How Asia’s civil rights movements awakened its avant-garde art style: National Gallery Singapore show
- “Awakenings: Art in Society in Asia, 1960s-1990s” plots how the emergence of avant-garde art often came with the ousting of old ideology
- It features 142 works by more than 100 artists from 12 countries in Asia, including Huang Yongping, Tang Da Wu and Nick Deocampo
The American civil rights movement in 1963; the Stonewall Inn riot that sparked the gay liberation movement; the French student movement that led to widespread protests in May 1968. These Western civil-rights landmarks are familiar to many in Asia, either through school or via the big screen.
By comparison, Asians tend to know little about each other’s civil-rights movements. A new exhibition at the National Gallery Singapore (NGS) wants to change that.
“Awakenings: Art in Society in Asia, 1960s-1990s” is a joint production by the NGS, the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo (MOMAT), the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea (MMCA) and the Japan Foundation Asia Centre. It features 142 artworks by more than 100 artists from 12 countries in Asia and plots how the emergence of avant-garde art often went hand in hand with the ousting of old ideology, rapid modernisation and the spread of democratic movements in the region.
It shows how the Minjung art movement, with roots in woodcut art of the 1950s, arose just as South Koreans challenged the legitimacy of the country’s military dictatorship; how Hong Kong artist Frog King took his performance art and the Fluxus art movement to Tiananmen Square and the Great Wall of China as China opened its doors to the outside world in 1979; and how, as the call for democracy grew in China in the 1980s, the “85 New Wave” artists like Huang Yongping started making large, room-size installations that reflected the magnitude of social changes.
One of these installation – Reptiles (1989) – has been recreated personally in Singapore by Huang. It is one of a number of works that were not included when the exhibition was launched in Tokyo and Seoul a few months ago.
Huang had made the first iteration of Reptiles for the now legendary “Magiciens de la Terre” exhibition in Paris, which was held in 1989 and was running at the time of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. He made two papier-mache Chinese tombs out of French newspaper that had been turned into mulch in washing machines, signifying the rise and fall of different cultures. This work is on loan from Hong Kong’s M+ collection and involves the artist smearing more paper pulp onto a wall in the gallery.