What is art from Singapore? A tiny island state in Southeast Asia that outshines her neighbors in her highly effective and efficient government, economic development and globalization for decades. It is, rivaling nearby Hong Kong, a very thriving international art center, and a lot of time regional artists rely on the status of Singapore as a regional art center to congregate, to exhibit, and to sell their art. The unique historical, cultural and socio-political background of this tropical island state in fact has foreground and inspired very interesting art to come forth.
To talk about Singapore art, one cannot get around mentioning the Nanyang Style. It is widely understood as a important regional modernist movement that was active from around 1950s till late 1970s. It continued to inspire a generation or two of Singaporean artists after that and even for many contemporary artists, the Nanyang Style is still a not-too-distant beacon, casting its long shadow over them. Nanyang is a sinicized term, whose literal translation is “South Ocean”. While the term broadly refers to the South China Sea, it is generally used to refer to the region we call Southeast Asia today. The movement was said to start by Chinese immigrant artists, who arrived to the region mostly settling in Singapore and Malaysia (these two used to be one country before Singapore’s split from Malaysia in 1965), as they soul-searched for their new identity in the tropical region. Some of them, especially younger artists who were born or grew up locally, started to question what it meant for them to be Chinese artist in their adopted land, whose multi-ethnic social fabric made their search for authenticity and identity even more acute.
The Nanyang Style art did not really pertain to a fixed “style”. Artists used oil, watercolor, or Chinese ink as their medium of choice, deployed techniques as varied as their chosen subject matter, which can be local or otherwise. Cheong Soo Pieng, Liu Kang, Chen Wen-Hsi, Chen Chong Swee and Georgette Chen are amongst the most well-known pioneer Nanyang artists. Each of them is known for working in their respective genre, or their specific subject matter. For example, Chen Wen-Hsi and Chen Chong Swee are both well-known for their Chinese ink painting; the former’s portrayal of wild life such as egrets and gibbons is the most popular, while the later’s depiction of Chinese landscape and then later landscape of local tropical scenes is best known. Cheong Soo Pieng, Liu Kang and Georgette Chen, on the other hand, are better understood as oil painters, though some of them also painted in ink earlier as well in their career. They are also known for various subject matter of their choice but maybe most noticeable, as it turns out, are their depictions of local subject matter such as portraits of people in their indigenous costumes, activities, tropical landscape and tropical flora and fauna. The Nanyang Style was therefore arguably more of a unified ideology of artists identifying with their new locality and re-framing their identity in the new land as they attempted to negotiate their relevance to the region. The term in fact was not officially coined until 1979 by local art historians T.K. Sabapathy and Redza Piyadasa during a retrospective study of Nanyang artists’ works.
Singapore is a success story in the 20th century of a harmonious multiracial, multicultural immigrant society, with Chinese immigrants and descendants making up the majority of the population. The story of pioneers, of all cultures, toiling and working-hard ceaselessly, putting their root down in the new land, in order for their family and children to have a better future, is a universal story of immigrants everywhere. The story of the Nanyang Style, which fits nicely to this rhetoric, is therefore viewed as an important national narrative for the art in Singapore and its continued influence to her contemporary artists cannot be overstated.
