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.
A number of Singapore’s own artists are featured in the exhibition, such as Tang Da Wu, who made powerful statements linking Asian cultural beliefs with animal extinctions. The NGS recently bought his seminal Poach the Rhino, Chop Off His Horn and Make This Drink (1989), and this will be on show.
One work in the exhibition that addresses LGBT rights is Manila director Nick Deocampo’s Oliver (1983), a film about a female impersonator who ekes out a living by performing as “Spider Man”, spinning webs by pulling string out of his anus. According to Adele Tan, co-curator of the exhibition, this work was included despite its R-18 restriction because it was an important documentation of the underbelly of Manila during the Ferdinand Marcos regime.
Tan says the curators decided to include works from different decades because they wanted to acknowledge that modern social changes were experienced in different countries at different times.
As she prepares for the launch of the exhibition, it strikes her that the issues all the artists dealt with are just as urgent today.
“For example, in the US, people are reliving the 1970s abortion debate and women’s right to choose,” she says. “And I can really feel it as I go through the sections in the exhibition about change in society.”
Awakenings: Art in Society in Asia, 1960s-1990s, Level 3, Singtel Special Exhibition Gallery, City Hall Wing, National Gallery Singapore. Sat-Thurs, 10am-7pm, Fri, 10am-9pm. Jun 14-Sep 15. Weekend opening times before Aug 9 may be affected by National Day Parade rehearsals.
