śāntiniketan: The Making of Contextual Modernism, exh. cat. (Delhi: National Gallery of Modern Art, 1997), unpaginated. Bagyi Aung Soe (Note, c. 1980). Aung Soe Family Collection. Zaw Hein (Min Zaw), “Studies on the Works of Bagyi Aung Soe, A Modern Painter” (Essay in Burmese sub-

mitted for Diploma in painting, University of Culture, 1998), 7. 29 On Bose’s pedagogical programme, see K.G. Subramanyan, “Nandalal Bose,” in Nandan: Nandalal (Kolkata: Viśva-Bhāratī, 1982), 1–22. 30 Htein Lin recalls censorship offcers ridiculing Aung Soe as such at his frst solo exhibition in 1996. Htein Lin, oral communication with Yin Ker, May 2016.

world, Aung Soe distinguished himself through his concept of art, which is again indebted to Śāntiniketan.26 Adamant against the commodifcation of art and in the hope that more laypersons might beneft from his art, he illustrated and priced his works at less than a tenth of gallery prices. Despite his dire fnancial situation, he opined: “As much as they would like to buy, they cannot afford to spend more money […]. That is why I reduced the price to 10 kyats. This is fair to everyone; I want my works to be accessible to all.”27 None of his predecessors and contemporaries are known to have been as intransigent on this point. In the frst place, there is no ground for comparison between Aung Soe’s and his fellow Burmese artists’ notion of artistic modernity. While he pursued Śāntiniketan’s universalistic vision in which the Euro-American model of art was but one amongst many, his contemporaries were largely divided into two camps corresponding to two phases of European art history: the Impressionist tradition in the vein of U Ba Nyan (1897–1945, fg. 20.9), U Ngwe Gaing (1901–1967) and U Lun Gywe (b. 1930), and modernist experimentations promulgated by artists like Kin Maung (Bank) (1908–1983, fg. 20.10), Aung Khin (1921–1996) and Khin One (1947–2000). Consequently, if there is no known sustained exchange between him and any of his peers as equals, it is not merely be-

cause they were terrifed of his nerve-wrecking shenanigans when inebriated (which included declaiming their names as enemies of the military government). His unabated dialogues with the aspirations of Śāntiniketan, followed by an amalgam of schools of Buddhist thought, anointed and isolated him. When he did engage with the local art community, such as through Peacock Gallery between 1982 and 1985 upon the request of his friend and student Sonny Nyein (b. 1949), it was in the capacity of a supportive and nurturing elder, not merely an artist amongst others. Returning to our earlier question of the medium, nature and import of Aung Soe’s peculiar legacy eluding visual detection, this paper proposes that above and beyond his incarnation of the modern myth of the artist, his solidarity with the literary world, his compassion for his countrymen, his charismatic (screen) presence and of course, his artistic excellence, it was his being absolute freedom that makes the force of his legacy. In point of fact, “freedom” is what Burmese artists and amateurs of art ascribe to him and art in general, as simplistic as the correlation may be! To Aung Soe, who had to clean the latrines of a monastery for an indeterminate period in order to convince U Hla Bau of his sincerity to study art, “art” was unlikely to have meant mere “freedom” in terms of the licence to do as one pleases.28 Neither could it have

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represented a naïve refuge from the pressures of daily life and society. The price of freedom in a conceivably repressed society under authoritarian rule could not have been insignifcant, and for an independent-thinking artist battling (self-)censorship to choose to be it nonetheless, even if it meant being taken for a lunatic, accused of destroying art, deprived of housing benefts or incarcerated, is nothing less than a demonstration of extraordinary fortitude in the spirit of Albert Camus, whose 1975 Burmese edition of The Stranger Aung Soe illustrated. Aung Soe’s tenacious pursuit of a modern and Burmese pictorial idiom according to Tagore’s vision of true modernism as “freedom of mind” and “independence of thought and action,” with its back turned against the imperialist culture of subservience and conformity, is in itself an expression of absolute autonomy and freedom—albeit a choiceless one, following the awakening to the truth of the mirage of Western modernity. Indeed, his insistence on pushing the boundaries of the norm and challenging conventions in a climate of oppression can be understood as the fulflment of one’s duty towards society, as per the ffth consideration in the pentatonic pedagogical programme formulated by Tagore’s right-hand man at Śāntiniketan, Nandalal Bose (1882–1966).29 While Yangon had no shortage of dissident and individualist artists—outspoken Paw Thame and ludic Kin Maung Yin who was similarly disinterested in the art market, for example—none went as far as Aung Soe in the pursuit of absolute autonomy at all levels, sacrifcing fnancial security, family ties, good name, health and more. All things considered, it is this unparalleled embodiment of freedom that explains why Burmese artists today, including performance, installation and new media artists, exalt his memory, regardless of the absence of any explicit citation of his art in theirs. It is why they relish recounting anecdotes of his life in conversations as well as in writing, for they are lessons on artistic and human integrity from

which they draw strength. The chief impetus of Aung Soe’s exceptionality, in tandem with the medium and nature of his legacy, is thus none other than his resolve to think, speak, draw, paint and dress freely in the face of tyranny both specifc and general, manifesting in multiple sites. The inheritance of this artistic legacy is located in a transmuted artistic consciousness expressing itself through the rejection of the status quo; it does not necessarily take tangible form. Like manaw maheikdi dat painting whose ingenuity lies not only in the fnal product labelled as “art,” but in its process of spiritual transformation by means of time-honoured techniques of mental cultivation, Aung Soe’s legacy is mind-borne. It is not contingent upon form and it leaves no material traces. Veritably, it is the contextual exigency of the notion of freedom in conjunction with his art’s emancipation from a strictly formal expression that has signalised his memory and legacy, however ambiguous and uncertain. It is by virtue of the fact that the inspiration that he continues to be cannot be censored as conveniently as an artist, a work of art or an exhibition that the authorities’ condemnation of him as a failure unworthy of emulation has been unavailing.30 Beyond Myanmar, what might be the fate of Aung Soe’s art and legacy in the “international” art world that has proven itself to be ruthless in blanching contextual vibrancy? That the crux of Aung Soe’s legacy lies in its transcendence of art as an object of display and site of spectacle, to bespeak a resolutely autonomous mode of seeing, thinking about, representing and being in this world, is a point to which modern arbiters of art are unaccustomed. Many are likely to associate it with conceptual art whose tenor is alas alien to the two beacons in Aung Soe’s practice: Śāntiniketan’s vision of art as a pulsating living tradition to be experienced and not merely admired, rationalised or theorised, and Buddhist spiritual practice whose path and goal are beyond form and the conceptual. Modern Western art’s as-

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31

Bagyi Aung Soe, written communication with Sonny Nyein, c. 1987. Collection of Sonny Nyein.

sumption of the conceptual as the sole site of non-form is inapposite in the frst place, and without the awareness that Aung Soe did not necessarily subscribe to the prevalent construct of “art” which is no more than the invention of an almost exclusively modern European historical experience, it is unlikely that the legacy of this reluctant “Burmese Picasso” can be discerned.31 As artful as it might be to conclude that the verdict of the Global North’s art professionals and institutions on Aung Soe’s exceptional mode of legacy in no way alters the essentia of his presence in the consciousness of those making up the (hi)story of Burmese art, the reality is less upbeat; for it does dictate his position in the “international” (hi)story of art about which he founders today. To pause this investigation into Aung Soe’s legacy in conjunction with his exceptionality, this paper proposes a few questions: what are the chances of Aung Soe’s art surviving into a future that might be fnally capable of seeing through and not merely looking through the premises, ambitions and strategies of Western visual culture? What are the chances of art history evolving to such an extent as to be emancipated from hegemonic discourses and gain profciency in engaging with the sui generis nature of each artistic expression on its own terms? What are the chances of the art historian preserving or acquiring the curiosity, artlessness and shrewdness of a child’s gaze, while being armed to the teeth with intellectual rigour and possessing the linguistic arsenal of a wordsmith? Can we ever be disenthralled 290

32

See Guy Debord, La société du spectacle [The society of the spectacle] (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1992).

from the idolatry of systematised theories and grand narratives, so as to restore the authority of common sense and the common experience? Ironically, it is in fulflling modern art’s fetish of originality that Aung Soe has been let down: His art is so “original” that modern conceptual tools and language fail to do justice to its distinction. The silence emanating from his works—rare, extremely rare in our société du spectacle of extravagant reproduction and inordinate intellectualisation—is barely audible.32

Refections on the exceptionality of Bagyi Aung Soe are indebted to the promptings made by research co-supervisor T.K. Sabapathy at the viva voce of Figurer, voir et lire l’insaisissable: la peinture manaw maheikdi dat de Bagyi Aung Soe (1923/24–1990) [The making, reading and seeing of the formless: The manaw maheikdi dat painting of Bagyi Aung Soe (1923/24– 1990)] held at the École normale supérieure, Paris on 10 December 2013. This paper owes much—as ever—to the generosity of Aung Soe’s friends and family, especially U Sonny Nyein, Ma Thanegi, Bagyi Lynn Wunna and Maung Maung Soe. Special words of gratitude go to Lilian Handlin, as well as Kriz Channyein and Lin Lei Lei Tun whose untiring assistance with the appreciation of the Burmese language, culture and much more has been invaluable. It has also benefted signifcantly from the reviews provided by Patrick D. Flores and Low Sze Wee, and proofreading and copyediting by Genevieve Ng.

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Bagyi Aung Soe [Title unknown] (I DRAW FOR YOU SOLAR ENERGY NO. 9) 1989 Felt-tip pen on paper 27 x 18 cm Collection of National Gallery Singapore © Maung Maung Soe, Bagyieain Foundation, Yangon, Myanmar 20.7



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U Ba Nyan Jetty at Sinde c. 1925–1927 Oil on canvas 36 x 46 cm Collection of National Gallery Singapore

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Yvon Chalm, Catalogue raisonné, 2013, unpublished, 68–9. Thanks also to James Mizerski for the background on the reproduction history of these two pieces. Notes in the voice of Vann Nath recorded in the Catalogue raisonné attribute the pencil sketch to 2006, presumably in the context of preparing the 2007 digital print exhibition and sale. This chronol-

2 3

ogy is not, however, confrmed in the materials associated with the 2007 and subsequent print exhibitions which posit the pencil drawings as preparatory sketches for paintings. Vann Nath, quoted in ibid., 69. Pamela Corey, “The ‘First’ Cambodian Contemporary Artist,” Udaya, Journal of Khmer Studies 12 (2015): 87.

( 21)

Emergenc(i)es: History and the Auto-Ethnographic Impulse in Contemporary Cambodian Art Ashley Thompson

Vann Nath painted Seeing Myself in a Piece of Mirror in 1996, nearly two decades after the moment it depicts. A pencil sketch of the same scene also exists. Both were digitally reproduced in a limited edition of prints as part of a fundraising effort by a group of Vann Nath’s friends to alleviate the artist’s medical costs (fgs. 21.1 and 21.2).1 It is a scene of self-recognition in the split second of misrecognition, a distant echo, if not a refection, and certainly not a citation of what Lacan called the Mirror Stage, the frst step in the constitution of the human subject as fundamentally and constitutionally alienated. “Is that me? Is this me?” Vann Nath asks himself at once innocently and knowingly, in 1978, and again, if otherwise, decades on as he paints and draws the scene. Time is out of joint, as memory is retrieved, from the very frst iteration of the scene when he frst re-sees himself in the mirror. In 1978 Vann Nath was held in S21, or Tuol Sleng, the infamous Khmer Rouge tor292

ture and execution processing centre in Phnom Penh. One February day in that year, he was brought from the prisoners’ cell to, in his own words, “complete a short questionnaire before being allowed to clean myself of flth and animal-like bodily odors.”2 Washing oneself is always something of a renewal, perhaps a constitution of human subjectivity through the removal of a perceived mark of animality, a more-or-less ritualised process of portraying oneself with or without an actual mirror prop. And perhaps it is the use of the mirror which makes a distinction between the animal and the human intent on cleaning themselves. At that moment, preparing to apply water to his body, or having just done so, he saw himself as a radically different person—nearly an animal—from the one he had seen in the mirror of the modern artist before the war. Yet in this estranged fgure he saw himself. The multiple reproductions of the scene, where he applies paint or lead to (represent) himself clutching

Charting Thoughts

a fragment of a mirror, themselves constitute a representation and a recognition of himself as fundamentally alienated, in their very multiplicity—the repetition belying a certain anxiety over the success of the depiction—(re)enacting the alienation as a privileged mode of selfidentifcation. This is a refection of the artist’s condition, of course, evidenced by the traces of preparatory sketches and pentimenti. But for Vann Nath, the artist’s condition overlays that of the survivor. Many metaphors of the passage of time characterise accounts of the Khmer Rouge period. Time is said to have stood still; or the clock is said to have been turned backwards, as society reverted to a primitive state. The Khmer Rouge declaration of 1975 as Year Zero is now infamous. Vann Nath, like many others under the regime, kept close count of the agonisingly slow passage of time as it happened. The phrase “three years, eight months and twenty days” has taken on the status of a proper name in Khmer, synonymous with the “Pol Pot period” (17 April 1975–7 January 1979). Vann Nath’s subsequent recounting of his time under the Khmer Rouge often incorporated literal re-counting, on the order of the February day specifed here, along with a continued counting of the passage of time since his liberation. Together, however, the two counts of time progressing perpetually ran up against another equally real compression of time in his lived experience. The mirror image, seen and then seen again in art, participates in this uncanny experience whereby time progresses by way of an unsettling presence of the past. The process of self-other (mis)recognition, as of the dual quality of time upon which that process is premised, is interrupted in the painted image. Pamela Corey has written astutely of the triangulated gaze at work in the mirror painting, with the two guards looking at the prisoner looking at himself.3 While the artist appears on the one hand to be protected from view behind the wooden barrier, the lack of spatial depth in

the broader foreground composition compromises his intimacy: what we see is that he is seen even when apparently hidden. The single open barred window of the white structure looming behind yet pressed fat against the wooden barrier enhances this effect, as if a monstrous Cyclops of a panopticon prison holds the scene in its scopic grasp. The artist’s self-seeing moment is not cut short in this way in the drawing of the same scene. In the drawing, the foreground depth accords with the guards’ gazes turned on themselves to separate the two groups, the man-with-urn-and-mirror on the left, and the men-with-cigarette set slightly back on the right, affording the artist time in all its complexity. With the guards drawn at once in and out of the picture, and no looming Cyclops, the artist is, for a moment at least, the exclusive focus of his own gaze. Whether the drawing was a preparatory sketch for a painting or a piece specifcally produced for sale after the painted fact, the private exchange it renders, whereby the prisoner would have momentarily gained some form of sovereignty, would seem to not have been initially offered up to the gaze of the audience that we are. I take Vann Nath’s Seeing Myself in a Piece of Mirror as emblematic of a seminal source of what I will call an “ethnographic impulse” in contemporary Cambodian art. The “impulse” in question has multiple origins, many of which are shared across the Southeast Asian region if not globally. We might note that Hal Foster’s 1996 “Artist as Ethnographer” was contemporaneous in real terms with Vann Nath’s mirror painting, though of course Vann Nath’s concerns arguably had little to do with those of the artist–ethnographer under Foster’s critical microscope. In this sense, the contemporaneity of the two interventions seems little more than an historical artefact, and yet the two resonate meaningfully in the newly insistent mobilisation of and concern with “ethnographic” questions in more recent Cambodian art. Time, from this perspective, was and is still

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out of joint. On the one hand, what Foster described in 1996 as an “ethnographer-envy” that “consumes artists today” might be said to apply to the Cambodian art scene over the past 20 years.4 In Cambodia, as in many other places, this tendency refects, at least in part, a recognisable and ultimately rather banal identitarian and oftentimes nationalist orientation—even, often, when nationalism is purportedly under fre. However, there is simultaneously a historical Cambodian singularity that overlays and overdetermines this development, as articulated by Vann Nath in 1996: the brutal rupture of the Khmer Rouge period. For more than anything else, in Cambodia today, this artistic slant is auto-ethnographic, and one haunted by a singularly alienating inheritance with regard to sociocultural identity, in which radical estrangement from and within a sociocultural body has triggered a nexus of art and ethnography. In no way do I mean to reduce post1975 Cambodian art to an effect of the Khmer Rouge period; nor do I mean to subsume the vastly diverse aesthetic dimensions of this art under an authoritative political, social and cultural contextualisation. With reference in particular to Jim Supangkat’s caution of drawing the materials into a mainstream discourse, also published in 1996, these risks are duly noted, and mitigated, I hope, by an attentiveness to more than one haunting of history entangling collective and individual lives.5 In what follows I will briefy examine a series of historical ruptures layered at once under and over that of the Khmer Rouge, and participating, for themselves but also as integral to a process of repetition, in what I will now call the Cambodian auto-ethnographic impulse. As time would have it, there is no clear stratigraphy, no simple chronology; events which by one historical count occurred earlier are manifest in apparently later ones, with a kind of after-effect that might best be described in psychoanalytic terms, but which here has an objective historical raison d’être. My choice of 294

the term “impulse” over that of the more obvious “turn”—as in the “linguistic turn”—evokes the latter while emphasising those dimensions of the phenomenon in question which trouble any interpretation singularly bound to a linear chronology of events. “Impulse” gestures to the internalisation of external events, with attendant processes of reorganisation thereof on individual and collective registers; and synchs with the “emergenc(i)es” of our title announcing breakthroughs associated with but not necessarily operating breaks with the past. I will examine these layers of historical rupture through the person of one other man who, as far as I know, did not know Vann Nath personally but whose ethnographic lifework otherwise intersects with the work of the artist and, I will argue, will have been otherwise pivotal in the emergence of contemporary Cambodian art. — In 1994, Cambodian anthropologist Ang Choulean returned to Cambodia to pick up, in a sense, from where he had left off 20 years before. As a student at the Department of Archaeology of the Royal University of Fine Arts (RUFA), Phnom Penh, from 1968 to 1974, he had studied classical Cambodian art and archaeology, Sanskrit and ethnography. The curriculum was based on that of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, but integrated a focus on Cambodian classical art from its inception and included an ethnography component. The founding of the Department of Archaeology in 1965 was part of a national programme, spearheaded by King Norodom Sihanouk and his architect of independence, Vann Molyvann, to establish the institutional infrastructure of a modern state after the country gained independence from France in 1953.6 It was one of a number of departments, institutes and academies comprising the new RUFA, situated in a complex of buildings including the National Museum and what had previously

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4

5

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Hall Foster, “The Artist as Ethnographer?,” in The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996), 305. Jim Supangkat, “Multimodernisms,” in Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions/Tensions (New York: Asia Society, 1996), 80. See also my concerns with the category of post-Khmer Rouge art and mainstream discourse in Ashley Thompson, “Forgetting to Remember, Again: On Curatorial Practice and ‘Cambodian’ Art in the Wake of Genocide,” Diacritics, Review of Contemporary Criticism 41, no. 2 (2013): 82–109. Reyum Institute of Arts and Culture, Cultures of Independence: An Introduction to Cambodian Arts and Culture in the 1950s and 1960s (Phnom Penh: Reyum, 2001). Helen Grant Ross & Darryl Leon Collins, Building Cambodia: ‘New Khmer Architecture’, 1953–1970

been called the École des Arts. The complex is situated adjacent to the Royal Palace, and was designed to harmonise with it. While the Department of Archaeology represented a new addition to academic training in the arts, the Fine Arts components comprised a renovation of the École des Arts founded by the French out of Palace workshops in the early 20th century. The National Museum had also been founded by the French concomitantly with the École des Arts: Regular observation of museum masterpieces and reproduction of traditional decorative motifs anchored the study programme which was distinctly oriented to the production of traditional, not modern art. While new techniques, objects and styles of representation considered to be modern were programmatically introduced in the wake of World War II in the lead-up to independence and further institutionalised with the founding of RUFA, pedagogies of reproduction established in the colonial École des Arts proved tenacious.7

7

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(Bangkok: The Key Publisher Company, Ltd, 2006), 167. Ingrid Muan, “Citing Angkor: The ‘Cambodian Arts’ in the Age of Restoration” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2001); Gabrielle Abbe, “Le développement des arts au Cambodge à l’époque coloniale: George Groslier et l’École des arts Cambodgiens (1917–1945)” [The development of the arts in Cambodia in the colonial period: George Groslier and the Cambodian School of Arts (1917-1945)], Udaya, Journal of Khmer Studies 12 (2014) : 7–40; Pamela Corey, “The Artist in the City: Contemporary Art as Urban Intervention in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and Phnom Penh, Cambodia” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 2015), 20, 119. Ang Choulean, Les êtres surnaturels dans la religion populaire khmère [Supernatural beings in Khmer popular religion] (Paris: Cedoreck, 1986).

In 1974, as a fnal-year student in archaeology, Ang Choulean received a fellowship to undertake graduate work in ethnography in France. In Paris he studied under FrancoVietnamese ethnographer Georges Condominas at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, where he produced an encyclopaedic PhD dissertation on the hosts of supernatural beings who populate the Cambodian cultural landscape.8 He considered responding to the Khmer Rouge 1975 appeal to intellectuals living abroad to return to Cambodia, but decided not to. In Paris he was at the heart of a group of Cambodians studying Old and Middle Khmer language and texts with Cambodian linguist Saveros Pou. In the 1990s, he began to return to Cambodia on research missions supported by the École francaise d’extrême-Orient, during which he renewed professional and personal ties with the Department of Archaeology at RUFA. In 1994 he returned permanently, with his family, and began what has proven an in-

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Both journals are now housed by a cultural institute, Yosothor, founded by Ang Choulean in 2012. See Yosothor—For Khmer Culture, http://yosothor.org (accessed 23 November 2016) which provides a historical presentation of Yosothor as well as the journals it now houses, along with online access to the latter.

10 From Levi-Strauss’ 1963 Structural Anthropology,

tensive and ongoing career at the Department, where he has taught both ethnography and Old Khmer epigraphy. He co-founded and co-edits two journals, Udaya, a trilingual (Khmer–English–French) interdisciplinary academic journal of Cambodian culture, and KhmeRenaissance, a Khmer-language journal with a similar interdisciplinary cultural remit, but privileging short, abundantly illustrated articles, accessible also to a non-academic audience.9 From the turn of the millennium, Ang Choulean worked periodically with Reyum Institute of Culture in Phnom Penh and, to a lesser degree, Phare Ponleu Selpak in Battambang, the two main poles of contemporary art production at that time. The formation and development of the ethnographic research components underpinning the contemporary art programme of Reyum were thoroughly indebted to Ang’s work both through direct counsel and through his RUFA students employed by Reyum. In addition to participating in a series of activities at Phare, he sat briefy on the institution’s Executive Board. In the conclusion of this essay, I will attempt to demonstrate ways in which Ang Choulean’s pedagogical work and published oeuvre, along with his role taken more broadly as mentor or model, have had many informal incarnations and repercussions in the contemporary Cambodian art world within and be-

yond these two formal institutional contexts. In fact, I believe that Ang Choulean’s unique position in Cambodia, not just the exceptional depth and breadth of his knowledge or the fact that so few intellectuals of his generation survived the Khmer Rouge period, but his particular constellation of knowledge, abilities and interests, his virtually secret wilder poetic side, his commitment to a discreet form of critical refection and his dogged dedication to work at RUFA for more than two decades now has had as much of an impact on the evolution of contemporary art practice as it has had on the development of the ethnographic feld itself in Cambodia. I would also argue that the condition of possibility of Ang Choulean’s work has to some degree been the resonance it has had in diverse communities, some close to, but some quite far from RUFA. In fact, something that interests me here is the way that what I have just called a “resonance” appears to move sometimes in one direction, sometimes in the other, and often seems to function at a distance, with no clear or obvious chain of cause and effect. One crucial shared concern involves a stubborn determination to think the past and the present together, despite the impressive institutional, intellectual and cultural resistances this determination encounters at every turn. I am referring most pointedly to the resistance that quickly became an unspoken colonial trope,

quoted in John & Jean Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), 7. 11 Ibid.

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confrmed even in the few notable and laudable exceptions, regarding the absolute disjunction between the “ancient period” and the “modern period.” Had there not been a collective sense of urgency for tying the present to the past, in subtle or overt, unconscious or conscious defance of the historically repeated violent (declarations of ) disjunctions between the two, Ang Choulean’s work would not itself have evolved as it has. Had he not persevered, the sense of urgency in this regard would not, I believe, have found the expression in contemporary art practice we know today. Before, however, taking a look at artworks which bear the traces of this particular history, I will probe the historical moments of (mis)recognition in self-othering incorporated into Ang Choulean’s professional trajectory as I have described it here. Education The study of art in Cambodia has long served as handmaiden to the heroic progress of the historical and archaeological sciences, with over a century of meticulous attention to style and iconography enabling the establishment of a remarkable evenemential history of the rise and fall of the Angkorian empire. Rooted in this nexus of art and history, Khmerological scholarship long found a justifcation for its notable disengagement (save exceptions) from the “contemporary” in its enabling or constituting objects. The postcolonial period ushered in the possibility of new perspectives on, and respect for, the contemporary, whereby the classical traditions would fnd continuity rather than rupture between the people and practices of Cambodia past and present, demonstrating the political underpinnings of the narrative of rupture by which European scholars appeared as saviours and protectors of a noble culture— now their own. Ang Choulean’s two pedagogical paths, ethnography and Old Khmer, may appear incongruous, but they are not. The drive behind

both is a commitment to identifying and teaching—and perhaps thereby conserving—historical continuity between ancient and contemporary Cambodia. In a frst instance, Ang’s trajectory can be interpreted as evidencing the structural relation between the disciplines of history and ethnography explored by the Comaroffs via Levi-Strauss. “Both history and ethnography are concerned with societies other than the one in which we live. Whether this otherness is due to remoteness in time … or to remoteness in space, or even to cultural heterogeneity, is of secondary importance compared to the basic similarity of perspective.”10 But the postcolonial post-Khmer Rouge trajectory veers from the Levi-Straussian path in the bodies of those practitioners for whom the difference with regard to the object of study—be it the temporally distant Other of history or the spatially/ culturally distant Other of ethnography—is emphatically subjugated to its opposite: sameness and proximity. For Levi-Strauss,“in both cases [history and ethnography] we are dealing with systems of representations which […], on the whole, differ from the representations of the investigator.”11 For Ang Choulean it is the latent sameness underlying the difference exaggerated if not veritably constructed and certainly reifed through politico-academic violence which must now be uncovered and preserved. Ang’s politico-academic drive differs signifcantly from the universalist dimension of that informing structural anthropology in its infancy, for here we see a distinct affrmation of difference traced between the whole of the colonised politico-cultural entity called Cambodia and that of the Euro-American Other in particular, an essential difference premised on a primary discourse of sameness between the investigator and the temporal and spatially distant Others located within the newly circumscribed domain of study. This was the imperative variously driving the Cambodian study group of which Ang was a part in Paris, an imperative formed in

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response to the colonial excision of the contemporary from the scope of scholarly inquiry. The narrative characterising colonial expansion globally took particular form in Cambodia and over time, but never lost its core: When not veritably seen as a different race from those who built Angkor, contemporary Cambodians were projected as a degenerate race vis-à-vis their ancestors; they held poor, if any, knowledge of the ancient past, which could only be properly accessed through European science. Ethnography as a discipline arrived relatively late on the European academic stage, and has always been a poor cousin to archaeology and monumental art history. In the Cambodian case, the European mission to recover the ancient past did not spur the establishment of a school of archaeology or art history for Cambodians. Instead, it led to the founding of a School of Arts where those deemed capable of best scrutinising and appreciating the fnest work of Angkor could train Cambodians to reinvigorate local craft production on its models.12 The Protectorate’s investment in “contemporary arts” was subjugated to that in classical art and archaeology insofar as support for contemporary production was strictly channelled to ensuring reproduction. The roots of what I see as a privileged relation between ethnographic and artistic practice in Cambodia today can also be located here, in the assimilated (mal)formation of the two disciplines. Within the Protectorate’s formal educational system, the two were effectively reduced to a spare one, as the study of traditional form was thoroughly instrumentalised to underpin reproduction thereof. The reinvigoration of “tradition” inevitably contributed to a reifcation thereof. The forward march of the disciplines of art history and archaeology, not taught to Cambodians in Cambodia, hinged upon this marginalisation of academic work attentive to contemporary creativity. The contemporary relation between the artistic and ethnographic practice is a legacy of this colonial context, as 298

well as of its fraught negation in postcolonial times. After independence, as national arts education emerged as a privileged site of nation building, ethnography and art practice were taught as modern disciplines and disciplines of the modern, alongside those disciplines of the past: art history and archaeology. The contradictions typical of postcolonial societies, well documented now in academia, were evidenced in many ways in the Cambodian context. RUFA, for example, adopted a curriculum aimed at promoting (knowledge of ) national culture based on European models, and largely taught by foreigners. The self-other mirroring of ethnographic practice found itself creatively reproduced in the French teaching of the discipline to Cambodians, who were effectively called to other themselves in order to play the role of the self, and so to see the other in Cambodians sited outside the closed yet necessarily, structurally open because now ethnographically inclusive academic circuit. So too did the selfconscious introduction of (European) modern art to Cambodian art students engender a transpersonal metamorphosis on the part of the artists as they were brought to adopt new media, technique and subject matter. Reproduction of Khmer “tradition” was still high on the artistic agenda, but the Cambodians were no longer made to strictly and exclusively reembody their artistic predecessors; instead, at a great distance from them, they were enabled to depict “tradition” in the form of painted landscapes, agricultural labourers and Cambodian beauties holding cooking pots. In such, they adopted new selves in identifying with those they simultaneously posited as Other. Selfidentifcation emerged through a new process of alienation. The tensions between the reactionary and the progressive characterising colonial investment in contemporary Cambodian art production were displaced but not resolved. The post-independence mission of which RUFA was an integral part in the decade between 1965 and 1975 took on new meaning af-

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12

For consideration of the development of the broader feld of Southeast Asian art history out of this foundational rupture between the classical and the modern/contemporary, see Nora A. Taylor, introduction to Studies in Southeast Asian Art: Essays in Honor of Stanley J. O’Connor, ed. Nora A. Taylor (Ithaca, New York: Southeast Asia Program Publications, Cornell University, 2000), 9–14; and Nora A. Taylor, “The Southeast Asian Art Historian as Ethnographer?,”

ter the war. In 1980 art practice components of RUFA reopened as a secondary School of Arts, including training in fne arts, drama, dance, music and circus performance. In 1988 the School was expanded to include archaeology and architecture, and administratively transformed into a university. The demonstration of continuity with the past at this historical juncture, so widely perceived as having been broken by the genocide and so fraughtfully embedded in RUFA’s post-independence foundations, was doubly important. The reopening of RUFA was itself emblematic of continuity. The pre-war curricula was theoretically reinstated in the Department of Archaeology though many factors (limited teaching resource, the precarious educational and socio-economic situation of staff and students, the political context, a sense of need for modernisation … ) militated against full implementation. From the early 1990s, the Department of Archaeology benefted from a UNESCO-sponsored pedagogical programme incorporating a range of international teachers and bolstering the national teaching staff. Over the years, RUFA has hosted numerous international artists and teachers, some independent, others backed by institutional contributions to the Department. Under Ang Choulean’s direction, ethnography, taught in Khmer, became a

Third Text 25, no. 4 (2011): 480.

13 For a cogent discussion of the evolution of fne

14

artists’ training at RUFA and through associated scholarship programmes in the Soviet-Eastern bloc throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, in contrast with a decline in dynamism after this period, see Corey op. cit., 128–40. Ibid., 156–7.

strong dimension of the archaeology curriculum. Set within the larger RUFA context, and inheriting from the history described above, ethnography at RUFA has been oriented frst and foremost towards indigenous aesthetics. This ethnographic exploration of the aesthetic might be said to privilege the visual, but is not limited to it. A keen attentiveness to the aesthetics of language also characterises the work in a signifcant way, and is key to the ongoing “Khmerisation” of the discipline. This is one crucial intersection between Ang’s dual focus on Old Khmer epigraphy and ethnography. As an object of study, old and new, Khmer language use informs ongoing refnement of the language as a pedagogical tool. A relative lack of focused, sustained and productive nurturing of contemporary art practice within RUFA’s Department of Fine Arts, particularly since the mid-1990s and the nominal transition to democracy, contrasts with the story just told of ethnography within the Department of Archaeology. As Corey has noted, many aspiring or established Cambodian artists turn away, disillusioned, from RUFA’s Fine Arts Department today.13 For Cambodian inspirational models they look instead to the “self-trained modern artist,” embodied in an exemplary manner by Vann Nath.14 They look

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15 Grégory Mikaelian, “L’aristocratie khmère à l’école des humanités françaises,” [The Khmer aristocracy and the French humanities] Bulletin de l’Association Française des études Khmères 19 (2014), http:// aefek.free.fr/pageLibre00010c37.html (accessed 23

also, if often indirectly, to the ethnographer, who looks himself to other types of self-made men and women, those contemporary artisans who devote themselves to nurturing the aesthetics of everyday life. Class Other roots of the auto-ethnographic arts can be located in a recently reconfgured middle class consciousness. There is, frst, a residue of the failed Khmer Rouge championing of a perceived oppressed and authentic Khmer people far from bourgeois urban worlds. Many harbour regrets in this regard. But the regrets for a catastrophically failed defence of the rural poor are at the same time intensely contemporary, and for this, shared by Ang Choulean with pockets of young RUFA students and graduates, as well as many contemporary artists in Cambodia. Though in many different ways, they each bear witness to and experience the contemporary disappearance of deeply rooted cultural forms of all sorts in the current sociopolitical context, where the countryside is emptied of both its forests and its youth seeking employment in the factories of the capital or the migrant market of Cambodia’s neighbouring nation-states while a small elite accumulates an ever-greater portion 300

November 2016). See also Pierre L. Lamant, L’Affaire Yukanthor, autopsie d’un scandale colonial [The Yukanthor affair, autopsy of a colonial scandal] (Paris: Société française d’histoire d’outre-mer, 1989).

of the national wealth. If only the time of an interview, a performance or an exhibition, the artist and the ethnographer identify themselves in more ways than one with the disappearing rural fgure or dispossessed urban migrant in counter-distinction to the urban elite made highly visible through the pageantry of money and politics. In this, ethnographic and artistic practice share an activist dimension. Generations At the same time and in some ways quite paradoxically, the radical rupture accomplished by the Khmer Rouge, reiterated in ways I have just suggested in the ongoing post-Khmer Rouge period, has triggered a nostalgic relation to prewar Cambodia. Any identifcation of the causes of the rise of the Khmer Rouge in the consolidation of modern forms of social inequality again, if otherwise, manifest in the contemporary condition does not necessarily go hand in hand with a rejection of the forms that modernity took. Contemporary artistic research also arises from a burning desire embodied by many born during or after the 1970s to know the prewar past. The ethnographer, who in his own person and body of work bridges the temporal and societal gap, is a precious source of inspira-

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tion as much as information. As a transmitter of the past whose lifework has been devoted to seeing the self in the other, he carries a promise of the relocation if not also the reinvention of a lost modern Cambodia. Diaspora Much Cambodian contemporary art is made in or out of a diasporic space opened up literally and in some ways metaphorically by the Khmer Rouge period, but again not limited to this singular historical source in experiential terms. Cambodia’s diasporic populations, like many others, can fnd themselves at home nowhere, at once belonging and not belonging here or there. They can also fnd themselves at home everywhere. The separation from “home” perpetuated even when ostensibly home, and often intensifed in the experience of return, resonates with the artistic and ethnographic iterations of the Mirror Stage discussed in opening: one sees another and oneself at the same time. Ang Choulean can be said to inhabit this impossible place by wielding the one, ethnographic investment, against the other, diasporic alienation. In this, he takes ambivalent inspiration from certain of his predecessors reanimated of late in research undertaken by one of his successors. I refer to Grégory Mikaelian’s work on Aruna Yukanthor, the famous late 19th-century named heir to King Norodom’s throne who, in publicly challenging, on French soil, the ways in which the Protectorate violated French Republican principles, was disowned by his father back home; Yukanthor’s son, Areno Vachiravong Yukanthor, an accomplished artist, poet and Orientalist who pursued, also on French soil, the challenges brought by his father, exiled in Singapore and then Bangkok, to the Protectorate, only to end himself in a cloud of rumours of reclusive madness in his mother’s Phnom Penh residence; and Au Chhieng, a brilliant Cambodian scholar whose 1941 doctoral dissertation

in Law at the University of Paris comprising a critical analysis of the legal foundations of the Protectorate was completed and printed in multiple copies before being rejected, seized and destroyed on the orders of the French police, and whose subsequent critiques of the colonial relationship were articulated in a rather more oblique manner via the study of Cambodian Sanskrit epigraphy in Paris, where he lived out his life.15 The fgure of Ang Choulean, in turn, serves as a model or a sounding board of sorts for the globetrotting contemporary artist whose condition with regards to home is not unlike that of the diasporic fgure, and who, in the Cambodian case, often comes, at some point in his or her life, from abroad. — There are numerous recent artworks which evoke the ethnographic in more or less literal terms. Than Sok’s 2009 Negligence Leads to Loss; Attention Preserves (fg. 21.3), a video piece staging the burning of what appears to be a traditional spirit house but made of incense sticks rather than wood, set inside an installation featuring a sturdy gold-painted concrete spirit house of the kind favoured by most who can afford them today, is a prime example of this genre. The work is now held by the Singapore Art Museum and was included in a group exhibition curated by Phnom Penh resident Erin Gleeson titled Phnom Penh: Rescue Archaeology: Contemporary Art and Urban Change in Cambodia. Amy Lee Sanford’s Full Circle (Day 3) (fg. 21.4), co-produced by the artist and Dana Langlois of Phnom Penh’s JavaArts, is a performance piece which makes use of a traditional clay cooking pot to explore cultural and personal integrity or, more precisely, the loss and reconstitution thereof in a highly ritualised process of breaking and meticulously repairing pots—a process itself citing at once Buddhist meditation and archaeological practices. On the cover of the French catalogue of Kh-

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vay Samnang’s performance/video installation, Rubber Man, also curated by Gleeson, we see a passage from an article by Ang Choulean on the material forms given relations between soil and ancestors in traditional Cambodian culture.16 The text runs off the cover, front and back, and, in conjunction with photographic stills of the performance, participates in the artwork rather than explicating it. Pich Sopheap’s redeployment of an artisanal practice of rattan weaving to make representational forms rather than utilitarian objects is well known internationally. The gesture of pouring a liquid substance over one’s own head, seen in diverse work by Khvay Samnang (Rubber Man, for example) and Tith Kannitha’s Heavy Sand, evokes the traditional ritual gesture of consecration (fgs. 21.5 and 21.6). In its most formal mode, the consecration of a king or a Buddha statue, the ritual is called “abhisheka,” but it can take a range of more banal forms. The twist these two artists give to the gesture is in the turn to the self, where the symbolically pure ritual substance which has been materially or contextually denatured is poured by the artist over his or her own head, effectively reinventing a consecration inseparable from desecration. But the relation I am attempting to demonstrate here, between art and auto-ethnography in the contemporary Cambodian context, is not wholly dependent upon evidence of direct morphological, gestural or material citation. Nor is it dependent upon the infuence suggested by any individual artist’s actual contact with the person or work of an ethnographer. It is situated rather in shared processes of self-(mis)recognition. Much of the work I have just cited has, as an ostensible goal, an estranging of the self. Khvay Samnang’s Rubber Man is the eerie naked and white rubbercovered anthropomorphic manifestation of an ever-disappearing territorial spirit. Like Samnang, Tith Kannitha strips down to then cover herself with a liquid of the earth—wa302

ter and sand. The distorted consecration ritual renders the artists strange creatures rather than societally integrated ones, unrecognisable but in the space of performance. This staged denaturing of the social body is a (re)naturalisation thereof, a means by which the artist asserts, if only momentarily, self-controlled embodiment, extending a fragile dominion over social space. With reference to anthropologist James Siegel’s “supplementary notion of recognition by which I discover something in myself always there and that makes me what I have become,” it is a means of groping his or her way to a modern identity through the purposeful embodiment of a “natural foreignness.”17 Some work explicitly turns the mirror onto others. Anida Yoeu Ali’s Buddhist Bug Project and Svay Sareth’s series of durational performance pieces culminating at one stage in Mon Boulet are exemplary in this regard (fgs. 21.7 and 21.8). Staging themselves in extravagant crossings of public space, the artists trigger (mis) recognition. The picture of a fantastic saffronrobed female-faced veiled creature travelling in and out of others’ everyday lives is strikingly reminiscent of that of Svay Sareth, like a beast of burden, dragging a gigantic metal ball along decrepit Highway 6, through village after village from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh and then through the blaring traffc of the capital. Both artists act themselves—as if nothing were out of place. Yet these selves are animal-like, sharing with Vann Nath, then, the discovery of misrecognition at the heart of self-recognition, and demonstrably offering the effect of the mirror to their audiences. They do not seek to preserve this or that. Nor do they analyse the other. Instead, their art comprises felds of (mis)recognition. Their chance viewers have double takes—momentary interrogations of just who, where and what they are—before also continuing along their ways. Ali periodically scrutinises those scrutinising her (fg. 21.9). But she does this with a steady leaning forward and a studied stern blank gaze which returns to the

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16 Khvay Samnang, Rubber Man (Dijon: les presses du réel, 2015). The trilingual (French-Khmer-English) catalogue was produced for exhibitions at the Jeu de Paume

viewer more than it takes from it, like the gaze she projects into space with no direct address. Her staged stills jolt the viewer into seeing the unrecognisable in the apparently familiar street or bucolic scene, to ponder the appearance of harmony enabled by the Bug’s disruption of social space (fg. 21.10). — We appear to be witnessing a turning of the tables whereby ethnography in Cambodia, while still informing art practice, also now emerges as beholden to it. This is the case, I believe, in

17

and the CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux. James Siegel, Fetish, Recognition, Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 159.

terms of public recognition of ethnographic practice. The making of art in Cambodia today makes ethnography relevant, not just as it appeals to or uses ethnography, but as it triggers and probes (mis)recognition, exploring, we might say, the wilder side of ethnographic practice. For its acts of disruption, where resonance and dissonance meet, contemporary art practice harbours a theoretical promise for ethnography in Cambodia today to skirt the risk of falling prey to reductive reappropriating narratives of continuity on the one hand or progress on the other. Like time, it tells us we are out of joint. And for this, I am grateful.

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21.1 Vann Nath Seeing Myself in a Piece of Mirror 1996 Acrylic on canvas Collection of Katie de Tilly Image by James Mizerski © Family of Vann Nath 21.2

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Amy Lee Sanford Full Circle (Day 3) Durational performance, 2012 Image courtesy of the artist

21.5 Khvay Samnang Rubber Man 2014 Performance Image courtesy of the artist and Sa Sa Bassac

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The exhibition was made in celebration of the 40 th anniversary of the CCP. Patrick D. Flores, “The Philippine Modern: Conceiving a Collective Category,” in Suddenly Turning Visible: The Collection at the Center (Manila: Cultural Center

of the Philippines, 2009), 7–8. The essay is also reproduced in the Philippine online journal Ctrl+P 15 (2009). This online version, however, omits the portrait and archival photos of the protagonists in the catalogue essay.

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Rhetorical Postures and the Photographic Condition: A Minor Malaysian Detour Adele Tan

In his 2009 essay for the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) exhibition catalogue Suddenly Turning Visible: The Collection at the Center, art historian and curator Patrick D. Flores begins his narrative with the pivotal role played by artist and curator Raymundo Albano (1947–1985) in the productive artistic and collection developments of the CCP.1 Albano was the director of museums and non-theatre operations there from 1971 to 1985. My purpose here, however, is not to examine Albano’s achievements; rather, it is to cast a small light on a neglected aspect of discourse and semiotic construction—that of the deployment of the “artist-as-photograph” (and in most cases it is also “artist-in-photograph”)— enlisted into various discursive forms but which often goes unremarked or is complicit with the institutional strictures that try to repress it (as was said of the CCP). In the margins of Flores’ essay as laid out in the catalogue Suddenly Turning Visible, is a half-body portrait shot of the bespectacled 304

Albano (fg. 22.1), his slight fgure lying on the foor with his right arm outstretched towards the photographer and his left hand gripping a small Minolta SLR camera that is balanced below his chin and resting on his chest. In a majority of instances, the artist is presented as a headshot, or more often is the case, seen posing with his or her artworks, thereby cementing the intimacy between the artist’s personage with his or her art. Seldom do we ask why some things look the way they do; why do we preface articles on artworks with images of the artist? Is what or how the artist looks like important? My attention is drawn immediately to this selection and placement of a photographic illustration in the catalogue, and to the subtle refexivity or the “strategically ludic mode” (words used by Flores to describe Albano’s own curatorial disposition) demonstrated on the page with regard to the relationship between the image and the text that lies next to it and follows on from it:

Charting Thoughts

The CCP thought of the period from 1971 to 1975 as the “exposure phase” in which “advanced art—experimental in nature—were deployed in the galleries. The use of sand, junk iron, non-art materials such as raw lumber, rocks … were common materials for the artists’ development strategies. People were shocked, scared, delighted, pleased and satisfed even though their preconceived notions of art did not agree with what they encountered.” This “curatorial stance” was provocative: it may have insinuated a level of democratic habit within a possible Kantian sensus communis, an engagement with strangeness and an encounter with disbelief, into an institution that was complicit in repressing the body politic in no uncertain terms. In all this, Albano was convinced that the atmosphere at the CCP “made one relatively aware of an environment suddenly turning visible.” The Center, hence, was conceiving a world and its spellbound subjects, inventing an indispensable mythology of freedom and prefguring the unknown in a regime that had claimed unerring destiny: tadhana, a fate written in the stars.2 (emphasis mine) In this passage by the author, who took pains to vividly evoke the intellectual gambit of Albano, Flores also unexpectedly raised two phrases to the reader’s consciousness, “exposure phase” and “suddenly turning visible.” These are phrases related to the practice of photography and darkroom techniques, both of which worked with and mirrored Albano’s portrait image so as to surface and confrm the message—the importance of exposing or the exposition, the visual and the visible, all concerted tenets and objectives of the CCP in the 1970s. Flores was to again use this image of Albano in his essay “Turns in Tropics: Artist-Curator” (2012) and in his presentation for the 2016 symposium How Institutions Think at the Cent-

er for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. And as an artist deeply committed to play and experimentation with the medium of photography, it is striking that Albano himself chose to be photographed with his camera, and on another occasion with a camera tripod (without the camera). In comparison, Roberto Chabet, the founding museum curator-director at the CCP, was represented in Flores’ catalogue essay with a nondescript headshot, although a more wellknown image composition of Chabet would show him in a classroom setting, the preferred mode of reference, as Chabet was a longserving professor of art studies at the University of the Philippines. And, indeed, it is about exposing and turning visible some of the conditions and conventions that structure the visual presentation and construction of the artist. In ways these photographs function as if they were the literal noncoded message, or denoted image, whereby the signifer and signifed are the same; what you see is what you see. Yet, we should call the bluff of these merely “denotative” images, because as the French semiotician and philosopher Roland Barthes reminds us, the absence of a code only reinforces the myth of photographic “naturalness” (although Barthes rejects the possibility of the purely denoted image) and it only naturalises, supports and contextualises the symbolic, connoted messages held within the overall image structure by making them look innocent. The hyperdistribution of images in the Information Age also means that the appraisal of imaging becomes more challenging as more images circulate but are going away unremarked, and the balance of power between maker, user and receiver is shifting constantly. As Barthes writes, with regard to the advertising photograph as denoted image: The denoted image naturalizes the symbolic message, it innocents the semantic artifce of connotation, which is extremely dense, especially in advertising. Although

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3

4

Roland Barthes, “The Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image—Music—Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 45–6. The genesis of this paper and my desire for looking at photographs of artists is indebted to Craig Owens’ two essays “Posing” and “The Medusa Effect or, The Specular Ruse,” in his notable (posthumous) volume, Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power and Culture, eds. Scott Bryson et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 191–217. Particularly important is Owens’ consideration of Victor Burgin’s photographic suite Gradiva (1982) on page 208: “Composed of seven photographs with accompanying narrative captions (photo-graphie), Gradiva is not simply a series of straightforward illustrations for Jensen’s text; nor is it as is sometimes said dismissively of Burgin’s work, merely an ‘illustration’ of (psychoanalytic) theory. For what is illustrated here is the process of—the desire for—illustration itself. To illustrate a text is in a sense to punctuate it, to arrest its development by the inser-

the Panzani poster is full of “symbols,” there nonetheless remains in the photograph, insofar as the literal message is suffcient, a kind of natural being-there of objects: nature seems spontaneously to produce the scene represented. A pseudo truth is surreptitiously substituted for the simple validity of openly semantic systems; the absence of code disintellectualizes the message because it seems to be found in nature the signs of culture. This is without doubt an important historical paradox: the more technology develops the diffusion of information (and notably of images), the more it provides the means of masking the constructed meaning under the appearance of the given meaning.3 (emphasis mine) In this small excursus of the Philippines, I want to put forward that images of artists, used in their myriad ways, are not merely decorative, illustrative, secondary material.4 They all come 306

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tion of a gaze in the form of a fgure of illustration—a gaze which brings the textual machine to a standstill.” In an attempt to push the boundaries of photography, and to distinguish his practice from journalistic or documentary photography, Filipino conceptual artist Johnny Manahan made the work Self-Portrait with Lens Cap On (1972), which had, however, proceeded to deny the viewer the visual index of the referent and instead presented an endgame scenario. The work comprised an entire flm roll of 36 photographic prints of blackness (or blankness) which Manahan later developed after he had taken self-portraits by aiming the camera at himself with the lens cap on. See Clarissa Chikiamco, “Making ‘Marks’ and Leaving ‘Evidences’: The Art of Johnny Manahan 1971–82,” in A Fact Has No Appearance: Art Beyond the Object, exh. cat., eds. Clarissa Chikiamco, Russell Storer & Adele Tan (Singapore: National Gallery Singapore, 2016), 19–20. Puah’s reference to photography can be situated

together to concoct the visual feld in which we receive the artists and their work. Analyses at present must therefore be diverse, fuid and inventive, taking into account the varying contexts and usages, and critical orthodoxies frequently renewed and reappraised.5 If the camera was the abiding device in the photographic images taken of Albano, the camera also comes front and centre in the surreally funny but conceptually serious paintings of Malaysian artist Kok Yew Puah (also known as George Puah, 1947–1999). Although not photographs, Puah foregrounds the signifcant use and appreciation of the photographic apparatus in artistic practice and in the conveyance of the artistic self as image.6 In Camera View of the Artist (1993, fg. 22.2), Puah paints himself into a scene as if looked upon through a camera viewfnder. In a later work from the Camera View series, Camera View of Two Tourists in a Malaysian Town (1995), the artist shows a scene framed again by the camera viewfnder, but this time of two tourists, one of whom is pointing

Adele Tan

within and differentiated from a trend in the 1980s and 1990s in Malaysia, which the art historian Zakaria Ali has asserted as a market-driven endeavour where artists “gather a stock of ready-made ideas” from Kodak prints, “modifying, expanding, distorting as they go along” so as to create paintings “with photographic qualities: clear, crisp, hard-edged” for their corporate buyers. See Zakaria Ali, “Modern Malaysian Art in Search of an Identity,” in Malaysian Art: Selected Essays 1979–2009 (Tanjong Malim, Perak: Penerbit Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris, 2010), 261. See Puah’s 1995 Camera View of Two Tourists in a Malaysian Town, http://www.theedgegalerie.com/ hidden-meanings/ (accessed 25 July 2016). Another painting that utilises the same fgural composition is In Front of an Indian Temple (1997) except that in this case the backdrop is that of an Indian temple in Malaysia. Malaysian curator Beverly Yong has written: “In the Camera View paintings exhibited at his last solo in 1997, Kok Yew Puah discovered a brilliant conceptual

and formal framing device—the camera viewfnder. He chose favourite familiar places—an Indian temple near his house, the Yacht Club in Klang and nearby Pulau Ketam, for example, and made these the backdrop of various portraits of himself, friends and family. He made these special places iconic, representative of our cultural heritage or our modern aspirations. The scenes are painted in vivid colourful detail, layer upon layer built up lovingly, only to appear fattened ultimately. The fgures likewise are brought out in intense detail—the psychological probity of Kok Yew Puah’s portraits undercut the fatness of his painting and the posturing of his subjects. The emotional texture and frst impulses of his work can be seen clearly in his drawings and watercolours. See “A Malaysian Version,” in Kok Yew Puah: A Tribute, exh. cat. (Kuala Lumpur: Valentine Willie Fine Art, 2004), 5–6. 8 Ooi Kok Chuen, “Seeing beyond his Canvas,” New Straits Times, 24 April 1999, 24. 9 Ibid.

his camera towards us, the viewer (although in a preparatory watercolour study of the work, the fgure on the right is photographing the fgure on the left, who is taking a puff of his cigarette, rather than holding the camera looking out for the next shot).7 The most intriguing aspect of this 1995 painting is, however, the jumble of street and traffc signage in different languages in the background, a seeming appeal to the viewer to treat the picture (whether painting or photograph) as a complex semiotic and visual composition rather than merely attempt at reading it biographically or geographically. The New Straits Times arts journalist Ooi Kok Chuen, in a presciently titled article “Seeing Beyond His Canvas,” stated that “his portrait works relied heavily on photography. Photography re-affrmed a reality, showing him at a certain place at a certain time […]. The camera viewfnder device helped him create a sense of detachment between artist/viewer-voyeur and the subject depicted.”8 Ooi denied that it was anything to do with

“artistic ego when Kok Yew insinuated himself into one of his paintings” but posited that the focus was on the idle boats in the background which indicated “an overwhelming urge to reclaim a fast disappearing past of the Klang that he grew up in.”9 Yet the artistic ego or artistic subjectivity is precisely something which is aligned with the discourse of photography, not simply because the camera is used to take the myriad shots of the artist-fgure, but also that photography is deeply mired in the debates and stakes surrounding subjective positions created by a supposed objective recording device (the denoted image that Barthes speaks about). Malaysian writer Alexandra Tan perhaps comes closest to articulating the investment Puah has as an artist with the act of seeing and visioning. For Tan, Puah is fascinated with the seemingly superfcial world of the tourist, a class of individuals who visit a range of places and in the process encounter the foreign and absorb new cultural signifers along the way, all within this important act of “looking and gazing” as

7

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10 Alexandra Tan, “Kok Yew Puah: Looking In or Out?,”

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The Edge Galerie—News, http://www.theedgegalerie. com/kok-yew-puah-looking-in-or-out/ (accessed 12 June 2016). Puah dropped out of making art in the mid-1970s and went into his family’s food business, and returned to art only in the mid-1980s with the encouragement of Piyadasa. Piyadasa regarded Puah an “important fgure for the social content and context of his works” and held him in high esteem together with younger artists like Wong Hoy Cheong, Bayu

exemplifed by the tourist snapshot. Yet this is again a two-way relationship for Puah—the viewfnder motif reminds us that we, viewers of the painting, are also looking out from the vantage point of the camera lens, collapsing two different moments of voyeurism into a chiastic layer, that which is still an active process, a visual process ironically immortalised as a painting but not yet as celluloid, or until a photographic image is taken of the painting itself. Further, Tan also teases out the relationship between photography and painting, the interdependence these two modes have in the regimes of representation and, more crucially, self-representation of the artist: What does it mean to render the act of photography in the medium of paint? Any image is supposed to be a durable, permanent thing. Modern photography allows us to capture feeting moments in a lasting way. Puah immortalises the activity of the scene, as does the painted photographer. The character holding the camera to his face is hypothesized to be Puah himself. If so, he is then being mirrored by Puah the painter. The dialectic of the relationship between artist, painting and viewer is enhanced by Puah looking at himself looking at us looking at him.10 308

12

Utomo Radjikin and Haron Mokhtar. See Ooi, “Seeing beyond his canvas,” op. cit., 25. As T.K. Sabapathy writes: “In Bentuk Malaysia Tulen, Piyadasa presents an image of himself as a site on which authenticity and purity (attributes affliated with the word tulen) can be negotiated and tested. He simulates a capacity to read and write jawi, hence the inclusion of the script in the upper zone of the composition, written in the formal hieratic style. Will he qualify? Is he a true authentic Malaysian? Can he claim to speak on these matters? Whereas in Self-

The conscious scrutiny of the artistic self has continued for Puah beyond the remit of the camera viewfnder and can be gleaned in other paintings such as Colour Guide for Self-Portrait in Four Different Postures (1993) and Colour Guide for Self-Portrait in Three Different Postures (1994), both canvases emblazoned with a horizontal colour bar at the top, as if in anticipation of its turning into a printed published image. But the more peculiar issue that Puah’s paintings have raised for me is the analytical invisibility of the artist’s pose in art critical discourse in the Southeast Asian region, particularly of those in the panoply of images taken to illustrate exhibition catalogues, magazines or newspaper reports. Looking at Puah’s paintings has prompted me to turn my gaze in the direction of Redza Piyadasa (1939–2007), an older peer and friend of Puah and one of Malaysia’s most prominent artists of the second half of the 20th century. Piyadasa himself was a champion of Puah’s work (“a signifcant Malaysian artist whom I genuinely admired and respected”), and wrote the foreword for Puah’s posthumous exhibition in 2004.11 Piyadasa himself had not conscientiously produced copious works of self-portraiture, apart from examples such as Portrait of the Artist as a Model (1977) and Bentuk Malaysia Tulen (1980), which examined his identity as a conceptual artist and a

Adele Tan

Portrait of the Artist as a Model, he employs the self to interrogate aesthetic and art historical issues; here the self is desperately involved in defning legitimacy and in determining identity along social and political grounds that are slippery. The outcome can be either life-enhancing or life-threatening; the image of Piyadasa is both vulnerable and defant.” See T.K. Sabapathy, Piyadasa: An Overview, 1962–2000 (Kuala Lumpur: National Art Gallery, 2001), 92–3. 13 A number of such photographs were published in newspaper obituaries of Piyadasa. See Ooi Kok Chuen,

“Paying Piya Tribute,” The Star, 10 June 2007, http:// www.thestar.com.my/lifestyle/women/2007/06/10/ paying-piya-tribute/ (accessed 14 June 2016); and Eddin Khoo, “Death of an Artist,” The Star, 13 May 2007, http://www.thestar.com.my/lifestyle/women/ 2007/05/13/death-of-an-artist/ (accessed 14 June 2016). 14 Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 53. 15 Ibid., 55. 16 Ibid.

Muslim-Singhalese Malaysian.12 Yet it cannot be denied that he has been prolifcally documented in numerous profle shots and many of them with him positioned erect (the photo of him with his painting Entry Points is particularly well circulated) and arms crossed or holding a cigarette in his hand, next to his own work and fully aware of the photograph that he is making with art (like the photograph of him looking through an empty picture frame towards the camera, fg. 22.3).13 The ineluctable power and presence of Piyadasa in such photographs (although the photographers are usually unnamed) recall American feminist art historian Amelia Jones’ critical dissection of what she calls the “Pollockian performative,” through Hans Namuth’s black-and-white photographs of Jackson Pollock actively working his dripand-fick painting technique on his large canvases lining the foor of his studio. Jones is instructive in this regard because she had articulated how the mobilisation of Namuth’s photographs of the artist functioned in the reception and construction of the artist as a subject, and his relationship to his work and his audiences. This was helped by the theatrical character of Namuth’s images (and the physicality of Pollock’s actions) which overwhelmed the article layout, and instead of “appearing as incidental illustrations of the text,” stood out

against other conventional imagery of artists sitting with their easels and trade tools. The photographic record of the artist is therefore contingent rather than deterministic, thereby de-privileging original artistic intentionality and opening itself up to the expressed receptivity of its viewers.14 The formidable appeal of the Namuth photographs held sway in the mythic fabrication of Pollock, such as American critic Harold Rosenberg’s construction of Pollock as a “labouring existentialist hero,” and art historian Barbara Rose’s acknowledgement that “[i]n retrospect, I realize Rosenberg was not talking about painting at all; he was describing Namuth’s photographs of Pollock.”15 Stories about the profound effects of Namuth’s photos have also themselves perpetuated the art historical narrative that Pollock “became internationally known through photographs published in art and popular magazines by the mid-1950s.”16 But where Jones’ exegesis on the “Pollockian Performative” concentrated on the outstanding and therefore exceptional shots of Pollock by Namuth, the photographs that I would like to pay attention to are the conventional and therefore discursively neglected or parried shots of artists posing with their artworks. As a class of image-type, these photographs nonetheless achieve a great degree of

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17 18

19

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See Ooi, “Paying Piya Tribute,” op. cit. Ronald Achacoso, “Kick in the Eye to Enlightenment 101,” in Roberto Chabet, ed. Ringo Bunoan (Metro Manila: King Kong Art Projects Unlimited, 2016), 36. Others who were known to have publicly and acrimoniously disagreed with Piyadasa include Jolly Koh and Tan Chee Khuan. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Refections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 27. Ooi Kok Chuen, “To Seek New Artistic Directions,” New Straits Times, 19 August 1987, 6.

interpretative currency through their circulation, despite the methodological armoury of the establishment. For those of us interested in the practice of Piyadasa, we cannot ignore occasions where he has depicted himself or gave chance for himself to be depicted as “complex, diffcult, arrogant;” the photographs that only demand a cursory glance in newspapers, magazines and books, fashion a distinct atmosphere in which the artist is read, and something which, I argue, can be imbricated with the practice of the artist and at times provide countervailing assessments towards prevailing narratives of the artist and the artworks.17 Indeed, accounts of Piyadasa’s personality are stuff of anecdotal legends in Southeast Asia, with a particularly well-recounted one of him dropping by unannounced into a local watering hole called Nanette’s in Manila and attempting to force Roberto Chabet (who was having his beer and in no mood to entertain Piyadasa) into a debate about art. This resulted in fared tempers and Piyadasa apologising to Chabet days later that he was merely “jousting.” This account would seem unremarkable except for the intriguing choice of words by Filipino artist and Chabet’s former student Ronald Achacoso: 310

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J. Anu, “An Artistic State of Affairs,” The Sunday Star, 8 September 1996, 25–6. 22 Marzuki’s article demonstrates passive–aggressive ambivalence in its treatment of Piyadasa as subject. Readers are not sure whether her fawning responses were made sardonically (if she knew what he had professionally professed to stand for) or that she genuinely admired Piyadasa. Marzuki was a well-known journalist for the New Straits Times covering issues and affairs related to women. It is interesting to note too that later even the obituaries of Piyadasa were fled under the “Women” section of The Star Online.

The whole episode became a non-incident, but it presents an interesting study in contrast between Southeast Asia’s two foremost conceptual artists and educators. I clearly remember the disappointment in the Malaysian’s face as he left the wolf ’s lair. And it seemed he regarded the event as a potentially signifcant milestone in Southeast Asian art history while Chabet dismissed the whole affair and forgot about it. If we were to read and deconstruct the “minimalist” encounter between the two, it would speak volumes, and like a Zen parable, would be as enlightening for not having been concluded, the “what might have been” not as interesting or as resonant as what never actually took place.18 Although obviously siding with Chabet, what Achacoso had described was an exquisite collision between two viewpoints: one mined or mourned a lost potential, and the other fatly denying the situation any signifcance. This misreading or over-reading of what had happened produced a productive tension, a quality that is sought by anyone embarking on the hermeneutics of art. Achacoso’s words also restored to view the necessity of looking into

Adele Tan

missed encounters, the parts which were hastily disregarded and deemed to not have taken place (or taken its place), could yet be interesting or resonant. This is the resonance I am giving to the images of Piyadasa that appear silently in printed materials, their selection and placement seemingly never to have bothered viewers to take a second look. For Barthes, these are the photographs which he deems good enough only as studium but not as punctum, whereby the levels of interpretation and investment would reach those of the cultural, linguistic and political (the “feld of unconcerned desire, of various interest, of inconsequential taste”) but not of the emotional or psychical (“that accident which pricks me [but also bruises me, is poignant to me]”).19 But what if the named and coded photographs under the regime of the studium are made to be considered differently, to be looked upon as the punctum of the institutional world of artwork images, the “sting, speck, cut, little hole” that is the work of these photographs when reading them (together with the headlines and captions on the page) against the stolid images of pure art? Take for instance the different uses of Piyadasa’s work Two Malay Women in the New Straits Times articles. The 1986 article (fg. 22.4) shows Piyadasa as the gallerist proudly showing off the work in the background and shoring up the defant headline “There’s Still Business in Malaysian Art Business” and the caption “reputation of a gallery counts a lot.” In the other article in the following year, Two Malay Women is an image apart, with a headshot of Piyadasa overlapping onto it, but signalling a vastly different message and marking the end of his Saujana Fine Art Gallery: “To Seek New Artistic Directions.”20 The repeat use of the same artwork is intriguing, and seems to suggest the breakdown of optimism, yet it also points to Piyadasa’s method of reusing a certain found image and making numerous variations in treatment of the print (also by way of painting or collaging) for his

Malaysian Series, which defned the last phase of his artistic career. Images from the 1988 article “Piyadasa— The Romantic Artist” by Nora Marzuki (fg. 22.5)—which has an affected title that is incompatible with the cerebral outlook he had fashioned for himself—are more revealing of the artist’s own anxieties and self-regard. This time a pose with yet another work from his Malaysian Series (a composite of the Tun Razak Family which the newspaper mistook for two separate works) and a candid half-body shot of the artist seated in a pseudo-pensive pose and having a smoke, with the words “I’m a painter and a unique one too” running under it. The words sound haughty yet they are also ironic—Piyadasa was not considered a skilful painter and his later forays into mechanical reproduction for the Malaysian Series meant that he was not particularly invested in the unique and original. The intimation of Piyadasa as a family man by Marzuki is taken up again by J. Anu’s 1996 article for The Sunday Star, where Piyadasa’s posed photo with his young children from his second marriage is included in the spread that however says very little of his family life, but works instead to secure Anu’s impression that Piyadasa was “anxious to put you at ease,” his reputation for being blunt, impatient and arrogant notwithstanding.21 The invocation of the family man in Piyadasa is an odd gesture, clumsily asserted by Marzuki who read the presence of heritage family photos in his works as indicative of him interested in being a family man.22 By 2001, with his solo retrospective running at the Balai Seni Lukis Negara (presently known as the National Visual Arts Gallery of Malaysia), the persona of the family man receded and a different picture of Piyadasa emerged, this time of photos of the artist not by himself but with his peers, his artistic and the Malaysian VIP community. The images work with the new rubric, describing an intellectual giant (“Challenging the Concept of Art,” fg. 22.6) and therefore ripe for a

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reassessment and critical plaudits (“Remaking Piyadasa,” fg. 22.7). Photographs of Piyadasa captured by undergraduate student Peter T. Brown (who majored in photography) in the mid-1970s at the University of Hawaii at Manoa where Piyadasa earned his Master of Fine Arts, however, surfaced a view of the artist as already cognisant of the power of the posed photograph. Similar to Albano before, Piyadasa is pictured in a series of photographs carrying a camera. Yet where Albano was just composing himself as a picture, Piyadasa not only does this but also pursued with his camera the actions of Laura Ruby, a Hawaiian artist and University of Hawaii art department faculty member who made a mock-conceptual work in protest against the conceptual “con-job” art that he was promulgating. Like a double entendre, Piyadasa turns around in one shot and looks smugly into Brown’s lens (fg. 22.8), and then in another, proceeds to track the activity of Ruby with his camera. By posing with Ruby’s work and standing proudly erect and chest puffed, Piyadasa enacts a visual sleight of hand—he made it look as if it were his own artwork (fg. 22.9). We should not be too surprised then that Piyadasa was further captured in a proclamatory gesture, arms outstretched with papers with a fower garland around his neck (instead of a camera), and standing next to a painting emblazoned with the stencilled words “ART IS A LIE.” It was a painting he had acquired from his undergraduate friend Malcolm Wong at the University of Hawaii, who had completed it as a class assignment on Willem de Kooning. Piyadasa proceeded to appropriate Wong’s painting through the refexive addition of words that remarked upon its own condition and existence. With these foregoing examples, the Penang collector, gallerist and aspiring art historian Dato’ Dr Tan Chee Khuan was perhaps paradoxically prescient and astute in his assessment of Piyadasa, despite disparaging him as an inveterate “pastiche” artist who being “unduly in312

fuenced by another,” makes work lacking individuality and originality—“In conceptual art, the concept is paramount since there is very little aesthetic. Borrowing the concept and adding in local favour does not exclude it as pastiche.”23 Tan had also proceeded to illustrate this by way of his own “artwork,” a crude poster titled Pastiche Stinks (fg. 22.10), parodying Piyadasa’s Portrait of the Artist as a Model where the painting is reproduced in miniature on the right and captioned underneath with the words “historical transgression 1977 to 1994.” This is, however, undermined by a caricature of Alfred E. Neuman, the fctitious mascot of Mad magazine, with his fngers stuck up his nostrils and broadcasting his riposte: “The reader may ask, ‘What is a pastiche?’ or ‘Whose pastiches are we talking about?’ ”24 Whilst careful not to say that art does not proceed from infuence by predecessors, Tan enlisted art critics such as Robert Hughes and Suzi Gablik to his cause to decipher the conditions of pastiche, but in the very same gesture, he brings to the fore considerations of fraudulence, charlatanry, mimicry, imitation, dissimulation, camoufage and counterfeiting, aspects of which are precisely what occurs for Barthes, who wants a “history of looking,” in the act of posing for a photograph. In Camera Lucida, Barthes examines and philosophises on the centrality of forced and conscious duplicity (“a sensation of inauthenticity, sometimes of imposture”) of someone posing for the “whole photographic ritual” or “social game” (and even when one is observed without knowing it, one can often know the feeling of being observed by the lens and once knowing, it changes everything, leading to a transformation of the self in advance into an image) and how the posed photograph gets coopted in the construction of self and identity:

Adele Tan

I pose, I know I am posing, I want you to know that I am posing, but (to square the circle) this additional message must in

23 Tan Chee Khuan, “What is Pastiche?,” in Social Re-

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sponsibility in Art Criticism: or Why Yong Mun Sen is the Father of Malaysian Painting (Pulau Tikus, Malaysia: Art Gallery, 1998), 131. This 1994 poster’s background was subsequently retouched in 2013 and put up for sale by Tan for MYR 2000.

no way alter the precious essence of my individuality: what I am, apart from any effgy. What I want, in short, is that my (mobile) image, buffeted among a thousand shifting photographs, altering with situation and age, should always coincide with my (profound) “self ”; but it is the contrary that must be said: “myself ” never coincides with my image.25 Although there is the professed noncoincidence of the self to the image, there is however an admission that despite the mortifcation of the body by the photograph, “the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity” and “represents the very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object.”26 In other words, when constituting oneself in the process of posing, the posed photograph enables the involuntary presentation of a dispersed self, where the subject turning into object permits the inhabitation of contradictory dimensions but turns away from the possibility of ever positing an objective self in a photograph. Paul Jay has argued that: Barthes’s treatment of posing is really about the impossibility of not posing. It questions the very concept of authenticity

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Barthes, op. cit., 11–2. Ibid., 12, 14. Paul Jay, “Posing: Autobiography and the Subject of Photography,” in Autobiography and Postmodernism, eds. Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore & Gerald Peters (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 194–5.

and turns it into a kind of simulacrum in which the subject cannot stop “imitating” himself. […] But worse than the specter of inauthenticity is the specter of objectifcation, the fear that the always-inauthentic image does in fact constitute the objectifed self. The problem Barthes’s remarks on posing [reveal] is that the so-called profound or essential self can never be represented as such. Indeed the very nature of this essential self becomes paradoxical: its subjectivity is linked to a notion of authenticity, yet any image of that self is a sign of its objectifcation, and hence, its inauthenticity. The authentic self, in Barthes’s terms, is fnally an impossibility, for it would be a self freed from the process of becoming an object.27 In short, there is no running away from the objectifcation of the self, a self which at the same time requires and acquires its identity and substance from images that objectify or other it. In common parlance, the maxim “fake it till you make (or become) it” applies, as there is no way, to quote W.B. Yeats, to “know the dancer from the dance.” To look at and analyse Piyadasa through his poses in photographs is especially apposite, given his extensive recuperation and use of found heritage photographic material that are largely posed studio shots in his by now

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28 Piyadasa’s frst forays with photographs in his artmaking were with his two versions of Tribute to Usman Awang (1980). Piyadasa was commissioned by the editor of Dewan Sastra to produce an artwork for the journal’s cover to honour the 50 th birthday of Usman Awang. Piyadasa was given photographs of Usman which he subsequently replicated as a bromide halftone image of the poet via an electronic copying machine, with the help of photographer Ismail Hashim. The hand-coloured design was based on the idea of a postage stamp, the stencilled letters a carry-over from his conceptual art phase, and the bromide image pasted on rather than silkscreened like his later Malaysian Series images. Rodolfo Paras-Perez, introduction to Piyadasa (The Hague: The Prince Claus Fund, 1998), 4. Paras-Perez took Piyadasa at his own words: “The more I studied the old photographs, the more I became aware of the documentary power of the photographic medium, namely its ability to freeze and record so vividly aspects of social reality. These were very real people that I was confronting in the

photographic images, and I had to consciously retain and project their individual personalities and also the cultural essence and mood of their times. In transferring the images to the silk-screens, I was of course, projecting them twice removed from their original “reality” but their pertinence as persona was not being diminished in any way, in the process.” Quoted in “A Dialogue: T.K. Sabapathy and Redza Piyadasa,” in Piyadasa: The Malaysian Series (Kuala Lumpur: RA Fine Arts and Asia Contemporary, 2007), 32. 31 Sabapathy, Piyadasa: An Overview, 1962–2000, 95. 32 This was Nirmala’s exhibition titled Keadaan Manusia (The Condition of Being). It was held at the Dewan Bahasa & Pustaka in Kuala Lumpur for eight days in January 1981. 33 It is interesting to note that unlike the photographs of Piyadasa published in the New Straits Times, Nirmala’s feature (as does the female batik artist, Fatimah Chik’s, the frst wife of Piyadasa) credits the photographer clearly. See also Alina Ranee, “Fatimah Making Waves Again,” New Straits Times, 1 May 1985, 8.

famous Malaysian Series.28 Piyadasa too spent much of his time thinking about the practice of photography, particularly portrait photography and how it could be co-opted to deliver his own thoughts and arguments about his place within the multicultural history and identity of Malaysia and how the upsurge of ethnically divisive and polarising Bumiputra politics was jeopardising all of that. The evocation of these found photographs by the Filipino artist and art historian Rodolfo Paras-Perez as “half-forgotten,” “unknown,” “distant” and “dated” is similar to how one might consider the posed photographs of Piyadasa in newspapers and exhibition catalogues. Paras-Perez, however, offers up the possibility of redemption through the manipulation and conversion of these images into “serious works of art” (by Piyadasa) where the past and reality are transformed.29 As such, one should pause to wonder: Could it not be possible too, to entertain ideas about the

incorporation of marginal photos into the art historical narration of Malaysian artists? And although Paras-Perez describes Piyadasa’s use of collage and serigraphy (“photographing a photograph—a process that places the image at a point twice removed from reality”) as non-threatening to “the subject’s unique qualities and the specifc references,” otherwise known as “Malaysian aura,” I would suggest that Piyadasa’s method instead points to a potential change, or even violence, done not to the superfcial image codes themselves but to the reception of the actual referent—and for my purpose here Piyadasa is the referent.30 Opening art historical writing up to embrace this image class of artist poses and noticing their specifc deployment on the page provides new interpretative modes that can be held in contention with each other. To this end, T.K. Sabapathy provides a far more accurate reading of the impact and effect of

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photography in Piyadasa’s work and on the artist himself: The portrait photograph is not a neutral value-free entity; on the contrary, the portrait photograph is a fabrication and consolidation of who one is by means of complex codes that are transacted and shared by the subject, the photographer and the community.31 Sabapathy calls Piyadasa’s method “agglomerative,” where fragments from diverse sources are arranged, shaped and repeated in a pictorial scheme. Yet it is also as a collective arrangement that Sabapathy realises such a schema would already harbour “a hint of a divergence,” with coded images abutting each other, “prising these interests apart.” The inclusion of the posed photos of the artists into the art historical ambit would not be a benign enterprise, for the recursive appearance of artworks, bodily postures and accompanying rhetorical tropes already ensure that dissonances will arise from the non-contiguity between them. If Piyadasa was expecting his use of found old photos of various ethnic families as a means to interrogate the identity politics of the country, he would not be too alarmed by the same manner in which photos of him could be taken as critical resources to appraise his work, attitudes and politics. An important counterpoint to Piyadasa to raise here (as gender is also a missing operative term when writing about Piyadasa) would be Nirmala Dutt Shanmughalingam (b. 1941), a pioneering Malaysian female artist of socially conscious or committed art, and a peer and close friend of Piyadasa, who himself had also authored the catalogue essay of her solo exhibition in 1981.32 Nirmala, who has an intense artistic engagement with the plethora of sociopolitical photographic imagery gleaned from topical news media, often feature in her works photo-silkscreened newspaper images collaged

onto canvas which are then painted with bold expressive brushwork or traditional symbolic motifs. Her themes have regularly focused on issues of war, violence, sexual abuse, poverty and environmental degradation in local and international settings from the 1970s right up to the 2000s, frequently foregrounding or addressing women and children as the primary victims. Female subjects and roles have featured signifcantly too in Piyadasa’s Malaysian Series, particularly the two Malay women, the Malay and Nyonya brides and the Indian mother. However, it is a study in contrast when we compare the photographic “fortunes” of Nirmala and Piyadasa—Nirmala has rarely been the subject of newspaper or journal features, and hence far fewer photographs of Nirmala posing with her work are out in public circulation. One newspaper article that presented such a photograph did so with an image of her placing one hand gingerly on the support on which her works were resting, and not with her arms crossed in a defensive posture. Such tentativeness of pose and posture may strike one as not immediately ftting for an artist who is seen as vociferously opposing the inequities of society (fg. 22.11).33 In 1973, Nirmala made a stunning entrance at the “Man and his World” competition organised by the Balai Seni Lukis Negara with her work Statement 1 (she and Sulaiman Esa were the two major award winners). The form it took—documentary photographs in a grid layout fanked by two boards pasted with newspaper clippings and her extended artist statement on the growing urban pollution of Damansara in Kuala Lumpur, which was installed together with the waste she collected from the area—was so unusual at the time that in the place of medium, the work was just described as a “concept.” Yet despite her photographybased art being the voice of justice for the oppressed and dispossessed, Nirmala was also well aware of the limits of photography. In another work Statement II, she explained: “The camera recorded only a small fraction of what was

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seen and experienced by actually being in these areas. No single medium can actually communicate a whole experience.”34 And despite the innovative treatment of photo imagery by Nirmala, much less attention was paid to her craft than to her sentiments, with critics largely philosophising or pontifcating about the state of humanity and the world. One such critic, Zakaria Ali, however, had unwittingly made a useful observation on her method and her scale: Nirmala’s work was “heavy stuff, made even heavier by having these images enlarged. The viewer has no choice but be confronted by the gruesome pictures.”35 Unlike Piyadasa, who is usually seen posing confdently with his artworks, Nirmala is instead captured rather diminutively seated cross-legged and barefoot on the ground with her work looming behind her; she also does not look squarely at the camera but gazes out into the far corner (fg. 22.12). Disliking labels but vexed by her own vested interests, Nirmala has declared that she is “an artist frst and foremost—not necessarily just a woman artist or feminist artist or political artist” because “once labelled, people feel they can deal with you. It is easier to control and oppress you when you are put into a category. But I have not resolved how to deal with this as I really care a lot about issues that affect women and children.” Her chosen posture in the photograph may have to do with her expressed desire to not be pigeonholed and to let the work and the issues speak for themselves.36 Despite her divergent emotional responses of anger and compassion when confronted with issues, she lets on that she “had to sit through the pain of the incubation period,” where she “might read a book and try not to think of it” or “do some research or collect things.” This is because “the subconscious cannot be dictated to but rather, it dictates. And it cannot be forced into action or else your work will emerge a shallow mess.”37 These alternating psychical currents and her willingness to work through her own ambivalence may yet explain why Nirmala the artist has been pre316

sented in oddly contradictory ways to her viewers. Her self-portrait from 1999 (fg. 22.13) is a picture of crimson rage where two frontal head shots (one a facsimile of the other) are placed on separate diametrically opposing vectors but close to the points of convergence and the state of metaphorical eruption where she then visually chastises the viewer: “When are you all going to say enough! And stop it!” On the other hand, her profle page on The Edge Galerie’s website is headed by an uncommon pose with the artist’s head turning away from the viewer’s gaze and her eyes downcast, as if rejecting engagement with the prevailing visual order of the world.38 These are, I would argue, the two poles animating Nirmala’s practice—one being detached and analytic, and the other being highly charged empathy, an interpretation supported too by how she herself is presented and received through the posed photographs that are in circulation. Viewers may not be privy to the intentions of the artist (as the posing subject), the photographer or the news media staff (who textually frames the images); these posed images as artefacts set in motion another form of agency, urging us to pay heed to the ways they interpose on how we read the artists, their art and their unexpected lifeworlds. To end, I am reminded of what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari had argued in the name of “minor literature”: “Create the opposite dream: know how to create a becomingminor.”39 Instead of having an “offcial, referential genre” and the proper assignation of names and sense, we ought to have “a sequence of intensive states, a ladder or a circuit for intensities that one can race around in one sense or another, from high to low, or from low to high.”40 Any word, name or image need no longer refer to only one thing but to other things or conditions—“the becoming-dog of the man and the becoming-man of the dog.”41 Turning our attention towards photographs of artists with their artworks that might otherwise be gleaned only as supplemental and marginal

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34 Redza Piyadasa, “The Art of Nirmala Shanmughalingam,” in The Condition of Being (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa & Pustaka, 1981), 12. 35 Ali, op. cit. 36 Wong Hoy Cheong, “Let the Bamboo Grow in Your Heart: A Conversation with Nirmala,” in Nirmala Dutt Shanmughalingam: The Making of an Artist as Social Commentator (Kuala Lumpur: Valentine Willie Fine Art, 1998), 2. 37 Ibid. 38 See “Nirmala Shanmughalingham, Datin,” in The Edge Galerie—Artists, http://www.theedgegalerie.com/ artist/datin-nirmala-dutt-shanmughalingham/ (accessed 25 July 2016). 39 Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 27. 40 Ibid., 21. 41 Ibid. 42 Refer to Deleuze’s comments on the minor in “Gilles Deleuze in Conversation with Antonio Negri,” Futur Anterieur 1 (1990), trans. Martin Joughin, http://www.

to an essay is one way of “becoming minor.” For Deleuze, to invoke the minor is to jettison the established model for a process, a becoming that will lead into unknown paths, which does not in itself jeopardise its ability to acquire a major model should we wish it to.42 The acquisition of a “major model” was also at the forefront of the minds of the convenors of the landmark exhibition Vision and Idea: Relooking Modern Malaysian Art at the Balai Seni Lukis Negara in 1994. It was a desire for a master narrative guided by a sense of history and continuity. Yet as the esteemed Malaysian dramatist and critic Krishen Jit rightly cautions in the introduction to the exhibition catalogue, “historical meaning changes over time in perceptions of art and social contexts” and these are seldom tackled by art historians in Malaysia. Jit proposed instead to bounce off art and social contexts against each other, so that “we could enjoy the beneft of being both inside and outside the drama of modern Malaysian art”:

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generation-online.org/p/fpdeleuze3.htm (accessed 16 June 2016). Krishen Jit, introduction to Vision and Idea: Relooking Modern Malaysian Art, ed. T.K. Sabapathy (Kuala Lumpur: National Art Gallery Malaysia, 1994), 12. Piyadasa addressed this in his exhibition Art and the Social Context at the Balai Seni Lukis Negara in 1991 where he included a selection of cartoonists with other visual artists, making a point about the privileging of a certain hierarchy in the arts: “It is about time cartoonists were given their due recognition. The role of the cartoonist is more important than the role of painters who are still operating in an elitist context.” See also Joseph Edwin, “Thought-Provoking Art Show,” New Straits Times, 21 June 1991, 25. This makes practical sense too as there is not yet a plethora of publicly available scholarly books and documents on artists. Corralling other types of visual material (which have been hitherto considered secondary or marginal) could potentially open up other methodological pathways.

On the one hand, our insideness would be ensured by our entanglement with the narrative of the relationship between art and society. On the other hand, the very act of bouncing off these forces and actions would release us, even if temporarily, from the dangers of an incestuous and claustrophobic involvement, and thereby help us to construct a critical distance from the evolving narrative.43 I would hazard that Jit did not go far enough. If we are truly concerned with the social nature of art, we should attend to the visual universe that the works of art reside in, and that one way to construct that “critical distance” and evolve the narrative would perhaps be to frst expand and include the visual feld of what can be considered with and next to artists and art-making—the minor streams of photographic material which circumscribe our daily visioning of art, that is.44

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Ooi Kok Chuen, “Brush with Harsh Realities of Life,” New Straits Times, 3 May 1992, 12–3.  

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Kwa Chong Guan, Derek Heng & Tan Tai Yong, Singapore: A 700-Year History, From Early Emporium to World City (Singapore: National Archives of Singapore, 2009), 8, 11–2. Lily Kong, Ching Chia-ho & Chou Tsu-Lung, Arts, Culture and the Making of Global Cities: Creating New Urban Landscapes in Asia (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, 2015), 6. Caroline Turner, “Internationalism and Regionalism: Paradoxes of Identity,” in Tradition and Change: Contemporary Art of Asia and the Pacifc, ed. Caroline Turner (Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1993), xiii–v.

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Jim Supangkat, “A Brief History of Indonesian Modern Art,” in ibid., 47; Redza Piyadasa, “Modern Malaysian Art: 1945–1991: A Historical Overview,” in ibid., 66; Apinan Poshyananda, “The Development of Contemporary Art in Thailand: Traditionalism in Reverse,” in ibid., 96–9; T.K. Sabapathy, “Contemporary Art in Singapore: An Introduction,” in ibid., 85–6. Turner, op. cit., xvii. Sabapathy, “Contemporary Art in Singapore: An Introduction,” 86. Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London: Verso Books, 2013).

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Undoing the Global: Contemporary Art of Singapore June Yap

See fg. 23.1, Conway Mordaunt Shipley, Chinese and Western Ships in Singapore Harbour (1854). Lands. Specifc. Edit. Yellow. Contempt. Naked. Weep. Soar. Slip. Thought. Ordinary. Moist. Millennium. These words, which have been engraved upon the green, brown and off-white surfaces of Simryn Gill’s installation, Washed Up (1993–1995, fg. 23.2), were, according to the artist, randomly compiled. Yet, they are deeply suggestive, as is the knowledge of whence these otherwise prosaic shards have been gathered—beaches of Singapore since reclaimed and areas of Port Dickson in Malaysia under redevelopment— intimating their having been swept to shore by unseen currents. Typifying the material and 318

method employed by Gill, of registering the ebb and fow of a universe of objects and of understanding through found matter that has included stones, shells and circular things, these travel-worn fragments may be said to embody the subject of this essay: the global. The term, global, has become ubiquitous and would appear to also be central to Singapore and the exposition of its past, such as has been documented in Singapore: A 700-Year History, From Early Emporium to World City. Written by Kwa Chong Guan, Derek Heng and Tan Tai Yong, this expansive history published in 2009 was manifest as an exhibition at the National Museum of Singapore in 2014. Whereas the exhibition emphasised the narrative of the development of the modern state, noting its gestation in 1299, with the renaming

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of the island to Singapura by Sri Tri Buana (also known as Sang Nila Utama), and elaborating, in increasing detail as it progressed into the recent half-century, the genealogical rise of the nation, the intent of the publication that had been commissioned by the National Archives was, one might say, rather more “global.” It was to locate present-day (21st century) global and economic “aspirations” as having been established in the early maritime history of the Melaka Straits, thereby nominating this disposition for exchange in a continuous trajectory from pre-colonial emporium to the present as the island state’s destiny.1 It goes without saying that an affrmation of a “natural” propensity for being global is advantageous to the national narrative, and this advantage extends to its cultural capital, that, as Lily Kong’s study suggests, provides strategic edge for the aspiring global city.2 For the aesthetic interpretation, however, the global is not merely signifcant in a historical capacity. It also articulates the defnition of the contemporaneity of art, for Singapore and also the region. In 1993, in conjunction with the frst Asia Pacifc Triennial of Contemporary Art, the Queensland Art Gallery published Tradition and Change: Contemporary Art of Asia and the Pacifc. Within her editorial introduction, Caroline Turner defned the contemporary as “a product of tradition, historical cultural encounters, the confrontation with the West in more modern times, and the recent economic, technological and information changes which have pushed the world towards a ‘global’ culture.”3 Charting this contemporary turn, the essays following her overview highlighted the Indonesian New Art Movement (Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru) in the 1970s, neo-regionalist tendencies from the early 1980s in Malaysia, syncretic absorption concurrent with tumultuous politics in Thailand through the 1960s and 1970s, and, for Singapore, an alterity in the late 1980s defned by genre-crossing, multidisciplinary and multicultural approaches which were

signposted by the beginning of The Artists Village and The Space exhibition of 1992.4 Within these essays, the contemporary condition was observed in critical refections on the topics of postcoloniality, nation and identity, which were addressed as response or counterpoint in a “paradoxical” struggle to fnd footing between the global and the regional, after and alongside Internationalism, resulting in “an appropriate starting point for new defnitions of national and cultural identity.”5 Yet, in the case of Singapore, as T.K. Sabapathy was to remark, this struggle was produced less in grand gestures than in an accumulation of aesthetic negotiations across multiple instances. According to him, alterity as response and critique of cultural, social and political circumstance, was, more often than not, “circumspect” and implied, rather than professed; not to mention, it was also “entangled” with the very establishment it was to resist.6 Now, Sabapathy’s observation of the alterity of the late 1980s may be brought into relation with other defning moments of the contemporary. As noted by Peter Osborne, three oft-cited markers of the contemporary in aesthetic interpretation are: post-war or post-1945 formalism; the post-conceptual turn of around the 1960s; and neoliberal globalisation of capital or post-1989.7 Certainly one might chart the effcacy of each juncture for a particular historical discussion of aesthetic contemporaneity. But in the context of this exposition on the global in relation to the contemporary, as suggested by both Osborne’s third juncture that coincides with Singapore’s narrative of the contemporary, as well as the island state’s 700year historical narrative, it is proposed that the entanglement which Sabapathy puts forward may be expanded in an observation of contemporaneity of art in Singapore in relation to the subject of capital—not only in its expression in commodifcation, but also in tenet and foundation. Further examining this entanglement of the global with capital and the nation-state in

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a selection of artworks from the 1990s (either on view in the Gallery’s inaugural exhibition or else part of the National Collection), the essay’s analysis from the vantage of the present appraises the subject of the global as found within these aesthetic expressions in three respects relating to characterisations of the global, specifcally in movement or fow, of commensurability, and as free or unconstrained: the interruption, the disjunction, and of limits. Interrupt Just as one imagines Gill’s fragments as having been carried upon waves from one shore to another, Tang Mun Kit’s emergence into the aesthetic realm was marked by a drifting, this time of the artist, that would lead to a process of recovery. Tang’s sculptures are the restitution of his publicly abandoned fnds, extending the life of apparently exhausted objects in new form, such as in his Bomb Sculpture series of 1991 (fgs. 23.3 and 23.4). To produce this series, two chandelier medallions found cast aside were split, reshaped and washed over with dye, acrylic, enamel and varnish by Tang, to re-emerge as allegories of redemption and overcoming in the Nietzschean sense, both for the object and for the artist. Common to Gill’s ocean-crossing shards and the spoils of Tang’s wanderings is a movement and fow that the global encapsulates as its “logic.” As noted by Prasenjit Duara, the “strategies for capital accumulation” are “primarily deterritorialising”—a course that the island nation has, without doubt, beneftted substantially in the provisions of port facilities and services.8 Such a gambit might be said to have been performed in the production of these artworks; though, interestingly, in a doubling of deterritorialisation—appropriating materials and objects already displaced. As Tang was to elaborate in conversation with Sabapathy, the found object is the “frst stimulus for the concept, the idea, the thought process,” and thus a “starting point” for the aesthetic mediation.9 320

Whereas aesthetic mediation is visible in Washed Up and Bomb Sculpture in the artists’ mark and modifcation, in the case of M. Faizal Fadil’s installation, Study of Three Thermos Flasks (1991, fg. 23.5), it is the lack of such intervention that is its most compelling feature. Presented at the 2nd National Sculpture Exhibition at the National Museum Art Gallery, the artwork assembled three grey metal fasks (obtained from a street market on Sungei Road, which was popular as a site for the exchange of the used or unwanted), with evidence of past utility in plain sight, in the assortment of dents and one fask having even lost its lid. Variously interpreted as conceptualist extensions or as ready-mades, Faizal’s Study was to court a measure of controversy over “the relationship between artistic design, fabrication or craft,” and was also to become ensnared by a charge of plagiarism levelled at the artwork when brought into comparison with a painting of three fasks from the year before produced by Khairul Anwar, incidentally, a friend of Faizal’s.10 Paradoxically, these two contentions may be said to controvert each other: as the unaestheticised object, Study could not be accused of imitation in representation; and aestheticised, one might interpret the work as Faizal’s substitution of the material form for Khairul’s representational one. In the absence of overt aesthetic intervention, Study may have appeared taciturn, but it disclosed most vividly the circulatory fows of the global in moving from a utilitarian circuit to a cultural one, particularly when it was to become part of the National Collection. Within the artworks of Gill, Tang and Faizal, the fow and access that characterise globalisation are registered in displacement and trace. That is, in a presentation of the suspension or interruption of movement and fow (inasmuch as another fow, aesthetic circulation, takes its place), with the aesthetic act providing, in Duara’s sense, the opportunity for reassessing the “rationalising process” of modernity and, thus, its critique.11

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Prasenjit Duara, The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 98. 9 Tang Da Wu as quoted in T.K. Sabapathy, “A Conversation: Tang Mun Kit and T.K. Sabapathy,” in Tang Mun Kit: Project Mandala (Singapore: Sculpture Square Limited, 2004), 32–3. 10 For an account of the controversy see Sabapathy, “Contemporary Art in Singapore: An Introduction,” 87; Yvonne Low compares the installation and painting in “Making Space in Art History: 4 Objects of Art,” in Intersecting Histories: Contemporary Turns in Southeast Asian Art, ed. T.K. Sabapathy (Singapore:

Disjunction Certainly, in itself, critique is not limited to the contemporary. However, the proposition of contemporaneity is that the subject of critique—globalisation and its effects—may be said to be particular of its time. Duara’s critique of ecological sustainability in the wake of globalisation is a case in point, and his exposition, The Crisis of Global Modernity, presents the return to Asia’s past as a suggested corrective to the global problem of “human overreach in the conquest by man of nature.”12 Duara is not alone in observing the limits of globalisation; his perspective is shared by Dani Rodrik in a sober reminder of the vulnerability of globalisation as phenomenon, citing globalisation’s collapse in 1914 in his examination of the “global paradox” of economics, or the truth of its precariousness; as well as by Jørgen Ørstrøm Møller who cautions the “dangerous stand” of a globalisation “taken for granted.”13 Whilst such assertions have become increasingly commonplace and pointed in the contemporary, this refexive perspective had surfaced in artworks in the 1990s, where, in relation to the subject of sustainability, one recalls Tang Da Wu’s Tiger’s Whip (1991, fg. 23.6). Comprising performances at the former National Museum

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School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University, 2012), 89–90. Duara, op cit., 1. Ibid., 2. Dani Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy (London, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011), 17; Jørgen Ørstrøm Møller, Political Economy in a Globalized World (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, 2009), 2. Duara, op cit., 104. Sabapathy, “Contemporary Art in Singapore: An Introduction,” 85.

Art Gallery, and in public spaces in Chinatown and Marina Square, Tiger’s Whip was intended to draw attention to the Chinese custom of employing tiger penises for aphrodisiac use as, effectively, destroying the species. From Tang’s perspective, as it was presented in his artwork and performance, it would appear that the cultural system and its realities have become disjointed, and, drawing from Duara’s exposition, this may be understood in terms of the inherent duality of the “logic of culture”—as both culture in its everyday thrust in activity, interaction, and relationships; and as Culture in its systematised and institutionalised sense of “a representation” that lends “distinctiveness and authenticity,” not to mention, continuity.14 Commended then by Sabapathy for its “risky” confrontation of fellow citizens and, concomitantly, of his own received cultural background and its values, Tang’s ten white-linen-and-wire-mesh tigers, representing their spirits having passed on, may be seen as speaking not only to the issue of the depletion of the species, but also to this duality and to the compounding effect of Culture and cultural practices under globalisation.15 A similar cleft, though on a personal level, is presented in Amanda Heng’s Another Woman (1996–1997, fg. 23.7). Produced as a means to

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16 Ushiroshoji Masahiro, “Looking for Channels of Hope—‘Another Woman’ of 1999,” in Amanda Heng: Speak to Me, Walk with Me (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 2011), 75. 17 Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” (delivered on 17 July 1949, Sixteenth Interna-

reconnect with her mother, within the 14-image photographic installation (which also included sculptural forms made from outfts worn by the two that were starched stiff ), the artist and her mother are seen in a variety of interactions: in an embrace, in tandem, alongside, facing, touching, holding, and across a dinner table. Another Woman has been read as the bridging of a generational gap, fltered through the condition of being female, with Ushiroshoji Masahiro noting at the artwork’s 1999 presentation for the inaugural Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale that, in representing the “smallest unit” of community, Another Women was critical in its restoration of hope for, what seemed at that time, a bleak period.16 But beyond personal and affective reconnection, signifcantly, Another Woman presents another reconciliation: the culture–Culture divide that Duara speaks of. This other reconciliation within Another Woman is of Heng with her Cultural heritage as idealised and mediated by her mother. With migration and modernisation, the experiences of Heng and her mother were worlds apart as the artist was growing up in Singapore, not least exacerbated by the linguistic divide that separated them, with her mother speaking a dialect in which Heng was not fuent. Yet, in the performed interaction, as well as its form of the image, no words are needed and, instead, mother and daughter appear as if refec322

18

tional Congress of Psychoanalysis, Zurich) in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, [2002], 2006), 76. Lee Wen, “Journey of a Yellow Man No. 4: LIBIDO,” artist statement for Sense Yellow exhibition, installation and performance at Concrete House, Nontburi and Thamasat University, Bangkok, Thailand, 9–15 October 1993.

tions in a mirror. In Jacques Lacan’s description of the mirror stage of identifcation, the refection acts as the “root-stock of secondary identifcations” which simultaneously “fxes” the image of the self.17 Read back into Another Woman, through its representation of mirroring, the culture–Culture divide would appear to also be reconciled, the representation of this culminating in the suturing of their separate worlds within the iconic image with the greatest contact and thus its resolution: when the two embrace. This embrace was re-enacted in 2014 as the artwork, Twenty Years Later, that in image is almost identical to the one from Another Woman, excepting natural changes of the human form with the passage of time. Whereas in Heng’s act the culture–Culture divide is palpable in the physical distance and distinctions between the artist and her mother —even as they touched—in Lee Wen’s negotiation of this divide, overt disparity would appear reduced as the artist covered his own body with yellow paint. Though, perhaps, as a result, it was also a fssure and variance more intimately felt. Beginning as a response to having been frequently mistaken for a mainland Chinese citizen during his time in London, and manifesting frst as a painting in 1990, titled, Yellow Man, Where Are You Going?, Lee Wen’s exploration of cultural identity in a global context resulted a number of performances between 1992 and 2001. Appearing to satirise the ide-

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19

20

Singapore Art 97, 29 August–2 September 1997, Singapore International Convention & Exhibition Centre (Singapore: National Arts Council & National Heritage Board, 1997). Lee Wen, “Journey of a Yellow Man No. 11: Multi-Culturalism,” for SeptFest Art Conference “Multi-Culturalism: In Practice and on Paper” (Singapore: The

alisation of Culture in Duara’s sense, the irony of assuming superfcial enhancement in order to confront this cultural conundrum was not lost on the artist. As Lee Wen was to comment self-deprecatingly in his performance in 1993, succinctly capturing this disjunct: “You’re already yellow, why do you still paint yourself yellow?!”18 Particularly historic amongst these performances was Journey of a Yellow Man No. 11: Multi-Culturalism (1997, fg. 23.8) which comprised a presentation that concluded with a performance. Enacted during The Substation’s SeptFest Art Conference, “Multi-culturalism: In Practice and on Paper,” Journey of a Yellow Man No. 11 was a critique of the aesthetic conservatism of the time, exemplifed by the national art exhibition, Singapore Art 97, with its display of predominantly watercolour and Chinese paintings, and calligraphic works. However, it is noted that the exhibition’s 3D section— its panel chaired by Brother Joseph McNally— did include a mechanical moving-image installation, namely, Ming Wong’s Green Snake produced with Tim Thornton, which referenced the operatic classic, Madame White Snake.19 But this was an exception. Reading the source of the limits of the exhibition as symptomatic of “an obsessive preoccupation with ethnicity,” the artist presented his performative artwork as addressing the reality of the global condition in a self-conscious problematisation of identity

21

Substation, 1997); Lee Wen, Lee Wen: Lucid Dreams in the Reverie of the Real (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 2012), 114. Lucy Davis, “Wings (Metamorphosis), Lee Wen: Variations on The Exquisite Body—Lee Weng Choy, Adele Tan, Lucy Davis, June Yap & Ray Langenbach,” in Lee Wen: Lucid Dreams in the Reverie of the Real, 35–6.

“with a loud, pronounced yellow.” Yet, as he was to refexively demonstrate to humorous effect, this identity was also “tenuous” by submerging his painted body into a tub of water, and offering his audiences the bottled bathwater, yellow from having been used to sluice off this “identity,” and announcing, “Now I am a watercolourist too!”20 Yellow, not yellow enough, or too yellow—the aim of the performance would appear to be the presentation of the cultural dilemma, rather than its resolution; as Lucy Davis was to comment, Lee Wen’s embodiment of the essentialist defnition of his identity in this performance was “only part successful,” its “promise of change […] abandoned half way.”21 But, perhaps, what is revealed in these refections on the disjunctions of the global condition, noting what it is, rather than what it is assumed or prescribed to be—through Tang’s tiger caught between continuity of Culture and its corporeal end, Heng’s desire for familial reconnection, and Lee Wen’s unsettled embodiment—is that the foundation of the global, nation, is itself not untroubled. Limits The outlook of nation under the pressures of global forces do not appear all too favourable; as Møller describes, the nation state is “no longer jeune premier,” “performing the dying

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22 23 24 25 26

Møller, op cit., 56, 66. Duara, op cit., 102. Rodrik, op. cit., 238–9. Duara, op cit., 6, 22, 28. T.K. Sabapathy, “Introduction” and “Trimurti: Thoughts on Contexts,” in Trimurti and Ten Years After, ed. T.K. Sabapathy (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 1998), 8–9, 31; Constance Sheares, “In Conversation with: S. Chandrasekaran, Goh Ee Choo, Salleh Japar,” in ibid., 54. 27 S. Chandrasekaran, Goh Ee Choo & Salleh Japar, “Trimurti, 1988: Statements and Documentation,” in ibid., 11. 28 Ahmad Mashadi, “‘Different Things’: Trimurti and

swan—sometimes with very little grace, but no other role is available in the script of history.”22 The waning of nation may, however, not come entirely as a surprise given its constitution, having emerged in “the volatile tension between its globality and its nationness”as a result of 19thcentury globalisation, which was, effectively, an exercise of power and empire.23 It is for reason of “managing” this inherent “tension” between nation and global desires that Rodrik suggests the necessity of choosing two of three options in globalisation’s “trilemma”—hyperglobalisation, democracy and the nation.24 A similar sacrifce is suggested by Duara to alleviate the crisis of sustainability, though, in a “holism” of authority as a “modern universalism” via the “revisit [of ] the alternative traditions from China and India,” to transcend nation in its basis of a “tribal self-other distinction.”25 Such a scenario by way of aesthetic response, engaging too with the subject of transcendence in a convergence of contrasting forces and aesthetic approaches, may be said to have been the subject of the seminal exhibition, Trimurti, presented at the Goethe Institut in 1988 by artists S. Chandrasekaran, Goh Ee Choo and Salleh Japar. 324

Multicultural Assertions,” in ibid., 32, 40–1.

29 Swaminathan as quoted in S. Chandrasekaran, “In

30

31 32

Conversation: S. Chandrasekaran with T.K. Sabapathy,” in Living Stories, ed. T.K. Sabapathy (Singapore: S. Chandrasekaran, 2012), 5. Alfan Sa’at, “Empty Signifers Make the Most Noise (Or, Refections on the Merlion’s Refection),” in MIKE: Lim Tzay-Chuen Singapore: 51 la Biennale di Venezia (Singapore: National Arts Council & Singapore Art Museum, 2005), 13. Duara, op cit., 67. Lily Kong & Brenda S.A. Yeoh, The Politics of Landscapes in Singapore: Constructions of ‘Nation’ (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2003), 153–4.

Trimurti was conceived around the time of other initiatives such as The Artists Village—considered by Chandrasekaran as based on “Western-oriented concepts” relative to Trimurti—as well as the sprawling and participatory exhibition, More than 4, by Tang Mun Kit, Chng Chin Kang, Lim Poh Teck and Baet Yoke Kuan at the Botanic Gardens and the former St Joseph’s Institution before it was redeveloped into the Singapore Art Museum.26 As such, Trimurti’s problematisation of infuences and inheritances of culture and identity as its aesthetic project had company. However, Trimurti was also exceptional in its approach. Assuming the Sanskrit word describing the Hindu Godhead of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva re-interpreted as three distinct forces of Creation, Preservation and Destruction that, regardless, were held in equilibrium, Trimurti was envisaged as “a total happening” of painting, sculptures, installation and performance.27 Read as critically responding to historical experiences of the nation in its making that had necessitated the management of ethnic differences, Ahmad Mashadi was to retrospectively remark that, Trimurti nevertheless “[replicated] the very ideology of multiculturalism” in its

June Yap

proposition of coexistence.28 Yet, if considered for its transcendental approach, Trimurti might be seen as less the presentation of a tempering of contradictory forces which multiculturalism may imply, than an emphasis on a dynamism of interdependence and the problem of illusory appearances—of differences—particularly when seen in the context of Chandrasekaran’s sculpture series. Following Trimurti, Chandrasekaran spent time in Madras learning and observing wood carving and temple architecture; his experiments culminating in his bronze sculptures, Deva Series I–IV (1994, fg. 23.9). Contrary to its title, the Deva Series approximated, rather than produced, the deifed form, in a refection on the ritual of darshan, where the form assumes godhood. In this ceremonial act, the craftsman fnishes the eyes of the form he is making in a ritual that “opens” the Divine gaze. But this moment is suspended in Deva Series, even as all the trappings of body (though often lacking the head), posture, accessory, pedestal and celestial transport or vahana are reproduced. Through Deva Series, Chandrasekaran was to create a profane aesthetic that, nonetheless, appeared divine—or as his peer Swaminathan was to exclaim, “What is this, it looks like god, but it is not god!”29 Thus, as with Trimurti, the Deva Series may be seen as an attempt at exposing the inner workings of representation, performed through the use of familiar frame and reference. Whilst such an approach may seem to have overtones of concession, recalling the entanglement suggested by Sabapathy, this complicity is, however, not incidental. Rather, as a collusive strategy, it is key to the artwork’s thrust as observed in Vincent Leow’s Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous: The Three-Legged Toad, with its subject, the nature of capital. Produced for The Space exhibition at Hong Bee Warehouse in 1992, central to Lifestyle was a suit and hat that Leow fabricated from photocopied reproductions of the American banknote. Donning

this suit, Leow performed as a personifcation of the Chinese Chan Chu or prosperity charm, the toad mascot of the aspiring everyman. Hopping and leaping around while masticating and spitting the dollar notes from his mouth, Leow’s prosperous fgure, apparently subsisting on and expelling wealth, was to call into question the superstitions of both currency notes and charm. Post-performance, Leow’s outft has become a performance relic, Money Suit (1992, fg. 23.10); its enshrinement paradoxically affrming the success of its critique and its material appeal. Whereas Leow’s performance took issue with capital in its symbol of currency, the subject of capital was brought into relation with nation, in the currency of a national symbol, in Lim Tzay Chuen’s proposition for the Venice Biennale of 2005. Crafted as a bid to bring the 80-tonne half-fsh, half-feline Merlion constructed in 1972—“its upper half […] metonym [of founding myth] and its lower half metaphor [of maritime history]”—from the Marina Bay in Singapore to Venice, Italy, Lim’s proposal pushed the subject of nation within the global to its logical conclusion.30 That is, to assume the truth of its currency as “circulatory global resource,” which may be imported, exported and traded upon, and in no less than an exhibition about nation as global entity, the Venice Biennale.31 Furthermore, as a national commission, MIKE (fg. 23.11) (as the Merlion was nicknamed within Lim’s proposal) may be said to have satisfed the nation’s central need to be its own subject, putting to work the symbol of the nation’s aspirations for international recognition.32 However, unable to garner approvals for MIKE to make the voyage, in place of the nation signifed, Lim’s exhibition presented other conventional elements of the tourist or visitor’s experience: an “informational” room, a bathroom as utilitarian rest-stop and site of other watery needs, and a sign within the pavilion’s courtyard marking the location where the Merlion would have stood had it arrived as pro-

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posed. In absence it would appear that Lim’s project failed, but the crux of the proposal may be said to be in its “success” as documented in a fctitious news article included in the exhibition catalogue. In the article, “Singapore Icon Makes a Splash at Venice,” purportedly written by Cindy/Carol Vogel—the frst name used in the catalogue, the second in a poster provided by the artist in 2015, though both signalling the subject of the global centres of art in referencing Carol Vogel, a veteran arts writer of The New York Times—Lim is quoted via a “spokesperson” as claiming that the proposal was about the fctions of nation, and the opportunity to add “more layers to the story.”33 It is without doubt that Lim’s proposal has added just such a layer. But the corollary of such an addition is the question of what one might fnd if one were to peel away these layers? The fction of nation is the subject of James C. Scott’s study of the peoples of the upland regions of Southeast Asia, circumscribed as Zomia—a term he attributes to Willem van Schendel, referring to the high-altitude areas crossing Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Burma, as well as the Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangxi and Sichuan provinces of China. Within Scott’s chronicle, these Zomia communities, which operate without the structure of nation (or specifcally avoiding nation’s “enclosure” of legible, taxable, assessable, confscatable and replaceable economic activity), may be seen as the alternative to the nation-centric regionalism of Southeast Asia. Marked by their state-repelling strategies in settlement, agriculture and social structure, Scott notes that the eschewing of nation is also coded into their cosmologies and oral traditions. Handed down in “cautionary tales about hierarchy and state formation” for the Akha in the southern Yunnan and adjacent areas in Laos, Burma and Thailand, and in the rejection of history and genealogy by the egalitarian Lisu of Northern Thailand, nation and its representations has little place for these communities. In fact, in 326

the case of the Lisu, “Lisuness” as a category exists only to outsiders.34 While Scott qualifes his study as a relational exposition between lowland state and hill peoples, his work presents the truth of the ideological horizon of the global and its constituent, nation. On the one hand, the ways of the peoples of Zomia may be considered an instance of heterodoxy or alterity, but on the other hand, and particularly from their perspective, such an outlook would seem natural. Undone As marker of the contemporary, identifying the global within aesthetic expression performs the task of positioning the artwork and, in aggregation, an aesthetic scene, as climacteric. Yet, as observed from these artworks—the fragment adrift, a rubble reconstituted, the reclaiming of the unwanted, the presaging of the end of culture in practice, the desire for a reconciliation that seems out of reach even as it is near, the exploration of appearances, illusions and constructed narratives—the artwork as contemporary response to the global condition appears less affrmative than chary, or, as earlier noted, “circumspect.” Though it may also be said that, in the appearance of hesitation, caution or, even, uncertainty, the artwork reveals the global condition. After all, globalisation is not just about geopolitics, it is also a discourse of interests and a way of seeing. From the artists’ perspective, it would appear that, as view, it is rather limited. Speaking on Simryn Gill’s practice on the occasion of her exhibition at the 55th Venice Biennale for the Australian pavilion, Brian Massumi, observing how Gill’s artworks refect her lineage and history of traversal (descendant of Sikh ex-patriots, born in Singapore pre-Federation-of-Malaysia, and then living in Australia and Malaysia), suggests that the act of collecting—which may be read in the context of this essay as a deterritorialisation and of the

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33

Cindy Vogel, “Singapore Icon Makes a Splash at Venice Biennale,” The News Times, 19 June 2005 in MIKE, 36. James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Singapore: NUS Press, 2010), xiv, 5, 176–8, 234–5, 244.

35 Brian Massumi, “Making to Place: In the Artist’s

displaced, in aesthetic practice as well as National Collection—is intrinsically related to origins. Though, he also notes, “an origin is by nature out of place,” and thus Gill’s assembly of objects, forms and texts illustrates our “ways of regaining our composure in the essentially out-of-place” that is our reality. Faced with the question of how and what to present in her Venetian exhibition in 2013, Massumi

described Gill’s answer as the attentive act of “creative undoing,” allowing the space of the pavilion to come into its own, revealing its true nature.35 The same may be said of the aesthetic response to the global condition as observed in these artworks discussed: not in confrontation, nor of variance, but of a loosening of limits that, coincidentally, make these expressions truly global.

34

Words, Refracted,” in Simryn Gill, Here Art Grows on Trees, ed. Catherine de Zegher (Gent: MER. Paper Kunsthalle, 2013), 188, 220.

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Conway Mordaunt Shipley Chinese and Western Ships in Singapore Harbour 1854 Watercolour on paper 17.4 x 26.2 cm Collection of National Gallery Singapore

Simryn Gill Washed Up 1993–1995 Glass Dimensions variable Collection of Singapore Art Museum 23.2



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Tang Mun Kit Bomb Sculpture #2 1991 Found plaster moulding, dye, acrylic, enamel and varnish 84 x 45.5 x 6.5 cm Gift of Ng Chee Sun Collection of Singapore Art Museum Tang Mun Kit Bomb Sculpture #4 1991 Found plaster moulding, dye, acrylic, enamel and varnish 79 x 43 x 6.5 cm Gift of Ng Chee Sun Collection of Singapore Art Museum

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M. Faizal Fadil Study of Three Thermos Flasks 1991 Aluminium 35 x 13.5 x 10.5 cm (each) Collection of Singapore Art Museum 23.5



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Tang Da Wu & the participants of A Sculpture Seminar Tiger’s Whip (also known as I Want My Penis Back) 1991 Mixed media Dimensions variable Collection of Singapore Art Museum

Amanda Heng Another Woman 1996–1997 C-Print 75.4 x 100.9 cm Collection of Singapore Art Museum 23.7



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Lee Wen Journey of a Yellow Man No. 11: Multi-Culturalism 1997 Digital giclee print 101.6 x 144.8 cm Collection of National Gallery Singapore

S. Chandrasekaran Deva Series I 1994 Bronze 25 x 15 x 20 cm Collection of Singapore Art Museum 23.9



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23.11 Lim Tzay Chuen MIKE 2005 Digital print Dimensions variable Artwork courtesy of the artist Presentation by National Gallery Singapore

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1

2

Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “On Alternative Modernities,” in Alternative Modernities (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2001), 1. See John Clark, Modern Asian Art (Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 1998); Apinan Poshyananda, et al., Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions/Tensions, exh. cat. (New York: Asia Society Galleries, 1996); Caroline Turner, Art and Social Change: Contemporary Art in Asia and the Pacifc (Canberra: Pandanus Books, 2005).

3

4 5

See Nora A. Taylor, “The Southeast Asian Art Historian as Ethnographer?,” Third Text: Contemporaneity and Art in Southeast Asia 25, no. 4 (2011): 475–88. The journal dedicated a special issue which sought to unlock this emerging feld. Anthony Reid, History of South East Asia: Critical Crossroads (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015). Jennifer Lindsay, ed., Between Tongues: Translation and/of/in Performance in Asia (Singapore: NUS Press, 2006).

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Drafting History: Meditation on Location, Institutions and Myth-Making in Visual Arts in Postcolonial Singapore Venka Purushothaman

There is a new confdence to draft history into the writing of art discourse in postcolonial Singapore—a youthful city-state, with deep fnancial pockets in a sea of tumultuous but ancient cultures and economies. Culture drafts (sketches) and drafts (enlists). Perhaps drafting for a new generation of confdent museum goers crisscrossing the axis of fnance and culture in a prosperous city; or perhaps it is a newfound opportunity for the creative economy to generate discourse and enrich cultural value. As newly minted museums and gallery systems emerge—as signifers of both culture and commerce—one is left breathless at the rapid speed of development in the visual arts sector. At any given point in time, contemporary art-making in Singapore resonates with the development of the city state: imagined and engineered in simulacra of identities borrowed and emulated from established economies of 20th328

century Western society. It is no denying that history of art in Singapore and Southeast Asia (SEAsia) is a product of modernity “awakened by contact; transported through commerce; administered by empires, bearing colonial inscriptions; propelled by nationalism; and now increasingly steered by global media, migration, and capital.”1 It is a key consideration when seeking to tease out the place of art in a fast globalising SEAsia. The narrative structures of art are inscribed both by heritage and received knowledge of colonialism, and continue to imbibe an identitarian politics located in both continental philosophy and modernity.2 Contemporary art in Singapore can be ascribed to a strange meeting of foreignness on a deserted island seeking to present worldviews that are located within highly developed and classifed Western historical and aesthetical systems. A foreignness determined by the en-

Charting Thoughts

thusiasm of colonisers to increase their wealth by imbuing a wasteland into a trading powerhouse in SEAsia, which brought about an internationalism that remains critical to the success of Singapore. The range of platforms, from museums to heritage centres; from biennales to museum-curated exhibitions; from commercial galleries to art fairs; from academic centres to not-for-proft sites; and from artist collectives to art consultancies, enforce a critical perspective of internationalism in contemporary Singapore. A panoptical scan of Singapore’s fnely regulated ecology of cultural systems reveals a visual assault of imageries espousing the critical place of art in the making of a global city: It affords an opportunity to look deeply at the production and circulation of meanings and the making of culture. But the magic of cultural transformation works wondrously fast in Singapore while its neighbouring countries continue to struggle to preserve cultural identities. This essay is a meditation on location, institutions and myth-making, at how they intersect and draft history into becoming a conspirator in discourse-making. Location In recent times, the rush to historicise is eminent. This is front-ended by the changing geopolitical scenario in SEAsia as fast developing countries in the region, with rich and deep cultural histories, carve out their territories in art. I opine that much of 20th-century engagement with SEAsia and its art had an ethnographic/ anthropological sense of discovery and contextualisation rather than an inimitable point of view about the world and its very own socius.3 Furthermore, the art market that constantly seeks to add to its Asian portfolio of offerings, as evidenced by auction house sales and the proliferation of art galleries from Singapore to Hong Kong representing SEAsian art, continues to reinforce this ethnographic/anthropological perspective.

The 21st century sees a new beginning as these countries proposition a confdence that directs their perspective on art. SEAsia, with an approximate population of 625 million people, a huge economic base and an extremely large youth population across its ten countries, remains a sleepy enterprise trapped within geo-graphies and neocolonialist cultural formulations when contrasted against the energetic developments in East Asia (China, Japan and South Korea). It is awakening. It is now a fecund region of fast-emerging economies that have deep and ancient histories, as well as a long developed arts and culture scene that is alive and vibrant. SEAsia is seeing a renaissance in economic and cultural growth propelled by industrialisation, globalisation and a rising middle income.4 But the development of its arts and culture continues to be plagued well into the 21st century, with debates on preservation and promotion of traditional arts against the growth and promotion of contemporary arts that are demonstratively aligned with economic progress and an emerging affuent and mobile society.5 The twin agents of change, globalisation and internationalisation, have created opportunities that sustain and preserve the production and circulation of traditional arts and crafts. I defne globalisation as a manner in which, through colonialism, foreign policy, commerce and popular culture, a veneer of sameness emerges as nations become centrally controlled by market economies. Aspiring nations emulate and indulge in establishing global cities full of cultural vibrancy (e.g. art markets, biennales, etc.). Internationalism, on the other hand, allows nations to articulate their point of view. In doing so, they enable others to understand, learn and engage with culturally specifc endeavours. There are numerous examples of this, and both globalisation and internationalisation have been used as tools of cultural policies in rising economies in Asia. Whilst internationalisation has been useful (for example, here I am reminded of the way Indonesian

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gamelan music found its way into the musical compositions of many globally), globalisation, on the other hand, has reduced Asian arts to brands, embellishments and consumables (e.g. Shaolin monks and their world performance tour; Ai Weiwei and his brand of political activitism) where they play to highlight the fow of cultures within cities and societies. The opening of the National Gallery Singapore in 2015 marked a major infrastructural investment in the visual arts. It seems to arrive audaciously late at a waning global city party, as cultural developments were evident as early as the beginning of the millennium.6 Yet it started with a provocation. Its 2015 opening exhibition on Singapore art is titled Siapa Nama Kamu? (“What is your name?” in Bahasa Melayu). It is a question found embedded within the 1959 social-realist painting by Chua Mia Tee, National Language Class. While the work foregrounds questions of identity in a new country through the notion of learning the language of place, it takes on mythic propositions in 21st-century Singapore where issues of identity and future-proofng are critical for the longevity of this multicultural, multireligious and multi-ethnic country and its purposiveness to SEAsia. The guide accompanying the exhibition states that “the most arresting fact about Singapore is her location: set in a vast archipelago of island neighbours, she raises questions of scale and proportion whenever she is contemplated. Seeming almost submerged in the immensity of their surroundings, Singapore’s sea-locked inhabitants are constantly compelled to look outwards.”7 The exhibition, through its display of works, prompts the visitor to contextualise history through the lens of art. Location for Singapore goes beyond a mere structural relationship to geography: It is manifestly embedded in history-making and imagining a nation. For a city-state of approximately fve million compared to SEAsia’s scale, history’s structured geography is crucial. I draw on Arjun Appadurai’s seminal essay, “How 330

Histories Make Geographies: Circulation and Context in Global Perspective,” in which he asserts: “we need to recognise that histories produce geographies and not vice versa. We must get away from the notion that there is some kind of spatial landscape against which time writes its story. Instead, it is historical agents, institutions, actors, power that make the geography.”8 The shaping of Singapore through political, economic and industrial instruments of governmentality is well-documented. Singapore is birthed by geopolitical history and this is imagined through the city-state’s role in trade and its lack of resources for self-sustainability. As such, the arts play a critical function in the shaping of culture: image-making through artefacts and visual narratives; events and systems of community engagement; and buildings as lifestyle destinations. These anchor and integrate themselves within the ecology and, at appropriate times, signpost and perform the nation and culture, respectively. They foster a “circulation of forms” and “narrate the nation” to the external world which crystallise what a vibrant fnancial and business city can do by linking art, business and enterprise.9 It is systematically done through a bureaucracy of beauty and aesthetics, to borrow from Dutta, whereby instrumentalisation of making and exhibiting predetermines the face of cultural identity.10 The Singaporean environment is deeply complex. While the nation is defned through multicultural, multireligious and multi-ethnic dimensions, art and its practice are largely defned by contemporary aesthetics and investor– collector interest. In actual fact, much of it is considered in reference to aesthetics that are imbibed through Western, though not exclusively, discursive frameworks. Art historian John Clark provides plausible rationale for the reliance on Western discursive frameworks. He says, “[i]n Southeast Asia, realistic European oil painting was not connected with the strong

Venka Purushothaman

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Late in that Singapore arts infrastructural development to support the city-state’s global city aspirations commenced in 1998 propelled by cultural policies such as the Report of the Advisory Council of Culture and the Arts (1998) and the Renaissance City Plans in three parts (RCP I, 2000; RCP II, 2005, RCP III, 2008). During this period, massive infrastructural development, of the Esplanade–Theatres on the Bay, Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore Art Museum, National Museum of Singapore and the Singapore Tyler Print Institute framed the way national visual identities were to be experienced. Sara Siew, ed., Siapa Nama Kamu? Art in Singapore since the 19 th Century: Selections from the Exhibition (Singapore: National Gallery Singapore, 2015), 6.

pictorial discourse of China and Japan, each of which had developed parallel art theoretical or poetic criticism.”11 But any attempt at articulating a collective aesthetic for SEAsia—premised on geography, language and history—is challenging and, to say the least, a futile exercise. The infuence of more than three centuries of colonial presence could make allowance for those who “surmise that Southeast Asian artists are, in a sense, more thoroughly (classically) Westernised.”12 From the Philippines to Singapore, one would fnd that the strong language of Western realism is pervasive. But with the regions’ transition to postcolonialism, which ushered in a period of political upheaval and industrialisation, this language of realism underwent a phantasmatic transformation to become an Asian stylistic form. This provides an entry point to understand public institutions deliberating over contemporary art practices. However, one could argue that contemporary art practices resonate better with the aspirations of a future-looking nation than ideals of tradition and preservation. Yet, as the Singaporean population ages, the ideals of tradition and preservation seep into critical

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Arjun Appadurai, “How Histories Make Geographies: Circulation and Context in Global Perspective,” Transcultural Studies 1 (2010): 4–13. 9 Ibid, 4; Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London & New York: Routledge, 1990). 10 Arindam Dutta, The Bureaucracy of Beauty: Design in the Age of its Global Reproducibility (New York: Routledge, 2006). 11 John Clark as quoted in David Chou-Shulin, “Introduction to the Aesthetics of Southeast Asia,” in Asian Aesthetics, ed. Ken-ichi Sasaki (Singapore: NUS Press, 2011), 248. 12 Ibid., 253. 13 Elizabeth Mansfeld, ed., Art History and its Institutions: Foundations of a Discipline (New York: Routledge, 2002).

discourse as museums become emblems of the past. While a young nation such as Singapore and youthful SEAsia continue to historicise from without, there is urgency to historicise, to contextualise and to summarise from within so as to articulate a cultural legacy, especially for an aging population; at the same time concepts of national identity need to be crystallised for a youth population that is much more globally connected yet locally distanced. Art historians in Singapore have resisted the act of historicising art in Singapore. This is because the drafting of history requires the historian to take a self-professed positioning outside of the regime of the system—art, people and exhibitions.13 In a rapidly developing art environment in Singapore, the art historian is also located within the regime of the system, advising, co-curating and participating in institutional projects, dabbling in aesthetics and advising and guiding artistic practice; the art historian constantly arrives at a fork in the road: museum or academia, disciplinary practice or professional practice, and research or curation. It is particularly useful to see art historians negotiate the dichotomy of at once being within

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14 Venka Purushothaman, “Cultural Policy, Creative Economy and Arts Higher Education in Renaissance Singapore,” in Higher Education and Creative Economy, eds. Roberta Comunian & Abigail Gilmore (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 201–19. 15 Great exhibitions refer to blockbusters that showcase the world and are popular with visitors. Major museums, such as the Tate (United Kingdom) and

and without, and how it compromises or enhances their particular felds of study. The slippages between their coterminous roles provide for a rich interplay between history-making and contemporary curation. The manner of infuence and manifestation of their oversight predetermine the outcome of a curatorial concept before historicisation sets in. This does not mean that art history or a sustained engagement with it is not evident. Its discourses are circulated in artist monographs, exhibition catalogues, cultural policies, government documents and cultural studies, revealing often, though not always, a largely hagiographical approach to art. Commercial galleries, auction houses, collectors and artists enlist art writers and art historians to contextualise their practices (perhaps to win a spot in the line-up of history?) as art trade fairs organise deeply thought-provoking seminars with brand-name academics from the Western art world to educate the Asian consumer. A fascinating mélange of activities cajole the marketplace of the importance of art and investment. Institutions Art’s legacy is often left at the door of the museum. Here it is collected, polished, organised and catalogued into a large canon. The museum structure is relentlessly harsh and antithetical to the artist’s studio where creativity fourishes in a sacred, yet private, space. The solid walls of a 332

National Gallery of Victoria (Australia), often stage defining exhibitions to enhance visitor engagement. Such exhibitions could take the format of presentation of masterpieces (e.g. National Gallery Singapore’s presentation of works from the Centre Pompidou, 2015) to surveys of individual artists such as Andy Warhol and Ai Weiwei.

museum (unlike the walls of art galleries which invite a transactional perspective) defne, categorise and guide the public through revelations of the artists’ minds stripped bare of their deep dark secrets. As a site of the curator’s acquisitional pride, a museum is where art becomes object; history becomes canon; and artists are anointed. Access reigns as technology-infused platforms, educational programmes and restaurants drive connectivity and fuel enthusiasm, thereby increasing visitorship—the viewer is transformed into a participant of the institution and destination. Here, there is no place for the politics of aesthetic ideology; it is a place of agreeability, of compromise, of spectacle: a wunderkammer. Singapore’s rich collection of public museums supported by a subsidiary commercial and not-for-proft gallery system is a recent evolution. This ecology emerged as part of the grand plan for a cultural and creative centre in the 1990s to make Singapore a vibrant global city for the arts.14 Public museums, notably the National Museum of Singapore, Singapore Art Museum, Asian Civilisations Museum, National Gallery Singapore are key cultural destinations and must-sees in the cultural and excursion/tourism sectors. As Singapore museums and galleries signpost a 50-year-old nation, they speak of a nation, a society, articulating a sense of location, thereby contextualising its relationship to and within SEAsia. Whilst located in SEAsia, Singapore does

Venka Purushothaman

not boast SEAsian art; it is an imagining of colonialism, a mere trading port of Chinese and Indian migrant communities. The National Gallery Singapore revisits this. It is a centripetal force drawing SEAsia into its legal chambers-turned-galleries. It occupies Singapore’s former Supreme Court and City Hall buildings and as these are heritage buildings, the National Gallery is required to maintain a number of its chambers while other spaces, including the prisoners holding areas, remain intact. The gallery exhibits its own permanent collection and co-presents SEAsian art. In presenting the regional, the arbitration of art in a former Supreme Court elevates it to a meta order of myth-making. The gallery’s commanding presence, both in terms of architecture and collection, allows it to fetishise art from SEAsia and to steer scholars, art historians, curators and art writers toward discourse-making. Balancing being a kunsthalle and a wunderkammer, public museums such as the National Gallery, in recent times, pack themselves with PhDclad curators and invest in discourse-making through colloquia and publication; it begs the question as to the type of historicising that will emerge in an arts ecology that is bureacratised, museifed, fnancialised and academicised. Salleh Japar’s 1993 installation Mechanised Learning is a critique of knowledge and information accumulation in an industrialising Singapore that privileges acquisition over refection, transaction over mediation and the general over the particular. An installation of books vice-clamped and mechanically propelled to squeeze into the head of an individual, the work comments on the over-emphasis of rote learning in Singapore at the price of developing the human mind. The work remains a sharp and timeless reminder of the reality on the ground, of cramming to acquire knowledge. The 21stcentury museum is in a similar conundrum as the head that is mechanically cramming into a process of study. But historically, institutions, such as public museums, have functioned as

the mediatory site between art and the public, and are the centralising force in the cultural and creative ecology. They acquire, curate, exhibit, educate as well as promote art and certain lifestyles, to create mythic and utopic experiences rooted in the ideals of the nation. Their condition is, deterministically, to play the role of canon-maker and be the manifestation of state/ national power. It cannot be either/or hence remaining a site to historicise art. The national gets performed as art wears the building. Over time it will wear down the buildings as the patina of familiarity envelopes the national. Over time the engagement with that which is within will be critical: the entry of the great exhibition will be imminent.15 Myth-Making Ho Tzu Nyen’s Utama—Every Name in History is I (2003–2015), a series of video and portrait paintings (later transcreated in 2005 into four episodes of “docu-visuals” for television), appropriates the 14th-century mythic founder of ancient Singapura, Sang Nila Utama. Ho’s work is the frst discursive platform to present a revised imagining of the founding of Singapore, conceptually locating it in SEAsia. In deconstructing the collective proposition of history and the historiography that has accompanied Singapore thus far, Ho judiciously brings myth and history together. The work boldly goes where political historians do not: that modern Singapore is a myth created to be located into SEAsia. It is structured on quantifables and binaries, and its lack—of resources, of primal identities—is its presence, existence and strength. SEAsia itself, with its disparate, multilingual cultures, beliefs and value systems, does not lend itself well to quantifcation and binaries. It is still understood through the gaze of foreign policy and commerce even today, though the transgressive nature of these is less effective than that of colonialism. For example, in SEAsia, one would fnd that the connection between land

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as “the known” and as “the unknown” is often negotiated through the body as means to transgress and transcend the grounded realities of the spiritual, imaginary and virtual world.16 This negotiation is done through the trope of myth, which allows Asians their ontology of place, geography and self to navigate contradictions inherent in society. I am interested in visiting myth-making, which when contextualised in SEAsia has links to the spheres of ritual, spiritual, darkness, magic, illusion and play. In art, it manifestly stands out in social realist art that serves to ethnographically document the everyday. Social realism’s closest ally, I would deem, would be magic realism: a device of creating a transcendental quality to fctional imagining, conjuring the funny and fearful, melodramatic and real, and the productive and counterproductive revealing that which is there yet unknown, unspoken. It is at once a play (lila), an illusory moment (maya) and a discovery giving voice to that which is not represented. I have argued in my earlier writings that magic realism, which was popularised by postcolonial novelists such as Salman Rushdie, has been a useful device for re-claiming cultural representation from colonial representation worldwide.17 Its potency is in its ability to unravel the weaves of social, political and cultural structures and knowledge that are often taken for granted and assumed as appropriate. Postcolonial theorist Stephen Slemon writes that “in the language of narration in a magic realist text, a battle between two oppositional systems takes place, each working toward the creation of a fctional world from the other” and the “real social relations of postcolonial cultures appear, through the mediation of the text’s language of narration, in the post-colonial magic realist work.”18 But more importantly the play with binary logic and the triptych logic of physical–metaphysical–self is constantly at hand but never quite the same. Thereby magic realist texts “tend to display a preoccupation with images of borders and 334

centres, and to work towards destabilizing their fxity.”19 Magic realism in art conjures paradoxes that allow for the conception of alternative planes of existence. It propels a discursive otherness through illusion, facilitating the emergence of hybrid identities, fexible hierarchies and plural exchanges in a transnational space where power structures are deterritorialised. To contextualise these as being of SEAsia is an opportunity for the museum sector to build upon. Perhaps it is irrelevant to prove if Singapore is of SEAsia and how institutions frame this through art. Rather, it is the construction of the mythic possibility, that is to prove the centrality of Singapore for art in SEAsia, by exhibiting, acquiring and historicising, that such an enterprise can even be taken seriously. Conclusion This essay is concerned about the rapidity of history-making. I am informed by Nietzsche’s epic lament on history in Untimely Meditation (1873) that humans do not defne history but are defned by it. Charging particularly at Europe for its “excessive concern for the past” in the 19th century, he foregrounds that modernity’s excess had led to the construct of history being defned by symbols of power, namely individuals, and less so by lived lives or philosophical renderings.20 Museums can be entrapped for monumentalising artists, celebrating the historic successes of the past and/ or simply moving away from it. But public museums should be based on a site of inspiration, not merely a site of remembrance. This would be being true to the etymology of the word “museum” which is of muses and a place of inspiration. Hence, a balance between the historicising of art and a forgetting of the institution is necessary to move forward.

I thank the editors and reviewers for their valuable feedback on earlier drafts of this essay.

Venka Purushothaman

16 Barbara Watson Andaya, The Flaming Womb: Re-

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positioning Women in Early Modern Southeast Asia (Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 2006); Fred B. Eisenman, Jr, Bali: Sekala and Niskala (Hong Kong: Tuttle Press, 1990). Venka Purushothaman, ed., The Art of Sukumar Bose: Refections of South and Southeast Asia (Singapore:

Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2013).

18 Stephen Slemon, “Magic Realism as Post-Colonial

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Discourse,” Canadian Literature 116 Spring (1988): 9–24. Ibid, 11. Mark Sinclair, “Nietzsche and the Problem of History,” Richmond Journal of Philosophy 8, Winter (2004): 1–6.

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1

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The scene of the two retired professors comes from my essay, “A Country of Last Whales—Contemplating the Horizon of Global Art History; Or, Can We Ever Really Understand How Big the World is?,” Third Text 25, no. 4 (2011): 447–57. The fve editors commissioned for Comparative Contemporaries were: Sue Acret, Patrick D. Flores, Ho Tzu Nyen, Ly Daravuth and Keiko Sei. For various reasons, the project has stalled. Some portions of this section are derived from my texts from the website; see Comparative Contemporaries: A Web Anthology Project, http://comparative.aaa.org.hk (accessed 28 March 2015). My debts to Benjamin’s ideas on history should

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be clear here. See, for instance, Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the philosophy of history,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (Berlin: Schocken Books, 1969), 253–64. Much as I would like, I do not have the space here to engage with someone like Peter Osborne and his analysis of the genealogy of the concept of the contemporary in art. The proverbial phrase “the past is a foreign country” is from the opening sentence of L.P. Hartley’s novel, The Go-Between (1953). The reader might notice that my thinking on Southeast Asia excludes perspectives from the sea. At this point, I can only acknowledge this blind spot, but I am not yet prepared to properly address it.

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Metonym and Metaphor, Islands and Continents: Refections on Curating Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia Lee Weng Choy

1 Could we return to a fctional scene? A few years back, writing about “global art history,” I evoked a hypothetical elderly couple. Both are retired professors; the man studied literature and the woman, flm. One day she had a dream which recalled a moment from when they started dating. Back then, she was doing her PhD at the university where he taught, and, once in a while, she would go to his lectures. In her dream, the man, in his mid-30s, is waving his arms, pontifcating in front of a class of sophomores. “The purpose, the true purpose of literature, of reading novels when you are young, is this: so that they can provide certain images of the world, of life, that will come back and haunt you, if you are so lucky to grow old.”1 As I imagine them, the elderly couple still live in a university town in the Northeastern 336

United States, and her dream harks back to the late 1970s. The where and when of that scene are very different from those of this essay. Here, I am concerned with contemporary art from Southeast Asia or, more specifcally, the regional assumptions underlying its curation. But perhaps the whys and hows are not unrelated. If not “the true purpose,” then is it not at least one of art’s many functions to suggest images, visual or conceptual, that will trouble and delight us for years to come? Although maybe the more pertinent comparison is this: with the storyteller, the poet, they address the world as something daunting—it is diffcult to live in and make sense of; it is too big, too complicated, too messy. I do not believe good novelists ever presume to fully apprehend the worlds they create; their reach always exceeds their grasp, and their perspectives are admittedly partial and personal. It is in this context

Charting Thoughts

that they struggle to fnd something to say. Is it not the same with artists? And what about for those who write about art? 2 Years ago, I initiated a web anthology project called Comparative Contemporaries. The project aimed to bring together art writing from across Asia and began with fve editors, each of whom selected what they believed are key texts of writing from or for Southeast Asia.2 Over time, the plan was for new editors and their “proto-anthologies” to be added to the website. Far from attempting to establish a canon of authors, the intent was to generate a community of researchers and readers engaged in discussion. The project alluded to the discipline of comparative literature, which considers not only different national traditions but also different historical periods, often with the aim of questioning the very concepts of “literature,” “tradition,” “canon,” “nation” and “history.” Likewise, Comparative Contemporaries called for an investigation of the art of different societies and traditions, and, at the same time, a questioning of those categories usually employed in constructing anthologies. In what ways is art across Asian countries “contemporary” with each other, or contemporary with art from anywhere else on the planet? How does one compare these varied practices and places? While Comparative Contemporaries focused on art writing, it had implications for curating the region. The project eschewed the goal of a survey or mapping; instead, its aims were deliberately provisional, refecting both its exploratory attitude and the fact that “we” in Asia (at the time the project was initiated) were then at the early stages of forming discourses about “our” contemporary art. Aristotle once proclaimed the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Comparative Contemporaries argued for the inverse: that it is better to understand “Asia” not as some unifed entity, but as a loose

and messy assembly of parts comprised of lateral and contingent associations. Comparative Contemporaries was not interested in the view from above or any totalising theme. Rather, it argued for perspectives articulated from the ground, always in process, always in negotiation. The question of who are our contemporaries is not just about geographical and temporal adjacencies. Proximity is formed in the imagination. We construct constellations of contemporaries, not unlike how we order groups of stars in the night sky. The celestial bodies that comprise Orion are not actually next to each other in the galaxy; only as a consequence of our vantage point on earth can we draw them into an outline of the mythic hunter. Another thing about the contemporary: as an art critic, I may write about recent work, but I am less interested in the “new” than the “now.” Consider these two approaches to teaching history: in one, the lecturer prepares the students to go on a trip to the past, as if it were a foreign country; in the other, she guides the students through the present, showing them signs of how history is still everywhere. I am less interested in artworks that are new for the sake of being new, and prefer art that has a deeper sense of time. Thinking about the contemporary involves a detour into the historical fullness of our “now.” The proper tense of history is not the “past” but the “present.”3 By evoking the constellation, I have used a spatial metaphor for time. It is good to be vigilant about one’s use of metaphors. In my own case, I wonder if I tend to privilege “space” over “time,” seeing the latter through the lens of the former. Some other spatial metaphors I have enlisted here are the two geographic terms “islands” and “continents.” So is it a continental or an island/archipelagic perspective that shapes my own thinking of Southeast Asia? 4 Should we insist upon and prioritise the discontiguity of disparate parts? Is the island the right metonym for this part of the world? Or

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is there something that a continental Southeast Asia implies—that there is indeed, throughout the area, a collective desire for a larger, interconnected identity? 3 In January 2015, in advance of its opening in November that year, National Gallery Singapore held its frst forum, “Is Singapore the Place for Southeast Asia?”5 (I want to highlight a sampling of forums, symposia and the like organised by museums and other art institutions in Asia to acknowledge their role in developing art discourses in this part of the world; these gatherings are arguably more accessible to curators, artists and art audiences than academic conferences in the region. My itinerary includes events involving the Gallery; the Institute of Technology, Bandung (Institut Teknologi Bandung); the Asia Art Archive (AAA) in Hong Kong and the Asia Culture Centre (ACC) in Gwangju. The AAA has been a vital resource centre for practitioners as well as scholars, and the ACC, much like the Gallery, is a major new Asian museum complex that aims to position itself also as a research centre.) One of the speakers at the Gallery forum was Nora Taylor, who teaches art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Taylor spoke about the evolution of Southeast Asian art history, and the role that curating has played in the writing of these histories. When she started in the feld, Area Studies was the predominant frame for understanding the region, and few in Europe and North America studied its modern art in art history departments. Over 25 years later, the situation has naturally changed but even so, it was not long ago when research focused on individual countries and considerations of the region as a whole were rare. The discourse has shifted from criticising hegemonic notions of modernity and recognising “other modernities” to going beyond East versus West dichotomies and establishing 338

interregional conversations. Taylor emphasised how the curation of exhibitions and festivals, as well as the networking among artists and organisations have often provided the creative conditions where research has fourished in the region.6 A good example of interregionality, art history and exhibition-making coming together is Patrick D. Flores’s book Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia, which the author developed in parallel with his curatorial contribution for the 2008 Gwangju Biennale (helmed by artistic director Okwui Enwezor). For Gwangju, Flores looked at the practices of four seminal artist-curators: Raymundo Albano from the Philippines, Redza Piyadasa from Malaysia, Apinan Poshyananda from Thailand and Jim Supangkat from Indonesia.7 At the forum, Taylor also made the provocation that in Singapore, while the art museum may have had power, it lacked intellectual authority. When it launched in 1996, the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) boasted the largest collection of modern and contemporary artworks from Southeast Asia in a Southeast Asian museum, and was also the richest of the region’s national museums (the collection, which has since grown, is now shared with National Gallery Singapore). In my own review of the inaugural exhibition Modernity and Beyond (1996), I argued a similar point. Modernity was a demonstration of SAM’s aspirations, from the start, to become a leading museum for Southeast Asia. It had two components: Themes in Southeast Asian Art focused on the region with the exclusion of the host nation, and A Century of Art in Singapore was hitherto the most ambitious survey of the country’s art. A notable theme in Century was the journey; for example, the 1952 feld trip to Bali by the pioneer Nanyang-style artists. Artists may go overseas, they may even study abroad, but as far as Century was concerned, the most important part of their itinerary is the return. To travel may be to detour, but to return is to belong. The themes in Century were assimilated into a national-

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The full title of the Gallery forum included the subtitle, “Art, Agencies, Agendas.” The speakers were: Eugene Tan, Director of National Gallery Singapore; Nora A. Taylor, Alsdorf Professor of South and Southeast Asian Art History, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Joselina Cruz, Director and Curator for Museum of Contemporary Art and Design of De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde, Manila; Farish A. Noor, Associate Professor and Head of Doctoral Programme, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore; and Pauline J. Yao, Curator, Visual Arts, M+, Hong Kong. See Nora A. Taylor, “Art without History? Southeast Asian Artists and their Communities in the Face of Geography,” Art Journal 70, no. 2, Summer (2011): 6–23. Some of the points made in her presentation

ist chronological development. Yet for many contemporary artists in Singapore, their work has been less about reacting or responding to predecessors within a national tradition, than engaging with larger regional or global cultural currents. The genealogy of the contemporary put forth by Century was unconvincing. (It should be emphasised that SAM’s perspectives and priorities have since changed.)8 As with the inauguration of SAM, National Gallery Singapore launched with two major shows, one on Southeast Asia and another on Singapore, but these are permanent exhibitions, and instead of cleaving the host country from its regional context as in Modernity and Beyond, these two overlap. While my purpose here is not to review the newer shows in comparison with the older ones, let me say this: I met with curators at the Gallery before the opening as they were preparing the Singapore exhibition, and found a marked difference in their approach from the presumptions of chronology and nationalism in SAM’s Century. From what I gathered, their aim was for their show to be assembled with multiple narrative points of entry and departure; it was meant to be a testing ground for ideas, rather than, by virtue of

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at the Gallery forum are elaborated in that essay. Although I cannot recall if Taylor mentioned Flores in her presentation at the Gallery forum, she would certainly concur with me that his work is a good example of the research she was referring to; Flores is Professor of Art Studies at the Department of Art Studies, University of the Philippines and was also an Adjunct Curator at National Gallery Singapore. See Patrick D. Flores, Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (Singapore: NUS Museum, 2008). See Lee Weng Choy, “Jump Start Art,” ArtAsiaPacifc 3, no. 4 (1996): 29–30. Kwok Kian Chow was SAM’s frst director; he was the principal curator of A Century of Art in Singapore, as well as the author of the exhibition monograph. The recent director of SAM, Susie Lingham, stepped down in March 2016, and no replacement was announced at the time of writing.

the museum’s name and status, the defnitive story of the nation’s art. Of course, curatorial intentions are no guarantee of what a hang fnally produces. And it will be interesting to see how this “permanent” exhibition evolves over time. 4 If I dwell on how the art museum in the island city-state of Singapore has dealt with nationalism, it is also because it can serve as a test case. Moreover, expressions of Southeast Asian regionalism have often been extensions of nationalism writ large onto the region. Approaches to curating Southeast Asia range from those that are self-refexive about the diffcult and complicated process of making sense of a certain area, to those that are emphatic in packaging it as a singular identity—whether in terms of the aforementioned regional nationalism, or in order to market the area for global consumption. Let me elaborate by referring to the symposium, Sites of Construction: Exhibitions and the Making of Recent Art History in Asia, organised by the AAA in Hong Kong in October 2013.

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Realism in Asian Art was jointly presented in 2010 by National Gallery Singapore and National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea, and was curated by Joyce Fan from Singapore and Kim In-hiye from South Korea. Strategies towards the Real: S. Sudjojono and Contemporary Indonesian Art was presented in 2008 by NUS Museum and was curated by Wang Zineng. Maria Lind, “The Curatorial,” in Selected Maria Lind Writing, ed. Brian Kuan Wood (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011), 57–66. Kevin Chua, “Exhibiting Modern Asian Art in Southeast Asia,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 13, no. 2, March/April (2014): 111. For the full list

of speakers at the symposium, see “Symposium,” Asian Art Archive, http://www.aaa.org.hk/sitesofconstruction (accessed 28 March 2015). Research on exhibitions in Southeast Asia is a growing feld, and those who have done important work include Michelle Antoinette, John Clark, Patrick D. Flores, Seng Yu Jin, Simon Soon and Caroline Turner. 12 Ibid., 106–7. 13 Ibid., 107–8. 14 Ibid., 108. 15 Pamela N. Corey, “Metaphor as Method: Curating Regionalism in Mainland Southeast Asia,” Yishu 72–84.

Kevin Chua, who teaches art history at Texas Tech University, spoke about the concept of the “curatorial” in relation to two exhibitions of modern art in Southeast Asia: Realism in Asian Art (2010) and Strategies towards the Real: S. Sudjojono and Contemporary Indonesian Art (2008).9 Chua cited Maria Lind, who explains that the “curatorial” is, in her view, an approach towards exhibition-making that produces “not a survey but a situation,” and “involves not just representing but presenting and testing; it performs something here and now instead of merely mapping something from there and then.”10 For Chua, Strategies was an example of the “curatorial” at work: “Instead of an exhibition space that served as a container for objects, one had the sense that Strategies was structured like a loose network of object-idea constellations, and that each constellation was structured by a non-linear sense of time.”11 While Realism was a rare occasion to view a breadth of paintings from the region, as well as to think about “an important artistic movement in the light of social history,” Chua found some curatorial decisions to be “puzzling,” notably, the “exhibition cleaved form from content.”12 Realism seemed to assume that modernism—and realism as one of its formal tropes—was imported from the West, even as

the exhibition argued that Asian artists made realism their own. For Chua, downplaying the relationship between form and content was a way to address the anxiety of Asia being derivative of the West by wishing it away, but it kept coming back, like the repressed. Even as “the exhibition tried not to be linear and fall into traps of teleology and progress, it fell into another one—that of a barely disguised essentialism.”13 Realism pivoted on the question of what is distinctively “Asian” about Asian realism, yet it failed to give an answer. Chua argued that, alternatively, the curators could have more rigorously tested the relations between form and content: “How do we understand the gap or distance in realism—between artifce and truthfulness, calculation and contingency—as it occurred in Asia?” Encounters with European modernism took place in Asia at different moments and speeds. So perhaps rather than trying to identify what looks Asian, Chua suggests that it might have been more productive to ask when did “Asia” in Asian art happen, “when did certain cultural confgurations and formations come into being?”14 Also speaking at the AAA was Pamela Corey, who teaches at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She analysed how metaphor has been used in curating mainland Southeast Asia to both draw and

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The Mekong platform at the 6 th Asia Pacifc Triennial was presented in 2009 by the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), and was curated by Ho Chi Minh-based independent artistcurator Richard Streitmatter-Tran and Russell Storer (who has since left QAGOMA and is now with National Gallery Singapore). Long March Project: Ho Chi Minh Trail was presented in 2010, organised by the Long March Project, Beijing. Ambitious Alignments is funded by the Getty Foundation and developed by The Power Institute at the

maintain geographic boundaries. Her aim was to “expand on the question of how—and for whom—a geographical metaphor endures.”15 Metaphors are effective as they can elide what is messy and incoherent, and represent complexity with a single compelling image. Corey recounted some of the criticisms of The Mekong platform at the 6th Asia Pacifc Triennial (2009) and the Long March Project: Ho Chi Minh Trail (2010).16 For instance, with the Ho Chi Minh Trail project, it seemed as if the Chinese Long March artists, in the name of networking and cultural exchange, were on “a mission of knowledge-gathering rather than sharing.” Corey ended her presentation on a note of how metaphor can indeed be provocative and productive, when she spoke of the naming of the Reyum Institute of Arts and Culture in Phnom Penh: reyum translates as “cicada crying.” 5 From a forum in Singapore and a symposium in Hong Kong, let us now turn to a workshop in Bandung, Indonesia. “Ambitious Alignments: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art” is a research programme that aims to bring together early career scholars and foster their work on the art histories of Southeast Asia from after World War II to the 1990s.17 Its frst meet-

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University of Sydney in cooperation with National Gallery Singapore and the Institute of Technology, Bandung. See Ambitious Alignments: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art, http://ambitiousalignments. com (accessed 22 October 2015). Ananda Rajah, “Southeast Asia: Comparatist Errors and the Construction of a Region,” Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science 27, no. 1 (1999): 41–53. Ibid., 49. Ibid., 44. Ibid., 50.

ing was at the University of Sydney in March 2015, its second gathering was at the Institute of Technology, Bandung in August, and the third and fnal meeting was at National Gallery Singapore in January 2016. During one of the Bandung sessions, eminent Singapore art historian T.K. Sabapathy led a seminar titled “Yielding a Region. Writing Art in Southeast Asia.” For my purposes here, I am interested in how Sabapathy created a subtext for his interventions by handing out a set of readings. Among them was “Southeast Asia: Comparatist Errors and the Construction of a Region” by Ananda Rajah.18 The “errors” of the title have to do with how “comparative methods imply systems of classifcation”—to think of Southeast Asia as a region is necessarily to think of other regions with which to compare it.19 But for Rajah, writing in 1999, the problem is “not whether we can or cannot identify Southeast Asia as a region”; the problem is that “we lack a conceptual framework, if not a theory, of regions as human constructs.”20 We are misled if we focus on the question of a Southeast Asian regional identity in comparison with other identities. Rather, we should be looking at interactions of “inter-subjectivity over geographical space and time,” and, as Rajah reminds us, such interactions were not and are not self-contained—regions are “interpenetrated systems.”21

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22

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The journal was founded in 2000 by Chua Beng Huat and Chen Kuan-Hsing. See “Inter-Asia Cultural Studies,” Taylor & Francis Online, http://www.tandfonline. com/loi/riac20 (accessed 22 October 2015). Gwangju’s Asia Culture Centre (ACC) is situated on a historic site of the May 1980 Democratic Uprising. It features fve institutions that operate interdependently of each other: ACC Culture Exchange, ACC Archive & Research, ACC Creation and ACC Theater. See Asia Culture Centre, http://www.acc.go.kr/acc.go.kr/ en (accessed 22 October 2015).

The name of the journal Inter-Asia Cultural Studies pivots precisely on this shift: the founding editors, Singapore sociologist Chua Beng Huat and Taiwan cultural studies scholar Chen Kuan-Hsing, deliberately used the term “inter-Asia” rather than “intra-Asian.”22 The latter might require articulating what an Asian regional identity might be, whereas “inter-Asia” directs our attentions to the interactions of an interpenetrated system. Which brings me to our fnal stop on our tour of talking about art: Gwangju, Korea, where the ACC held its “Vision Forum” in April 2015, the new centre’s frst public event in advance of its opening in the autumn that year.23 The forum included such speakers as University of Sydney gender and cultural studies scholar Meaghan Morris. Morris referred to both Inter-Asia founding editors in her presentation “Liminality and Everyday Life in Hong Kong.” She discussed Chen’s book Asia as Method (2010), which takes its title from a 1960 lecture by Japanese sinologist Takeuchi Yoshimi; she also cited a separate essay by Chen that examined the Takeuchi lecture.24 Morris’ presentation about Hong Kong involved thinking through Chen thinking through Takeuchi, who, on his part, was thinking through American philosopher John Dewey, performing the very intertextuality and interregionality at the crux of Chen’s arguments. Takeuchi’s “Asia as Method” takes up the proposition that the West cannot be the model 342

24 Chen Kuan-Hsing, Asia as Method—Toward Deim-

25 26

perialization (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). See also Chen Kuan-Hsing, “Takeuchi Yoshimi’s 1960 ‘Asia as Method’ lecture,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 13, no. 2 (2012): 317–24. Chen, “Takeuchi Yoshimi’s 1960 ‘Asia as Method’ lecture,” 322. Patrick D. Flores et al., Contemporary Asian Art and Exhibitions: Connectivities and World-Making, eds. Michelle Antoinette & Caroline Turner (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2014); Pheng Cheah,

for the intellectual and cultural development of Asia. The problem, for Takeuchi, is less the West itself than the binary and hierarchical structure of the idealisation. The solution is to seek multiple and lateral frames of references instead. He argued that for Japan to advance, rather than emulate a West deemed as superior it should look to China, India and other Asian countries, which should be viewed as equals, not inferiors. Yet as Chen observes, 50 years later, “[e]ven until today, comparative studies of China, India and Japan (with reference to each other) still do not really exist in the Chinese speaking world or in Japan, not to mention mobilising other regions in Asia or other parts of the third world.”25 Chen’s project is part of a larger interdisciplinary discursive turn towards rethinking notions of the world. Examples in art history include the recent collection edited by Marie Antoinette and Caroline Turner, Contemporary Asian Art and Exhibitions: Connectivities and World-Making, while in comparative literature, there is Pheng Cheah’s new book, What is a World?: On PostColonial Literature as World Literature.26 6 Today, it might seem the simplest thing for a Southeast Asian curator to declare that “we” should keep the focus within the region to make sense of “our own” place in the wider world. However, the increasing visibility of art

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What is a World?: On Post-Colonial Literature as World Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). 27 See Lee Weng Choy, “On Being Curated,” in Terms of Exhibiting (from A to Z), ed. Petra Reichensperger (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013), 61–5. See also Larissa Hjorth & Lee Weng Choy, “PlayStations: On Being Curated and Other Geo-Ethnographies,” in Art & Intimate Publics: Art in the Asia-Pacifc, eds. Larissa Hjorth, Natalie King & Mami Kataoka (New York: Routledge, 2014), 146–58. 28 The formulation comes from Kevin Chua, from a

from Asia in international exhibitions like biennales hardly evinces a widespread practice of “Asia-as-Method.” Instead, what one fnds are lapses into comparatist errors, essentialism, or even orientalism. Chua mentioned the second issue in his analysis of the Realism in Asian Art exhibition. And while I did not use those terms in discussing SAM’s A Century of Singapore Art, nor did I speak about Corey’s considerations of the Asia Pacifc Triennial and the Long March Project with such language, it is arguable that those problems do appear, in some combination and to some degree. It would not be diffcult to cite more exhibitions that critics have faulted along these lines, but with this essay I want to refect on broader conceptual concerns. As I see it, structural problems underpin many assertions of Asia for Asia or, the corollary, Southeast Asia by Southeast Asia. “Ethno-geography” is a neologism I have employed a few times, for instance, in the essay, “On Being Curated.”27 There, I reiterated that the geography of ethnicity has been privileged in many biennales and international exhibitions, so much so that one could describe a predominant mode of knowledge produced by those projects as “ethno-geographic.” Consider a hypothetical biennale, where a Capetownborn artist based in Mumbai is displayed next to a Beijing-born artist based in Paris (I leave out whether the artists are male, female, transgender, black, Chinese, or mixed, but one could readily

29

private conversation, circa 2015. See, for instance, Lee Weng Choy, “Just What is it that Makes the Term Global–Local So Widely Cited, Yet So Annoying?,” in Over Here: International Perspectives on Art and Culture, eds. Jean Fisher & Gerardo Mosquera (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 12–25. Also see C.J.W.-L. Wee and his discussion of Singapore vis-àvis the “Global West” in Wee, The Asian Modern: Culture, Capitalist Development, Singapore (Singapore: NUS Press, 2007).

fll in those blanks). In these situations, a good part of what it means “to be curated” is to be surveyed and mapped. As if a juxtaposition or a set of coordinates were suffcient to accomplish a translation, enabling distinct perspectives to speak to each other. The ethno-geographic impulse, one could say, is symptomatic of curating in the age of globalisation (surely a phrase that has found its way into a title of an art essay or two). It belies “covert meta positions that are uncommitted rehearsals to totality,” because it presumes the “global” without adequate refection.28 This graphing of art and artists is overdetermined by many underlying assumptions, but central among them is a privileged “global” view from above, which wields a panoptic power that renders distance and difference abstract, and which contains and controls culture into categories. At the same time, the distances that curators and the curated travel, as well as the distances between the places of art-making and the spaces of exhibitions, are often elided in biennales—and sometimes less as a deliberate strategy than an unconscious refex. Globalisation’s appetite for consuming cultural difference is not only a desire for the other, but a desire for the other as readily available, a desire to compress the separations of distant places and cultures, even as categories and sub-categories of identity proliferate and get rearticulated.29 Sanjay Krishnan observes in his book, Reading the Global, that globalisation is typi-

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30 See Sanjay Krishnan, Reading the Global: Troubling

31 32 33

Perspectives on Britain’s Empire in Asia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 1. Ibid., 1, 165. Ibid., 14. For more on an archipelagic perspective on interruptively embracing the global, see for instance, Patrick

cally discussed in terms of the increasing integration of international markets, fnancial systems and economies, the intensifcation of digital media dissemination, or the alarming destruction of the environment; however, he contends that it would be more productive to analyse it as an “instituted perspective, not an empirical process.”30 For Krishnan, “the term ‘global’ describes a way of bringing into view the world as a single, unifed entity, articulated in space and developing over (common) time”; it is a constructed viewpoint, which invents and legitimises itself, as it “defnes the terms in which historical narrative and political agency are shaped.”31 In the age of globalisation, what a curator might do, rather than presume the global, is follow Krishnan’s suggestion to “cultivate critical refexes that actively interrupt the global perspective. Such ‘resistance’ aims to enrich the global through the repeated interruption of its frame. […] Far from being a rejection of the global, this approach must be thought of as its interruptive embrace.”32 7 To return to islands and continents: of the world’s regions, Southeast Asia is perhaps the most evenly divided in terms of archipelagic and continental land areas. It thus offers two contrasting geographic tropes to think about regionality and how the regional relates to the global. Discourses on regions can provide not so much a “counter narrative” to the prevailing discourses of the global, but a way of thinking through 344

D. Flores, “Polytropic Philippine: Intimating the World in Pieces,” in Antoinette & Turner, op. cit., 47–65. 34 For more on Wittgenstein’s discussions on “family resemblances” and “language games,” see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, eds. G.E.M. Anscombe & R. Rhees, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953).

Krishnan’s “interruptive embrace.”33 Islands have famously functioned as metaphors for isolation as well as individuality but, of course, in real life, they are also always part of some larger ecosystem. Continents too, due to their breadth, can impart a sense of an entirety unto itself. Notions of self-containment are something that can apply to both, albeit coming from different directions. If we could play with fgurative speech here, let us characterise the pedestrian view from the ground as an anecdotal one, and the airborne view from above as thematic; let us further suppose that an island perspective is akin to an anecdotal one, while the continental’s is thematic. When you are on an island, you need only walk around to be reminded that you are indeed on one—signs of the sea are never far from sight— but for a proper sense of a continent, you have to imagine looking from up high to appreciate its extent. What obtains in one island may not apply to the next nearest one: an anecdote does not offer enough evidence for a general tendency; on the contrary, sometimes what it does is make a claim for an exceptional specifcity. But when you consistently see a pattern across a continent, then you may have a persuasive argument for a theme. Anecdote and theme can be important devices for the writer. But care must be taken when using an anecdote to make a point. A highly selective example may be recruited merely to illustrate an already constructed argument. And when an anecdotal outlook expands into the role of a larger theme, this can produce problems such as essentialism, like when a set

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of observations on Southeast Asian art becomes overgeneralised and a certain feature is then asserted as the defning characteristic of practices in the region. An exhibition is comparable to an essay in that individual artworks can function like anecdotes and a larger theme can be assembled through a series of them. Although in composing an essay or curating an exhibition, each and every anecdote need not always add up, there can be those examples which trouble rather than reinforce the overarching theme. I would hope that my own penchant for anecdotes is not for drawing conclusions; a more productive use for them is to interrupt the tendency to generalise through a close reading of specifc cases—to prompt debate and discussion by challenging assumptions, rather than propping up stock positions. When I write about art I would hope to engage the works, not to illustrate my arguments but to test them against the art, and likewise test the art against the arguments. Surely this is an attitude that some curators share when it comes to exhibition-making. Though to be honest, it is an aspiration I cannot say I have always lived up to, and I think my curator friends would admit the same. How many times have you seen a show where the artworks were used mainly to demonstrate the curatorial theme? In such cases, the theme speaks at the art. But the job of the critic and the curator is to speak not at but to art. The preposition matters: the “to” invites a conversation, as opposed to the one-sided broadcast the “at” insinuates. What makes a conversation is not the talking; what is most important is the listening. Crucially, this “speaking to” should not assume that we all speak the same art world language. Concepts like modernism, realism or conceptualism become even more contentious when applied across cultures and geographies. When unpacking the assumptions of a common language, one should think about commensurability as well as translation. In the latter, you can have as simple a situation as the one-way translation of a Malay text into English. With

the former you must have at least two, and typically many more units, that are measurable by the same standard. If we apply this to islands and continents, we can imagine an archipelago where every island has its own vernacular and the inhabitants of each have learnt to translate their neighbours—one vernacular into another. Compare this with a continent where there are several provinces with their distinguishable dialects but there is also a lingua franca. Here, translation is from each provincial dialect into the common language, not one dialect into another. But does the establishment of a standard across the continent really make all languages and dialects commensurable? There is a possible metonymic slippage here that is problematic, where commensurability stands in for totality, and becomes either the global view from above or that single thread that connects together all the anecdotes. There are other ways to understand how separate stories relate thematically to each other. For example, story A may be related to B, and B to C, but the relationship between A and C could be tenuous at best. What we have in this case is a “family of resemblances” amongst A, B and C, even if we do not have a single idea that explains or contains them all. This is a crucial point of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language: we do not have, let alone need, defnitive defnitions for our words in order for us to use them and know what they mean.34 Language is possible only because of its looseness; we can understand each other because we can also misunderstand each other. If an island/anecdotal view might be too limiting because it is too particular, then a thematic/continental perspective can offer a bigger picture that allows us to create associations between different parts. But this “bigger” does not mean complete, and anecdote can be very helpful at pointing out the elisions that an overall frame overlooks. Thematic associativity may give us a glimpse of a horizon of commensurability, however, it does not deliver the global view.

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8 My thoughts here have the purpose, as it were, of fnally putting the reader in front of a work of art. Let me bring these refections to a close. I want to culminate with a mention of a project by Navin Rawanchaikul, not to illustrate or test any arguments (contrary to what I just said), but to invite the reader to look and listen to this artwork, as well as to think further on one theme in particular: transportation. My suggestion is that “transportation” can offer an alternative approach to the surveying and mapping of the ethno-geographic impulse. Curators go far and wide to meet artists. It is not always easy to translate these encounters into forms of display, and sometimes exhibitions neglect to engage their viewers with the journeys that curators and the curated make. Yet, every so often, curators and artists present audiences with the experience of how art traverses distance. We are taken from the place of art to the space of exhibition, and we become transported. Or as Maria Lind would say: the curatorial gives us a situation, not a survey; it does not map a “there and then,” but performs a “here and now.”35 Navin was born in 1971 in Chiang Mai, a child of the South Asian diaspora.36 His Hindu-Punjabi ancestors were from Gujranwala, now part of Pakistan. His father descended from the frst wave of Indian merchants who settled in northern Thailand while his mother, when she was about seven, migrated there with her family because of Partition. In 1993, Navin graduated from Chiang Mai University with a BFA and in 1994 founded Navin Production Co. Ltd in his hometown. Much of his multi-disciplinary work which features sculpture, installation, performance, painting, photography, flm, comics and other media is produced through this company, which also functions as a diverse collective of artists and cultural workers. Cities on the Move 6, Bangkok (1999, fg. 25.1) by Navin and Rirkrit Tiravanija is part of 346

National Gallery Singapore’s permanent exhibition of Southeast Asian art. The work is named after the well-known touring exhibition co-curated by Hou Hanru and Hans-Ulrich Obrist. Subtitled Contemporary Asian Art on the Turn of the 21st Century, Cities on the Move frst opened at the Secession in Vienna in 1997, and subsequent editions included shows at the Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen, the Hayward Gallery in London and multiple venues in Bangkok.37 But I wish the Gallery would display another Navin piece from their collection, Fly with Me to Another World (2008). It is this project that I would like to touch upon. Navin has often used vehicles in his art, from taxis to tuk-tuks, bicycles and scooters. These have served as mobile galleries, interventions into everyday situations, or imagery for his paintings. In 1999 he started the Fly with Me to Another World project, which in Thai, Sud Khob Faa, translates as “magnifcent horizon.” Versions have been presented in Italy, France, Belgium, Japan and elsewhere. The inspiration for Fly with Me is the life and work of pioneer Thai artist, Inson Wongsam, who was born in 1934 in Pasang, a small town in the northern province of Lamphun. Inson’s is an archetypal story of the artist as a young man trying to fnd a way of being in the world, but also fnding his way back home. In 1961, he received a scholarship after completing a course in printmaking and sculpture at Silpakorn University in Bangkok; however, instead of continuing with school, he used it to explore Thailand for a year. Inson, moreover, wanted to travel the world, especially to Italy, the native country of his mentor and professor Silpa Bhirasri (also known as Corrado Feroci), the eponymous founder of the frst art university in the country. Inson raised funds through an auction of his works; he also received in-kind sponsorships, notably an Italian Lambretta scooter. In May 1962, he left Thailand with the scooter and, riding through India, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and Greece, fnally arrived in Italy in August 1963. He continued

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35 36

Lind, op. cit. I am following the Thai custom of referring to individuals by their given names rather than family names. 37 See “Cities on the Move,” Asia Art Archive, http:// www.aaa.org.hk/Collection/Details/3082 (accessed 14 May 2016); Hou Hanru & Hans Ulrich Obrist, “Introduction—Cities on the Move 1997,” Iniva–Institute of International Visual Arts, http://www.iniva.org/ exhibitions_projects/1999/cities_on_the_move/cit ies_on_the_move/introduction_cities_on_the_move (accessed 14 May 2016). 38 See Thanom Chapakdee et al., Public Art In(ter)

vention: Fly with Me to Another World Project, ed. Navin Rawanchaikul (Chiang Mai: Fly with Me to Another World Project, 2006). Within this book, see in particular Thanom Chapakdee, “Public Art and Collaboration: The Role of Integration,” 25–6; Navin Rawanchaikul & Thanavi Chotpradit, “Preface,” 11–7; and Thanavi Chotpradit, “Anything is Art… But Can Art Be Everything?,” 29–43. See also Navin’s Sala: Navin Production’s International Art & Life Magazine, ed. Navin Rawanchaikul (Chiang Mai: Navin Production Co. Ltd. in collaboration with Galerie Enrico Navarra, 2008), 49.

to travel (albeit without the scooter as it had broken down), frst across Europe, settling and studying in Paris for a while, before moving on to New York in 1966. In 1974, Inson returned home to Lamphun and built a studio in the forest. He was honoured as a National Artist of Thailand in 1999, and today still lives in Lamphun and works in his forest studio. Navin, after a few years of his own travelling art project, brought Fly with Me back to Lamphun in 2004 for a year-long series of activities: these experiments with alternative public spaces for art involved collaborations with partners that ranged from government offces to NGOs to temples, from Thai and international artists, curators, writers and activists to inter-generational members of the local community. Navin concluded the Lamphun project with the symposium, “Public Art In(ter)vention” in 2005, which in turn generated material for a book of the same name that was published the following year.38 Navin has produced many works with the name Fly with Me to Another World. What the Gallery has in its collection are three items: two sculptural pieces, each with a Lambretta scooter: one, replete with travel bags, has a fbreglass fgure of a young Inson riding it (fg. 25.2); the other, painted all over with a montage of Inson’s adventures, has Navin himself as the rider (fg. 25.3). And then there is the painting: Navin has

done several such canvases in a style that is an amalgam of the outdoor movie posters found in India and Thailand. Here, the subject of the supposed flm is the life of Inson Wongsam (fg. 25.4). While Navin’s mimicry of the poster form is adept, after having seen a few of these paintings, I feel that what is at stake is not so much the appropriation of popular culture, or nostalgia. I would contend that Navin does not survey Inson’s journeys; instead, he gives us a situational view of them. How might I support this impression? On the cover of Public Art In(ter)vention is an old photo of Inson and his scooter in India in 1962, while on the back is a picture of him in 2005 with a similar vehicle in Lamphun (fg. 25.5). For me, his painting shows how much Navin has inhabited, not literally but empathetically, the space and time of these and other photographs like them, which were likely the source material for the artwork. Navin reveals to us the presentness of the past conjoined with the distant as contemporaneous—the “here and then” and the “there and now.”

Part of this essay was frst published as “Anecdote and Theme: Refections on Curating Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia,” Art Monthly Australia no. 279, May (2015): 32–41.

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Navin Rawanchaikul and Rirkrit Tiravanija Cities on the Move 6, Bangkok 1999 Acrylic on canvas 170 x 120 cm Collection of National Gallery Singapore © Navin Rawanchaikul and Rirkrit Tiravanija 25.1

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Navin Rawanchaikul Fly with Me to Another World 2000, edition 5 Painted fbreglass scooter, bag and found objects 215 x 78 x 176 cm Collection of National Gallery Singapore Navin Rawanchaikul Fly with Me to Another World (to be continued…) 2008, edition 3 Painted fbreglass, scooter and found objects 210 x 84 x 170 cm Collection of National Gallery Singapore

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25.4 Navin Rawanchaikul Fly with Me to Another World 2008 Acrylic on canvas 120 x 229 cm Collection of National Gallery Singapore 25.5

Front and back covers of Thanom Chapakdee et al., Public Art In(ter)vention: Fly with Me to Another World Project, ed. Navin Rawanchaikul (Chiangmai: Fly with Me to Another World Project, 2006).

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Notes on the Contributors Kevin Chua is Associate Professor of Art History at Texas Tech University, USA, where he writes and teaches on 18th- to 21st-century European and Southeast Asian art. He obtained his PhD in the History of Art from the University of California at Berkeley. Dr Chua has published widely on the art and visual culture of Singapore, from Nanyang painting of the 1950s, to essays on Simryn Gill, Donna Ong, Ho Tzu Nyen, Charles Lim, Jeremy Sharma and the Migrant Ecologies Project. His essays can be found in Representations, Art Journal, Artforum, Third Text, Yishu and FOCAS.

in Philippine Colonial Art (1999); Remarkable Collection: Art, History, and the National Museum (2006); and Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (2008). He was a grantee of the Asian Cultural Council (2010) and a member of the Guggenheim Museum’s Asian Art Council (2011). He convened in 2013 on behalf of the Clark Institute and the Department of Art Studies of the University of the Philippines, the conference “Histories of Art History in Southeast Asia” in Manila. He was a Guest Scholar of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles in 2014.

John Clark is Professor Emeritus in Art History at the University of Sydney, the author of fve books and editor or co-editor of another fve. His book Asian Modernities: Chinese and Thai Art of the 1980s and 1990s (2010) is a pioneering work in cross-disciplinary inter-Asian comparison of modern art and art worlds. After his book Modernities of Chinese Art (2010), his most recent book is Modernities of Japanese Art (2013). He has also completed the draft of a two-volume study, The Asian Modern, 1850s–1990s which includes detailed comparative studies of more than 25 Asian artists between the 1850s and 1990s.

Yin Ker researches on “art” and “art history” as variable constructs, the intersections of ancient and modern methods of knowledge- and image-making, and ways of telling (hi)stories of art. In parallel with theoretical research within and beyond the discipline of art history, she explores image-making through drawing and painting. Previous projects as independent researcher, writer, curator and translator include Video, an Art, a History 1965–2010, A Selection from the Centre Pompidou and Singapore Art Museum Collections (2010) and plAy: Art From Myanmar Today (2010). Her long-term project is aungsoeillustrations.org, an open-access online database of Bagyi Aung Soe’s illustrations and writings. She currently teaches art history at the Nanyang Technological University. 

Patrick D. Flores is a Professor at the Department of Art Studies at the University of the Philippines and Curator of the Jorge B. Vargas Museum and Filipiniana Research Center in Manila. He was the curator of the Philippine Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2015 and was previously an Adjunct Curator at the National Gallery Singapore. He was a Visiting Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1999 and an Asian Public Intellectuals Fellow in 2004. Among his publications are Painting History: Revisions

Kwa Chong Guan is the former Director of the old National Museum in Singapore which he led through a strategic planning process to transform it into three museums under the National Heritage Board in 1994. He continues to engage with the Heritage Board and its museums in various advisory capacities. He was previously involved in establishing the Singapore Philatelic Museum—of which he was the founding Chairman—and the planning of the Singapore Discovery Centre and the Army Museum. He was also assigned

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to reorganise the Oral History Department, and more recently, as Chairman of the National Archives Advisory Committee, he advised on the integration of the Archives into the National Library. He is currently on the staff of the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies at the Nanyang Technological University and an adjunct staff of the History Department at the National University of Singapore. Among his publications is Singapore, A 700-Year History: From Early Emporium to World City, coauthored with Derek Heng and Tan Tai Yong. Lee Weng Choy is president of the Singapore Section of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA SG). His writing, which discusses contemporary art and culture, Southeast Asia and Singapore, has appeared in publications such as  Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art,  Over Here: International Perspectives on Art and Culture and Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985. He is currently working on a collection of essays on artists, to be titled, The Address of Art and the Scale of Other Places. He was Artistic Co-Director of The Substation arts centre, and has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Sotheby’s Institute of Art, Singapore. Low Sze Wee is presently Director of Curatorial, Collections and Education at National Gallery Singapore. Initially trained as a lawyer, Low later graduated with a Masters in History of Art from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. In 2007, he was awarded the National Heritage Board (NHB) Research Award for his contribution to scholarship on Singapore and Southeast Asian art history. Three of his exhibitions have garnered NHB Exhibition Awards: Convergences—Chen Wen Hsi Centennial Exhibition (2007), The Big Picture Show (2008, co-curated with Ong Zhen 480

Min) and Xu Beihong in Nanyang (2009, cocurated with Chow Yian Ping). In 2013, Low was the frst Singaporean to be named a fellow of the prestigious Clore Leadership Programme. Yvonne Low specialises in the modern and contemporary arts of Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. Her research interests include the cultural politics of art development, women artists and feminist art history, and the colonial histories of British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. Low has published in books, peer-reviewed journals and exhibition catalogues, and is on the editorial committee of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia and Ambitious Alignments: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art. She holds a PhD from the University of Sydney, and is currently a Lecturer in Asian Art at the University’s Power Institute and at the National Art School. Gael Newton is an independent curatorial consultant and researcher across several felds of interest, including photography, arts and the humanities. She researches Australian and Southeast Asian photography; and advises clients and galleries, archives and libraries on philanthropic initiatives and on the placement of artists and photographers’ collections and archives. She was a Senior Curator of Australian and International Photography at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) in Canberra. Susie Protschky is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at Monash University. She researches colonialism, cultural history and visual culture, with a special focus on photography. The Dutch empire in the modern era is her feld, particularly the Netherlands East Indies (colonial Indonesia). She is the author of Images of the Tropics: Environment and Visual Culture in Colonial Indonesia (KITLV Press/Brill 2011), and

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Photographic Subjects: Monarchy, Photography and the Dutch East Indies (contracted to Manchester University Press). Her current project examines the human impact of natural and regime-made disasters in a contiguous feld, through photographic representations of pain and suffering.  Venka Purushothaman is an art writer, academic and arts manager. Besides being deeply involved in the development of the arts and education of artists, he has researched and authored numerous art essays and monographs on artists. His 2013 book, The Art of Sukumar Bose: Refections on South and Southeast Asia, won the 2015 International Convention of Asian Scholars’ Best Art Book Prize. Purushothaman is a member of the International Association of Art Critics, France (AICA), and a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts, UK (RSA). He is currently Provost at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore. Somporn Rodboon is an internationally respected art historian, academic, author and curator. In 1995, she cocurated Asian Modernism: Diverse Developments in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand. She was also one of the curators for the frst and second Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale as well as the Asia Pacifc Triennial of Contemporary Art and a number of signifcant exhibitions that brought Thai artists to the international arena. She presently lectures at different universities in Thailand, including Chiang Mai University, Silpakorn University and Mahasarakham University. T.K. Sabapathy An art historian, T.K. Sabapathy has published extensively on modern art and artists in Southeast Asia, and especially from Singapore and Malaysia. His articles, books, conference papers and exhibition catalogue texts are invaluable for the study of art in Southeast Asia and

are esteemed in the scholarship in the feld of art history in the region. He is currently an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore, where he teaches the history of art. Marie-Odette Scalliet is a French art historian and Indonesianist based in the Netherlands. Ever since she took her doctoral degree on the landscape painter and architect Antoine Payen, Raden Saleh’s frst teacher in Java, Scalliet has become a leading authority on 19th-century European artists active in the Dutch East Indies and Raden Saleh. She has published several extensive studies on the painter since 1999. She was previously a lecturer at Leiden University and a curator of South and Southeast Asian Manuscripts and Rare Books at its Library. Although she has retired, she continues to develop her career in academia as an independent researcher. Seng Yu Jin is Senior Curator at National Gallery Singapore. His curatorial research extends to relationality, inter-discursivity, and exhibitions as productive felds of enquiry. Exhibitions he has curated and co-curated include From Words to Pictures: Art During the Emergency (2006), The Artists Village: 20 Years On (2008), FX Harsono: Testimonies (2009) and S. Sudjojono: Lives of Pictures (2014). A PhD candidate at the Asia Institute, University of Melbourne, he currently makes comparative studies of art histories in Southeast Asia, focusing on the region’s exhibition histories and collectivism. He was previously a lecturer at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore. Aminudin TH Siregar is presently a PhD candidate at Leiden University. A curator and critic, his frst book Blup Art! was published in 1999; subsequent books include New Art: After Non-Representational Painting in Bandung (2004) and Sang Ahli

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Gambar: Sketsa, Gambar dan Pemikiran S. Sudjojono (The drawing specialist: Sketches, drawings and thoughts of S. Sudjojono, 2010). He edited Modern Oblique: Mysticism, Shamanism in Indonesian Contemporary Art (2005) and Indonesian Modern Art: An Essay Compilation (2006). In 2008, he researched the subject of Indonesian Art in Japanese Occupation: Keimin Bunka Shidosho at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan. He has lectured on Indonesian art history, art criticism, art and the market; and supervised undergraduate and postgraduate students at the Faculty of Art and Design, Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB), Indonesia. Simon Soon focuses on 20th-century art in Southeast Asia in his research which spans comparative modernities and art historiography. His PhD thesis “What is Left of Art?” investigates the intersection between left-leaning political art movements and modern urban formations in Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines from the 1950s to the 1970s. It was completed at the University of Sydney. He is a co-editor of the Narratives of Malaysian Art, Vol. 4, and is also a member of the editorial collective of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, a new peer-reviewed journal. He is currently Senior Lecturer at the University of Malaya. Adele Tan is Curator at National Gallery Singapore. Her research focuses on contemporary art in Southeast Asia and China, with a special interest in performative practices, photography and new media. She was formerly Assistant Editor at the British art journal Third Text and her articles have appeared in numerous scholarly publications and journals such as PAJ, Broadsheet, Yishu, Eyeline and Third Text, among others. She received her PhD in art history from The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. 482

Nora A. Taylor is Alsdorf Professor of South and Southeast Asian Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). She is the author of Painters in  Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art (2004, 2009) and co-editor, with Boreth Ly, of Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art: An Anthology (2012) and editor of Studies in Southeast Asian Art: Essays in Honor of Stanley J. O’Connor; she is the author of numerous articles on modern and contemporary Vietnamese art. Her exhibition projects include Changing Identity: Recent Work by Women Artists from Vietnam for the International Arts and Artists Organization (2007–2009) and, with Heather Lineberry,  Breathing Is Free: 12,756.3;  New Work by Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, for the Arizona State University (ASU) Art Museum and Betty Rymer Gallery at the SAIC (2009). Ashley Thompson is a specialist in Southeast Asian Hindu-Buddhist arts, with particular expertise on Cambodian art and literature. She is the co-founder and editor (alongside Ang Choulean) of Udaya, a trilingual journal of Khmer Studies. Her publications include Calling the Souls: A Cambodian Ritual Text (2005),  Angkor: A Manual for the Past, Present and Future (2006, with Eric Prenowitz and Ang Choulean) and Engendering the Buddhist State: Territory, Sovereignty and Sexual Difference in the Inventions of Angkor (2016). Thompson holds the Hiram W. Woodward Chair in Southeast Asian Art at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and is Senior Lecturer at the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds. Ushiroshoji Masahiro is a Professor of art history at the Faculty of Humanities, Kyushu University, a position he has held since 2002. Prior to this, he was Curator at the Fukuoka Art Museum and Chief-Curator at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, heading many exhibition projects by these institutions,

Charting Thoughts

such as The Asian Art Shows (1980–1994), New Art from Southeast Asia (1992), The Birth of Modern Art in Southeast Asia—Artists and Movements (1997) and The 1st Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale (1999). Other curatorial projects by him include Cubism in Asia: Unbounded Dialogues (2005) and 50 Years of Modern Vietnamese Paintings: 1925–1975 (2005). He has authored numerous publications in this feld. Some of his recent published papers are “The Lost Innocent Self: Gauguinism in Southeast Asian Art” (2010) and “Japanese Military Rule and the Art of Southeast Asia” (2013). Adrian Vickers is Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Sydney. He has written extensively on Indonesian cultural history, especially on Bali. His frst and best-known book is Bali: A Paradise Created (2012), which has been translated into a number of languages. Another of his books, Balinese Art: Paintings and Drawings of Bali (2012) was the frst complete study on the subject. He is currently carrying out research on modern and contemporary Indonesian art with funding from the Australian Research Council and the Getty Foundation. C.J.W.-L. Wee is Professor of English at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His present research interest lies in the formation of and the relationship between contemporary visual art, theatre, popular culture and literature in Singapore and in East Asia. Wee is the author of Culture, Empire, and the Question of Being Modern (2003) and The Asian Modern: Culture, Capitalist Development, Singapore (2007), and the editor of The Complete Works of Kuo Pao Kun, vol. 4: Plays in English (2012). He has

held Visiting Fellowships at a number of institutions, including the Society for the Humanities, Cornell University, and the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, India. June Yap is a curator and art historian based in Singapore. Her curatorial projects include No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia for the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative (New York, Hong Kong, Singapore), The Cloud of Unknowing at the 54th Venice Biennale (Italy), Das Paradies ist Anderswo / Paradise is Elsewhere at Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa) (Germany), and Bound for Glory at the National University of Singapore (NUS) Museum. She is the author of Retrospective: A Historiographical Aesthetic in Contemporary Singapore and Malaysia. She was previously the Deputy Director and Curator of the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, and a curator at the Singapore Art Museum. Yeo Mang Thong is a Singaporean scholar and senior educator. His 1992 publication Xinjiapo zhanqian huaren meishushi lunji (Essays on the History of Pre-War Chinese Painting in Singapore) is one of the most well-cited and important reference for scholars in the feld. A second publication, Liudong qianyi zai di jingli: Xinjiapo shijue yishu xianxiang 1886 –1945 (Migration, Transmission, Localisation: Visual Art in Singapore, 1866–1945) builds on his earlier book on prewar Chinese art history and is being published in Chinese and English. He holds a Master of Arts in Chinese Studies from the National University of Singapore, and was awarded a National Day Commendation Medal in 1996.

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© 2017 National Gallery Singapore All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without prior permission of the copyright holders. Copyright of the content in this publication may also reside in persons and entities other than, and in addition to, the Gallery. The Gallery seeks to share our artworks with as many people as we can. We are fully committed to respecting the intellectual property rights of others and always use our best efforts to obtain permission for images used. Please contact us at [email protected] should you have any queries. Published in 2017 Digital version issued in 2020 with revisions Please direct all enquiries to the publisher at: National Gallery Singapore 1 St Andrew’s Road, #01-01, Singapore 178957 Editors: Low Sze Wee & Patrick D. Flores Editorial Advisor: Eugene Tan Managing Editor: Elaine Ee Project Editor: Charmaine Oon Copyeditors: Sarah Lee, Genevieve Ng, Charmaine Oon, Sara Siew, Jimmy Yap Designer: H55 Acknowledgements Our thanks to the contributors and translators, as well as the artists, lenders, photographers and other rights holders who have generously granted permission to reproduce the images in the book. Unless otherwise stated, images of artworks in the collection of National Gallery Singapore are provided courtesy of National Heritage Board. For their advice and support in developing the publication, we are grateful to the curatorial team at National Gallery Singapore, especially Horikawa Lisa, Seng Yu Jin, Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, Cai Heng, Clarissa Chikiamco, Phoebe Scott and Adele Tan. National Library Board, Singapore Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Name(s): Low, Sze Wee, 1970-, editor. | Flores, Patrick D., editor. | National Gallery Singapore, publisher. Title: Charting thoughts : essays on art in Southeast Asia / editors, Low Sze Wee, Patrick D. Flores. Description: Singapore : National Gallery Singapore, 2017. Identifer(s): OCN 973987775 | ISBN 978-981-11-2865-3 (paperback) | ISBN 978-981-14-1962-1 (e-book) Subject(s): LCSH: Art, Southeast Asian – 19 th century. Art, Southeast Asian – 20 th century. Art, Southeast Asian – 21st century. Classifcation: DDC 709.59 – dc23

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Errata Pages 208, 428 Fig. 15.4 should be titled A Dark Alley instead of A Dark Hell. Pages 270, 439 Fig. 19.2 has been substituted due to ongoing research into its attribution. Pages 122, 393 Fig. 8.2 should be attributed to “D.G. Soberat” according to the artist’s signature on the work. Existing evidence indicates that Anak Agung Gede Soberat and D.G. Soberat (or I Dewa Gede Soberat) are most likely the same person, but confrmation will require further research. The work is undated, instead of “c. 1930s.” Page 341 (note 16) Zoe Butt was erroneously attributed as the curator of Long March Project: Ho Chi Minh Trail. Addenda Pages 434–5 (fg. 17.1), 473 (fg. 23.11) For the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005, Lim proposed to uproot and ship the 70-ton statue of the Merlion to the courtyard of the Singapore Pavilion. The half-lion/half-fsh mythical creature is one of the country’s major tourist icons. When the Singapore Tourism Board, the custodians of the Merlion, rejected his proposal, Lim then commissioned two Italian designers to transform the pavilion into two grand public lavatories. Page 466 (fg. 23.2) The artwork comprises engraved seawashed glass pieces collected from beaches in Port Dickson, Malaysia, and the Southern islands off Singapore.