nanyang style part 2

nanyang style contd – some notes from yesterday’s research

where to find info: yesterday i went to the Lee Kong Chian reference library (national library) for info on the ‘nanyang style’.  on the 11th flr (southeast asian collection, not to be confused with the 8th flr collection of art), there is a shelf of books on sg art/artists.  not much info, but enuf to get started somewhere.  it confirms what i wrote abt the nanyang style (evolving from political concern in china).  will elaborate as and when i get more material.  i guess the logical choice to get more material will be to contact NAFA too.

here are two recommended books: The Evolution of the Nanyang Style: A Study in the Search for an Artistic Identity in Singapore 1930-1960 (Tan Meng Kiat) and Channels and Confluences (Kwok Kian Chow)  kian chow is the director of the sg art museum.

the six notable artists of this period: Liu Kang 1911-2004, Cheong Soo Pieng (Zhong Sibin) 1917-1943, Chen Chong Swee (Chen Zhonghui) 1910-1985, Chen Wen Hsi (Chen Wenxi) 1906-1991, Georgette Chen (Chen Liying) 1907-1993and Lim Hak Tai (Lin Xuedi) 1893-1963.  georgette chen is an anomaly.

georgette – ‘europeanized’, she was raised in paris and largely influenced by what was happening there, so her art is not motivated by mainland politics, although she was involved in a search for id in sg.  odd, considering that her father was a chinese patriot who supported sun yat sen.

hak tai – the administrator/organizer, the ‘pivotal man’ in the nanyang style, also the founder (cool!) of sg’s Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA)

chong swee, wen hsi, soo pieng and liu kang were alumni of the Shanghai Art Academy and Xinhua Art Academy.  they chose to be western-trained cos they wanted to modernize chinese art by blending the two traditions.

subject matter of the nanyang style: sg’s various ethnic races (chinese, malay, indian and others), seascapes, fishing villages & tropical fruits (durians, rambutans, mangoes, mangosteens etc) 

Style: loose, informal, not conscious/deliberate, open to different influences (i think artists like chong swee painted in a realist style, whereas artists like chen wen hsi kept close to the chinese traditions of ink painting.

Time period of the style: some researchers (like meng kiat) put it from 1930s – 1960s.  others around 1950s-1960s.  what is not in dispute is that this style emerged after an exhibition by 4 artists in 1952, after a trip to bali. apparently, it suffered a stagnation during the japanese occupation during 1942-25.  if artists today care to study it, it might serve as a “basecamp” of sorts.

judging from the livespans of these artists, i think it’s fair to say the search for an id is still relevant, although whether you can call the current diverse styles/subject matters the nanyang style anymore is highly debatable.  

not to find excuses for the artists, but i think you gotta be fair and say that the pace of development and change in sg is so rapid that it compounds the problems in our search for an id.  modernity is complex and to represent it and the issues that emerges from it is visually very challenging.

for example, regarding subject matter, sg then was largely undeveloped, so we had the ‘kampongs’ or villages until as recently as the 1950s/1960s.  since the 1980s, the majority of sgs live in housing board flats (HDB), so that’s one huge change in just one freaking generation.  visually, although we can paint the various ethnic races living in flats now, yet that’s still not enough, cos we have yet to explore the impact of this change to modernity visually.  put simply, what the hell does living in a hdb mean for sgs now?

now the logical question to ask is, doesn’t such rapid change affect the artists who are trying to take our quest for a national id to another level?  

the recent retrospective of wen hsi’s works is probably a reflection of this quandry of grappling with such changes in sg.

the sg art museum (SAM) categorised his works in four parts: tradition, life, explorations and synthesis.  (interestingly, he did not consider the nanyang style an important part of his development – that’s the ‘life’ part).  i’m fascinated by part 3: explorations, there is an rojak of different styles/mediums/experimentations.  this occured sometime in the 1960s-1970s, and i suspect it had something to do with grappling with the changes in sg then.  with regards to his last part, synthesis, he went back to chinese ink and painted cranes from his imagination.  personally, it reminded me of picasso in his last years before death, when he relied on his imagination… quite self-indulgent recycling, so the synthesis did not really work well.  wen hsi was much more balanced than picasso tho.

reflections:

well, there’s lots more to learn abt this style.  first thing is, if the nanyang style is so loose, why are these 6 artists ‘canonized’?  is there some common thread in their works that link them all?  what is is?  their works are quite individualistic and develop in various ways.  the challenge is to find a discernable ‘common thread’ through all these 6 artists, perhaps i can then build from there.  no point wasting my life threading the same path only to end up where they did.
 

Fishing in fishhead beehoon

i will be amiss if I did not record last thur’s lunch conversation with TH.  TH is a playwright, former journalist and researcher with deep interests in the arts/media/cultural scene in sg.  Here are the salient points: 

• Our derivative art – our confused id
• Who’s there to critique, to nurture a community, a distinctive idiom?
• Not the govt… yet?… they just don’t get it do they?
• Censorship? – we are free, but the imagined community is imagining fear or hallucinating irrelevant things.

Our derivative art/confused id 

state of the arts in sg – no surprise that we are still struggling to find an ‘idiom’, a recognizable national language, not only in the visual arts, but also the other arts (e.g. performing arts).  Most of our art is derivative (just look at mine stuff).  I suspect the problem for most budding artist or any existing arts practioner in sg is that we mostly start from ground zero most of the time. 

Our art education is primitive, no, we are at the amoeba stage.  We do not know how or where to begin learning our craft, which medium to pick, who to learn from, who to bounce ideas off, much less evolve to another level except for the main schools.  it’s mostly a trial-by-error, lonely and unconscious process (ok, at least the path of an artist is haphazardly documented), and the process of learning our craft often involves a profound and prolonged re-evaluation of our id and place in the world.  No sane person can live with this level of ambiguity for so long.  And pple wonder why van gogh cut his ear off.

A simple example: doing sketches of western masterpieces always makes me feel like I’m trying out Italian/Spanish/dutch/ clothes all the time, they all look nice, but they don’t fit and I still feel naked in a horrible way, like a limb is grotesquely misshapen and everyone can SEE it)

Picasso prepared 809 sketches alone for le mademoiselle de
Avignon. Can you imagine the incredible amt of work you need to do just to go through both eastern and western art, and THEN synthesize it into something original?  This is one of several personal everests for each artist in sg.  No wonder we are still struggling cos we have no method, no base camps to jumpstart the process like the Europeans/Chinese with their different movements and styles.  our closest approximation is the ‘nanyang style’, but more abt it later.

To paraphrase SE, “we are not European and we are not mainland Chinese”… although we might use oils/Chinese ink, we cannot authentically claim their traditions because we lack their cycles/long history, collective memory, and it is futile to even think abt superceding either.    (I must qualify this statement by stating that sg is a multi-racial community, so Chinese art is not the only art that influences us, and as I’m not familiar with art made by Malays/Indians/other races so this is a comment that applies to the Chinese majority in sg, + multi-racialism is a problematic concept in our quest for a national id and idiom).  

I think any artist (whatever the medium) in sg has to grapple with this fundamental split, heal this innate crisis in our national psyche and come up with some sort of synthesis, even if it is rather idiosyncratic (say, like Tan Swee Hian’s works?).  In an odd way, Swee Hian’s works embody the east-west tension very well because they defy easy categorization.  there is much promise in this dynamic ambiguity.  The problem again, is that it is idiosyncratic and highly individualistic, and we need a serious and committed group of artists and intellectuals to study Swee Hian’s works and philosophy in a coherent manner to sustain and develop a promising approach into any sort of national idiom.  Almost impossible when you think abt how artists are such individualists.

Perhaps the best way to illustrate the point above is to use two other examples.  with regards to painting, the recent revival in peranakan culture and the older ‘nanyang style’ (see http://www.thecore.nus.edu.sg/post/singapore/arts/painters/channel/7.html) are two clear, but limited attempts at creating something unique and distinctive in sg. 

before I launch into a critique, I must say I’m sympathetic to these attempts, and it is especially important to encourage any such attempts, even if they are flawed because they at least mark our approach to art and our socio-political history.

Some points on peranankan culture:

1) this recent revival in interest seems like an uncritical nostalgic throwback.  why NOW, WHAT FOR and FOR WHOM?  Are we grasping at straws in forging an authentic id?  Is something ‘exotic’ necessarily ‘authentic’?  who’s the intended audience?  The govt? foreigners?  Cos 2) peranakans were always, and are a tiny minority and a dying breed in sg, so peranankan culture is de facto, a subculture.  most sgs might not be able to relate to it and as a distinctive style, it serves as a small buoy, not a big anchor in our cultural landscape.  

On the bright side, this engagement with peranakan culture is one of the few times when personally, as a singaporean and a peranakan, I feel genuine affection as a response to the artworks (ok, I’m vaguely familiar with Desmond Sim’s works).  Sort of like “hey, i know whatcha ‘talking’ abt!” 

Perhaps the personal response is really a big psychological step, considering that most singaporeans probably do not even have that sort of personal connection to the local art works that hang in our museums or galleries.  I imagine most sgs who go to museums/galleries probably go, “hmmm, I like that painting, cos it’s good technically and the concept is familiar, and cos the critics say so, but there’s no deep emotional resonance personally”. 

Right?  ok, maybe I’m just a philistine. 

As for the ‘nanyang style’ – as the name implies, it refers to the wider region of southeast asia, not sg per se, so much for national id.  secondly, this style is tied to the politics of that time and that in itself has (on hindsight), introduced limitations to its development as an idiom that is still fresh and relevant today.  The original proponents of this style were overseas Chinese artists who identified strongly with
China’s struggle against the Japanese and other colonial powers and sought to express solidarity through art.  This style therefore, justly or unjustly, is associated with Chinese pride and perhaps racial chauvinism in sg.  this political sensitivity has perhaps hindered some artists in exploring/reclaiming this period in our art?

The other problem is one of time and gradual estrangement.  The chinese in sg have evolved a separate id from their chinese counterparts in china.  For nation-building, this is one positive result, but it also explains why most contemporary sg artists are not drawn towards exploring or developing this style anymore.

Ok, this is a really short and not very deep analysis, but in a nutshell, I guess the reason why our art is derivative and our id confused is cos we have to constantly reinvent the wheel.   

As for the govt and censorship, I’ll leave it for another post.  TH def has more to say abt that than me.