obtained Western educations in Holland formed a Javanese nationalist
movement , which became the embryo for Indonesian nationalism.
At the end of the 19th century signs of change began to emerge. A
group of liberals held sway in the Dutch parliament and opposed therepressive political policies and monopoly of the Dutch East Indies
government. This liberal group , which was supported by industrialists ,demanded that modernization be undertaken in the Dutch East Indies,through, among other things, the opening up of investment opportunities
in the colony for the private sector. In 1860, this liberal group initiatedthe Ethical Politics Movement that insisted that the Dutch colonial
government introduce modernization among the natives and stop
repressive politics. In 1901, this liberal group won the bulk of theirdemands.
The Ethical Politics Movement motivated the advent of modernization among the local populace , howbeit in very limited circles. In the
19th century , a number of local native figures emerged in the Dutch East
Indies who exhibited modern ways of thinking. Among them were theromanticist painter Raden Saleh, the photographer Kassian Cephas,female emancipation thinker R.A. Kartini, and the scholar / philosopher
Ronggowarsito , who studied on their own how to resist Western education. They were among the first moderns the Dutch East Indies, and were ,by chance, all natives.
At the beginning of the 20th century, modernization, which had
been concentrated on the island of Java, spread to other regions. The
groups of people who had been receiving Western educations since the18th century began introducing ideas about an Indonesian nation andpeople, fanning nationalism and eventually forming a movement for
demanding independence.
The culture of this group of people that brought Indonesia to
independence reflected the developments emerging from cultural intermixing. These developments followed along on the coattails of thepatterns of colonial imperialist politics. Because the center of the Dutch
East Indies colonial government was on the island of Java, this culturalinter-mixing developed mostly within the Javanese kingdoms, creating aculture known as the Javanese Classical Culture. As the power of the
Dutch East Indies government expanded, the mixing of cultures began tooccur in other regions as well. With the expansion of this cultural intermixing, emerged the concept of Indonesia , which at first lived only
within the world of ideas.
The developments ensuing this inter-mixing of cultures exhibited
continuity, from the Classic Javanese Culture to the culture of Indonesia.
Viewing this process within the context of Indonesia , this narrative ofdevelopment can be seen to contain links in a chain of thought that canbe read as "Indonesian modernism: ' In this narration can also be see the255development of arc in the Western sense.
In the Classic Javanese Culture, the adaptation of art in the Westernsense gave rise co the term kagunan.As I have set forth in ocher seminarsof chis sore, the term kagunan exhibits an awareness of the need co identify
art that did not reflect arc within the context of the Javanese ethnic
culture. Art within chat ethnic cultural context, as I understand it, did notinclude a tradition of identifying or defining arc. Delving into themeaning of the term kagunan itself, it is apparent that any translation
would have co scare with the term mousiketechne originating from thelanguage of ancient Greece, which is also the root for the formulation of
the term "arc" in the English language. This term, however , has developedand expanded in meaning.
The adaptation of art in the Western sense at the beginning of the
19th century led co the emergence of the romanticist painter Raden Saleh,
who besides studying art in Holland, had traveled to Germany andFrance. Although the adaptation of arc in the Western sense was alreadyapparent in the early 19th century , there was a feeling of ambivalence
about it. Ronggowarsico, an expert in Javanese culture who was known as
an advisor on Javanology to the colonial government of the Dutch Ease
Indies , cook issue with the term kagunan. He viewed the understanding of

kagunan,which carried the meaning of capability in the production of art,as bringing with it a sense of pride and the desire to be acknowledged.
This philosophical view of the scholar Ronggowarsico, who was
known as a Widyantara philosophy, then infused kagunan with moremeaning. This philosopher brought into play the matters of morality andefforts toward achieving good, which were prioritized within the Javaneseculture. 6 In the BaoesastraDjawa dictionary, which reflects the Classic
Javanese Culture , the understanding of the term kagunan contains theviews of Ronggowarsico. Kagunan is detailed as the expression of a feeling
related co morality and the achievement of goodness. ' This is the ideologyof the terminology kagunan chat indicates a shift in ideology occurring in
relation co the translation of arc in the Western sense.
In the midst of the modernization occurring in the 20th century ,the inter-mixing of cultures continuing from the 18th century gave birth
co the Indonesian language as a part of the advent of nationalism. This
Indonesian language was a modern language, which did not originate in
the Javanese language, and was also not one of the 500 dialects utilized by
the 300 traditional ethnic groups in Indonesia. In the Indonesianlanguage there then emerged a number of new expressions that also
could not be found in any of the 500 local dialects existing in Indonesia.
Among these new expressions or terminologies was the term seni,
which was more or less identical in meaning co the word "arc" in the
English language , and also the term seni rupa, which was a translation of"fine art~ Even so, the understanding of these terms covered not only the256under standing of th e words an "art " and "fine art " as the y existed in the
English language.
Because the emergence of the Indonesian languag e was a part of th econtinuation of the development of th e int er-mixing of cultures that had
been formulating since the 18th century , th e terms seni and seni rupa also
took on the understanding of kagunan ; in particular th e ideology ofkagunan . Within the development of art in Indon esia, this ideology basedin morality can be felt as the basis for all of the en suing developments inart, whether those of modern art in th e 20th centur y, or those of contemporary art , which emerged in the 1980s and '90s.
The differenc e between the ideologies of art based in the moralit ydefined above and that of art as set out by Stephen Davies, which makes
no reference to morality , is immediately apparent. This ideologicaldifference is what mak es the translation of art , which is linked to morality
and social conventions, more dominant within the development ofIndonesian art than the modernist discourse , which is relatively moredifficult to understand , and for that reason was never translated.
Taking into consideration this framework of thinking that I havediscovered , I do not see any relevance in comparing the development of
Cubism with the emergence of Cubist artworks in Indonesia . The
formalistic Cubism of the works occurring within the development of art
in Europe and America can be perceived as important because , basically,
they exhibit the noun-ish sense of the English notion of "art~While , the issue of Cubist shapes in the works of Indonesian artists
is only a matter of idiom , which , in fact, ignores the "thingness " of art asnoun. These works follow the understanding of the term seni rupa whichis adverbial. The Cubist forms in the works of Indonesian artists carry an
expression of the aesthetic , and are imbued with meaning and anemphasis on experience linked to a sense of morality. The tendency towork and use Cubist forms in this manner is certainly not special , andreally is no different than the tendency to utilize any other idiom that is
not Cubistic.

Notes:
I. William R. Everdall, TbeFirstModems(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), p.79.
2. C harles H arrison & Paul Wood. eds.,Art in "/1Jeory
1900- 1990, pp.493-49 4.
3. Andre Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image"in Philip Al person,ed.. "/11e
Philosophyo/The
VisualArts (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1992), p.279.
4. Srephen Davies,"Non-Western Art and Art's Definition" in Carroll Noel, ed., Theories
of Art Today(Madiso n: University of Wisco nsin Press, 2000 ), p.201.
5. J. De Loos Haaxman, Ver/aatRapportlndii ('S-Grave nhage: Moucon & Co., 1968).

6. Old Script PustakaPurwaRaja.The publisher and the date of publication are both unknown.
7. WJ.S. Poerwardarminta et al., Baoesastra
Djawa(Groningen-Bnatavia:J.B. Wolter's, 1939).

257

Session 2- Presencation 2

Translucent Traces of People:
Peasant and Proletariat in Philippine Cubism
Patrick D. Flores[Professor, Art Studies Department, Universityof the Philippines Diliman]

The idyll was one of the dominant scenes that typified the Philippines in
the American era. le was framed by the romantic-Realist vanguards ofwhat is known as the conservative school of Philippine painting , led by
the revered masters Fabian de la Rosa and Fernando Amorsolo. Its bastion
was the University of the Philippines , an institution founded in 1908 to
support the agenda of benevolent assimilation in which America reared
the erstwhile Hispanic post-colon y in the ways of democracy. This effort
co craft the Philippines in the image of a neo-colony and in the guise of arepublic under imperialist auspice cook deep root in the fields ofgovernment , education , and popular culture. The fixation on peace andprosperity inherent in such a policy, which incidentally the Americanpresident would invoke as the model of restructuring Iraq in our own
moment, motivated the interaction between the pastoral of liberation andthe frenzy of expansion. Curiously, in the discipline of arc, the polemics
between conservatives and moderns , initiated in the lace 1920s and lasting
through the 1950s, played out in a milieu chat nurtured both aspirations.
Central co chis imagination was the figuration of labor, of people
tilling the terrain , cultivating plentiful nature into a provenance exemplifying the "Philippine~ We note chat Amorsolo 's pictures were notconfined co paintings; they circulated in calendars , textbooks , advertisements , and newspapers. This representation of labor would be challenged
by Viccorio Edades , who studied architecture and painting at the
University of Washington and was acutely influenced by the controversial
1913 Armory Show. Th e work The Builders,which formed part of his
homecoming exhibition in 1928, created a stir in the establishment ,having deviated from the tableau of work that congeals into rustic
spectacle co settle on the fleeting circumstance of working chat lays barethe elements of its hectic drudgery: distorted bodies of considerable heft ,disfiguring grime and grit , workers fleshed out through an accretion ofsubstance , of a mass chat is basically undifferentiated. It is chis mass oflabor chat has been organized and contracted through wage relations
courtesy of capitalism , generating the proletariat of a developing nationstate and the inhabitants of its cityscape . In chis technique of building ,painting as an instance of facture produces the modern and becomes adetail of its technology; it ceases co be merely a modern invention. Thiswatershed oeuvre infused the movement acknowledged as modernism,

258

PatrickD. Floreswhich was pursued by the triumvirate of Edades , Carlos Francisco , andGalo Ocampo. We draw the art-historical nexus to Cubism against thisbackground.
Two paintings are salient in this regard. Carlos Francisco 's Orasyon(Prayer ) and Galo Ocampo 's Brown Madonna (1938, fig.l ) evoke a
spiritual climate; in the former , farmers pause to pray at dusk and in thelatter , the Madonna and Child iconograph y assumes local habiliment.
The figure of the peasant is foregrounded in both , lodged in a rural
economy and inscribes the codes of lore and ritual , which convey signs ofcolonial inheritance and native entitlement. In these instructive intimations of province, the trope of the "folk" emerges as a personage constituted between dignified survival and the critical transition toward selfconsciousness. The notion of the folk, therefore , modifies the strictly
fig. I : Galo Ocampo, BrownMadonna,
1938,o il on canvas

economic framework insinuated by the concepts of the peasant andproletariat that are mainly premised on the method of surplus extraction:exchange for the former and the conscription of labor through a
production mechanism for the latter. This travail of the folk, who werebeing decisively transformed into a "working class; is cogently put acrossin Cesar Legaspi's Gadgets series (1948, 1949, 1952) in which people
mediate machines but are not overwhelmingly dehumanized and in Galo
Ocampo's Surrealistic Bayanihan(1955 ), in which cooperative toil within
the locale of village life is esteemed. It is in the constitution of the "folk"that traces of people are delineated as workers reified from their humanity, on the one hand, and as agents cherishing their local moral world , on
the other.
Vicente Manansala , who learned from the socialist Fernand Leger,
would cast Cubism in light of these contexts. A member of the 13
Moderns, an informal coterie of modernists gathered by Victoria Edades
in 1941 only to be dispersed by the Pacific War, and a luminary of the
postwar Neorealists (1949), who tried to venture beyond the postImpressionism of a foundational modernism, Manansala sustained thediscourse of the folk that was introduced by Carlos Francisco and Galo
Ocampo. But he was committed as well to take it to another level by way
of Cubism . Thus , while his Angelus/I Believe in God (1948 ) resembles ornearly imitates Francisco 's stroke and flair (Paras-Perez, 1980), his

Madonna ofthe Slums (1950 , fig.2 ) reinterprets Ocampo 's intuition of
locality; it does not only mark a shift of locus and livery, it also conceives
the intensity adequate to an asymmetrical social situation. Madonna ofthe

Slums may be regard ed as the paradigmatic and programmatic modethrough which Cubism in the Philippines would be grasped to reveal th estrain in the ties betwe en the peasant and the proletariat, the idyll and thecity, the ideal and the misshapen , the common folk and the distinct
f ig.2: Viceme Manansala, Madonna of
the Slums, 1950, oi l on lawanlt board[co lor plate 9]

Filipino . In Philippine painting , this disproportion condenses in the
lumpen character , neither peasant nor proletariat, roaming the daunting

259

streets: the vagrant.
The critic Leonidas Benesa asserted that the Neorealists were"united under the aegis of cubism~ (Benesa 1978, n.p. ) Cubism served as
the vehicle through which they were able to express a world ruined andreconfigured by the war, the American campaign to reclaim the Philippines from the Japanese , and the period of reconstruction. Within thishorizon appeared sights of dispossession and restoration. H.R. Ocampo
and Cesar Legaspi would limn the theme of hunger amid affluence withseverity and Neorealists of the Philippine Art Gallery (1951 ) like Romeo
Tabuena, Ang Kiukok , and Nena Saguil would carve out of Cubism th eedge and angle of dislocation and uncertainty to sharpen their expressionist dispositions.
But it was H.R. Ocampo, a self-taught painter and writer , who mostconvincingly embodied the profound longing to imagine the temper of afractured state and the antagonisms that agitated it. Belonging to theartist 's proletarian phase ( 1934-1948 ) is a work titled Calvary! Three

Crosses(1948, fig.3 ); it depicts the crucifixion of Christ alongside thesmokestacks of a factory, and so links the Catholic pieties of suffering andsacrifice to the exhaustion of industrial advancement. It is a depiction that
coheres well with the artist's fiction such as Bakya (Wooden Clogs ), whichkeenly portrays the anguish of a mother who finds her husband dead in
the picket line of striking workers, and Riceand Bullets, where "the hungry
and the destitute hurl the first stones , assaulting the forces of law, andbarging into the mighty storehouse , heedless of bullets'.' (Reyes 2004 )Gleaning from the corpus of H .R. Ocampo , the city becomes a siteof uneven developments where the peasant and the proletariat live withina new space that recombines their respective customs and disproves therigid dichotomy between them: migrants from the countryside , like
Victorio Edades and Vicente Manansala themselves, found their places in
Manila and the islands around the archipelago were being graduallyassimilated into a network of urban centers. Manansala once confessed , "I
am not an intellectual. I am a peasant. I do not paint from the mind. I
paint from the heart~ (Reyes 1989, 22 ) He was raised in Pampanga, northof Manila, but moved to the capital after the war, lived in the slums , andsketched the portraits of American soldiers to get by. The Neorealists
refocused their vision on this feeling of habitation that was instilled
among dwellers who clustered around railways in their improvised shelterand poached on land that was not their property; Cubism offered alanguage that articulated this experience and may have envisaged the city
as, in the words of Susan Buck-Morss (1995 ), a "dreamwork and catastrophe'.'A key aspect here was a kind of hybrid architecture contrived in war.
The barongbarongwas and continues to be the popular term for the shanty
made of scrap materials found in the environment. It is pieced together

260

fig.3: H .R. Ocam po,Calvary / Three

Crosses,1948,oil on canvas

like an assemblage, with diverse elements continually being appended as
the need arises. Its structure takes after the indigenous hut , or the bahay

kubo, literally translated as the cube house , a single-room affair of manyextensions. The barongbarongfound its way to man y Neorealist paintings(fig.4 ), perhaps because it was a reference to the blight of the prewar andpostwar landscape , which inevitably conceded to the City Beautiful neoClassic design suited to America's tropical empire.
A complement of this peculiar translation of the Cubist conception
through the morphology of a makeshift abode is the phrase "Transparent
Cubism~ Departing from the prominent stylistic traits of its source, such
fig.4:Vicente Manansala, Bar1111gBaro11g
Number I, 1950,oil on canvas

as rigorous fragmentation and limited chromatic possibilities, Transparent
Cubism facets the surface to disclose crystalline planes without violating
the integrit y of the figur e or subject matter. This expression favors rhythm
and harmony, local color , and a lyrical effect in which the work tends toshimmer or sparkle as light touches the facets of the surface. The term"transparent " is based on this interplay as well as on the overlapping ofplanes that penetrate each other. This quality is more translucent anddiaphanous than transparent, flirting with the tension between opaquematter and streaming light , an impression that can be observed indelicate, see-through festival ornamentation,from Christmas lanterns to

rice-wafer chandeliers; gossamer fabric of pineapple fiber; and shell
windows filtering glare to furnish interiors with pearly luster.
The materialization of the Cubist in the Philippines thus can be
described by the layers of light that give rise to a condition of being
apparent, of being between obvious and seeming. This principle relates toboth space and a strategy of remaining "human: ' It has been proposedthat the resistance of Philippine Cubism to the total dissolution of thesubject is an attempt to restore well-being in the face of aggressive
alienation. It is an outlook that is, on the one hand , stark as can be seen in
how the barongbarongindexes political economy; on the other, it isambivalent as it impersonates Cubism but forsakes its analytical orsynthetic rationalit y through an excess of adornment , which renders afolk ethos lively and resilient amid the rubble. Ang Kiukok's indignant
faces and heaps of junk and Anita Magsaysay-Ho 's rural women of
angular visages who wear white scarves of sisterhood betray these mixed
tendencies of critique and concord , a creative transposition of Cubism
into a Philippine visuality suspended in luminous sheerness. This
uncertainty , how ever, has also prompted writers to suspect that artists of
Cubistic inclination only "incorporated into ... figurative
paintings ... fragmented image s ... They 're still Amorsolo ~ (Reyes 1989, 97 )Apart from translucence , an idios yncratic Philippine Cubism also
appropriated the mural as a means of addressing a wider public of either
spectators in the art world or citizens in a civic realm. Relevant in this
discussion is the early collaboration ofVictorio Edades, Carlos Francisco ,261

and Galo Ocampo for a large work commissioned for Juan Nakpil's
Capitol Theater. RisingPhilippines(1935 , fig. 5 ) is an allegorical tribute to
the rebirth of the nation with the founding of the institutions that vested
the Philippines with supervised sovereignt y as the Commonwealthgovernment of America and with the ascendancy of film as the century's
premier medium. This work bears the influence of Art Deco, theemerging style of a modernizing Philippine architecture that imbibed the
Jazz Age, Hollywood, and an eclecticism mingling an array of inspirations, from Cubism to exotic primitive archetypes (including Filipino
motifs ) to aerodynamic machines. According to Edades , "The painting

fig.5: Victorio Edades/ Carlos
Francisco/ Galo Ocam(X),Rising
Philippines,Capitol Theater mural,

was very symbolic ; it showed a figure of a woman surging upwards , and1935,o il on canvas

on either side of her we tried to show the Spanish civilization whichtaught us religion and the American civilization which taught us how towork ~ (Reyes 1989, 7) This sympathy to the eclectic vocabulary of Art
Deco resonates with the projection of the city as a utopian dreamscapereveling in narcotic admixtures but dispelled by war; painted in the year
Marcos declared Martial Law, Vicente Manansala 's charcoal opus Groupof

Nude Figures(1972) about an orgy in a drug den may allude to such a
decadent ambience.
Important murals that cite Cubism include Francisco's Filipino

Struggles ThroughPhilippines History (1964), which narrates the history of
the Philippines in a mythic register; Manansala 's Stationsof the Cross(1957) for the University of the Philippines Catholic chapel; and H.R.
Ocampo's Genesis(1966 ), which was woven into a tapestry by Japaneseartisans to serve as the magnificent curtain of the main theater of the
Cultural Center of the Philippines. These works were entangled inconflicting political desires. We note that before Manansala pursued
Cubism with devotion , he was interested in exploring social issues as canbe discerned in the mural Freedomof the Presson the predicament ofjournalism for the National Press Club. With this , Cubism assumed apublic-ness and declared a longing to at once represent and rouse thespirit of what may be interpellated as mass subjects and designated as thepeople.It was through this populism that Cubism lent itself well to thespecies of nationalism fostered by leaders of a peripheral nation-state like
Ferdinand Marcos in the 1970s; concomitantly , the art market intervened
to herald Cubism as the signature of modern taste. In a setting wherestate and market were coordinated by the patronage of a dictatorship likein the Philippines , Cubism inevitably converted into a specimen of kitsch
spoilt by the art trade and a variety of propaganda exploited by the state
to ratify its status as a custodian of identity deserving of consensus and anengineer of development worthy of international recognition. At this turnin the career of Cubism , modernism drifted toward becoming hegemonic, in contrast to its oppositional impetus in its incipient foray, setting
itself as the norm of the latest , albeit already belated from the262

Euramerican estimation. We only have to notice the discrepancy between
Vicente Manansala's Madonna of the Slums and its version in Mag-ina(Mother and Child ) in 1975 to reckon how the symptom of scarcity
would mutate into suspicious affectation over the years, with a vagary inhistory becoming nothing more than a vogue and the modernist
patriarch being reduced to a "society painter" on whom an authoritarianregime confers National Artist honors. Inevitably, the modernists , alongwith Amorsolo , would conspire to ensconce the Philippine picturesqueand secure for the hardened but sanguine folk its currency as Filipino ,modernity 's expectant apprentice.
This is probably why governments of autocratic and third-world
nationalist persuasion harnessed the potentials of public art , an option
carried out quite indirectly through Cubism. The Marcos administration ,through the frivolous schemes of Imelda, enlisted the talent of modernists
to satiate the impossibly fraught requirements of modernity foisted on a
post-colony: to locate an origin and to demonstrate originality , topreserve an essence and to catch up, to pose as native and national and toprime a polity for global enterprise. Manansala was asked to paint a mural
extolling the achievements of Imelda as mother of Filipinos for thePhilippine Heart Center (fig.6 ), and Cesar Legaspi's Bayanihan (1976) was
executed as an outdoor work for the First Lady's whim to decorate Manila
with art for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development V(UNCTAD ) meeting in 1979.
It is uncanny that the mural , an indispensable presence in Latin
fig.6: Vicente Manansala, Philippine
H eart Ce nter mur al, 1976, o il o ncanvas [color plare I I JAmerican Marxist-inflected art , was greatly deepened by Diego Rivera , a
Cubist in Paris from 1915-1917 before he returned to Mexico. We cantentatively explore a lateral encounter between the Latin American mural
movement and Southeast Asian modern art through Cubism, which had
an eccentric relationship with public art. In Indonesia , for instance , there
is a story of Soekarno, the charismatic leader of the Indonesian revolution
in 1945 and the first President of the Republic, inviting Diego Rivera tovisit. Though we could not confirm this anecdote, we find in theextensive Soekarno art collection a work of Rivera, Womanwith Flowers(1955), of an Indonesian lady in traditional attire . Moreover, in 1954,
Rivera met Soemardja, the founder of the cosmopolitan Bandung
Institute of Technology , which was the channel of Cubism in Indonesia
through Ries Mulder; according to art historian Jim Supangkat, Mulder
was primarily a stained-glass artist of Art Deco leanings. Recent researchby art scholar Alice Guillermo likewise tells us that Carlos Francisco, theforemost muralist in Philippine art , frequently mentioned Mexican
murals in letters to his daughter and looked up to Rivera; Victorio Edades
had earlier acquainted him to Pre-Columbian

motifs , which may haveheightened his interest in popular mural conventions through Art Deco.
This preliminary investigation into the contact between Cubism263

and nation-building , partially via Art Deco that flourished in Manila andBandung in the 1930s, may draw our attention to the ways in which the
Cubist promise would be upheld or frustrated as a testimony to a usable
modernity and an appeal to th e labor of th e folk multitude , peasant andprol etariat, that conjured th e nation. We can identify, for instance , theallure of abstraction (Zaelani 2004 ) and of simultaneity or dynamism that
may have mediated th e project of progr ess - or revolution - andenabled a Cubist spher e to exist and endure within postcolonial nations
anxious about autonom y and the prospect s of amelioration. As Thomas
Crow (1996) reminds us, "The Cubist vision of sensory flux and isolationin the city became in Art Deco a portable vocabulary for a whole modern'look ' in fashion and design ... (Th e Art Deco style was also easily drawn
into the imager y of the mechani zed bod y characteristic of proto fascist
and fascist Utopianism. )" Exemplar y in this regard is the poster designedby Leo Visser in 1933 that advertises th e telephone link betwee n th e
Netherlands and the East Indies: on the left are typical Dutch scenes; on
the right are commonplace images of th e colony. It is a juxtaposition that
may be detect ed in the early mural collaboration on the RisingPhilippinesof the pioneer Filipino modernists in 1935.
The ruin of postwar Manila and post-Independence Jakarta (Kusno
2000 ) and th e comprehensive plans through which they would bemended and later refurbished in the New Society/New Order rule of
Marcos and Soeharto was the materiality that may have concreti zed a
Cubist semblance , or dissembling. It was this procedure of wrenchingmodernization that provided the means of, in the neoliberal parlance ofour day, an exceptional makeover true to totalitarian and capitalist
preten ses. Cubism may have secured for Philippine and Indonesian
modernity an idiom that crosses the gap between th e memory of a"selective tradition " and the rupture with retrogressive habitude , between
cohesion and multiplicity , betwe en th e renunciation of underdevelopment (or the affirmation of innovative industrialization ) and theorientalist no stalgia for quaint virtu es of kinship and solidarity. In sodoing , it may have finally prefigured the complex convergence of nation ,state, people , and the emancipator y fantasie s of po stcolonial passage.

References:
Leonidas Benesa, "Hernando R. Ocampo: The Neorealist as Avant-Garde;HemandoOcampo:A Retrospective
1929-1978 (Manila: Museum of Philippine Art, 1978).
Susan Buck-Morss,"
The City as Dreamworld and Catasrrophe,"'Octaber
73,Summer 1995.
Thomas Crow,Modem Art i11the Common Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).
In Memoriam:"/11eFoundersof IndonesianArt: SjafaiSoemardja,AchmadSadaIi, Edie Kartasubama,MochtarApi11,
AngkamaSetjadipradja,But Muchtar{Bandung: Alumni Association of Bandung Institute of Technology,1995).
Abidin Kusno.Behindthe Postcolouial:
Architecture,UrbanSpaceand PoliticalCulturesin llldouesia(London:
Routledge, 2000 ).
Gerard Lico, Arkitekura11g
Filipino,forthcoming.
Molly Nesbit, '"In the Absence of the Parisienne;" in Beatriz Colomina, ed.,Sexuality and Space (New York:264

Princemn Architect u ral Press, 1992 ).

Paintingsand Statuesfrom the Collectionof Pres1de11t
Sukarnoof the Republicof Indonesia,5 volumes Uakarta:
Publishing Committee of Collection of Painti ngs and Statues of President Soekarno, 1964).
Rodolfo ParasPerez,Manansala (Manila: PLC Publications, 1980).
Cid Reyes, Conversationsin PhilippineArt (Manila: Cultural Ce nt er of the Philippines. 1989 ).
Da nilo Francisco Reyes, "Defying che Strict Co u nt; wall text for the exhibition "Influx: Transpositions in
Philippine Modernism; (Manila: Natio nal Museum of rhe Philipp ines, 2004 ).
Rizki Zaelani, "lmag i(n )ing the Autonomy: Cub ism Practice in Indones ia; del ivered at Art Sem inar 2004:
Cub ism in Asia (Tokyo: Japan Foundation Asia Center, 2004 ).

(The author wis hes to thank Alice Gui llermo, Reuben Caii.ete, J irn Su pangkat,Am inudi n TH .
Siregar, Crisl ine Torres, and Gene Lacza Pilapil for sharing information an d insight. )265

Session 2-Presentation 3

Nanyang Modernism:
Between Idealisms
Ahmad Mashadi[Senior Curator, Singapore Art Museum]

When Liu Kang (China 1911- Singapore 2004) asserted that the locationof his practice is "not ... Paris, not ... Beijing, not ... Rome and not ...
Tokyo ... ;' 1 he was not merely attempting to distinguish his art fromthose that developed el ewhere. But rather he aimed to emphasize acultural consciousness, one that recognized the engagements and thecontinuities of art development across geography and over time. Painting
Kampung (1957, fig.1) is both about marking affiliation (a belonging to acaucu of modernity referenced to Paris and Shanghai) and distancing( taking the idea of the original by way of its "original" Southeast Asiansubject and the re-positioning of the traditional ink-scroll landscapeconventions, advancing newer notion of "tropicality" and "oriental
pictoriality").
Born in China in 1911, Liu pent his childhood in Malaya, studied
art in Shanghai under Liu Haisu in the late-1920s and later Paris in theearly 1930s, taught art upon his return to Shanghai, before moving toSingapore in 1937. The Sino-Japanese War that erupted in 1937 made Liu
Kang's move permanent, foreshadowing the migration of others including Chen Wen Hsi, Cheong Soo Pieng and Georgette Chen- after
the Second World War. They came to Singapore having spent theirformative and maturing years either in Shanghai or Paris, and hence
looked at Singapore as a location where the modern trajectories in theirartistic practice may be continued and sustained. These developments
taking place out ide of po t-1949 China are intere ting. Ralph Croizier, in
his article on modern art in Shanghai remarked:

Ahmad Mashadi

fig. I: Liu Kang, Pai11ti11g Ka111pu11g,
1957,oil on anva

The Communist rise to power in 1949 wrote a definitiveend to a period in modern China's art history and culturalinteraction with the We t that was already over ... Not until
the 1980s would the names and styles of European
modernism - Matisse, Picasso, Fauvism, Cubi m, and all
the rest - re-enter the Chinese art world.2
Here, China is regarded firstly as a geo-national entity. Yet, the transmigra­
tion of intellectuals and artists during the period during and after theWar, involuntary or otherwise, had generated a range of practices outsideof China. For Liu Kang the question of continuity and change in modern
266

Chinese art (conceived here extra-territorially ) was to be addressed byasserting the discursiveness of his practice to earlier developments in
China. His comments on Xu Beihong , a frequent visitor to Singapore
during the late-1930s and early-1940s is indicative:
The 20th centur y is a major turning point in history.
Western art has entered a new state in creative concept ,technique and material. Witness the Impressionist 's
analysis of light , the psychological element on PostImpressionists ' style, the colour of individualit y in Fauvism,the method of re-organising forms in Cubism, and theinfluence of music on Abstract Expressionist style. All
these are indeed glorious happenings in the art world.
Living in the midst of new inventive waves, Beihong ,instead of welcoming them with open arms, criticizes
Cezanne , the forefather of modern art and, Matisse, leaderof Fauvism by calling them gangsters. That shows how
outdated his thinking is! 3
Here , Liu refers to the well-known debate between Xu Beihong and Xu
Zhimo initiated in 1929, during which time Liu was a student inShanghai. Xu Beihong in his article entitled "Doubt " denounced Cezanne ,Matisse as deviants from the great tradition of Western art , and "ridiculed
their Chinese followers in abusive terms that equally mixed scorn andoutrage~ 4 Xu Zhimo's calculated response in "I also Have Doubts: stateda case for the Chinese modernists , further entrenching the modernists'
claim in assuming the mettle in advancing Chinese art. Liu's regard for
Xu Beihong was strategic. Practicing in Singapore since 1937, it was
critical to correlate his practice in relation to earlier discourse that took
place in China . By the 1950s, the modernist project within China had
begun to wane, and one may speculate that it was important for Liu tosuggest that the criticality of artistic practice may be identified throughthe diasporic dispersion of Chinese modern art, including the developments taking place in Singapore. At ocher times , Liu refers to his Chineseness. He stated , "I paint with Western painting material and tools, but mystyle and substance are Chinese, ... the realm of my painting is typically
Oriental~ And this was also be cast in civilizational terms: "Only when
one has fully grasped the essence of one 's culture and is proud of one 's
ethnicity that one can thoroughly understand the essence of other races'
traditions and penetrate their minds ~ 5This presentation focuses the thoughts and perpectives of a group of
ethnic-Chinese artists - chiefly migrants - that emerged into prominence during postwar colonial Singapore. To emphasize the range ofaesthetic idealisms , we shall make references to the statements made by267

the artists and also claims made on their behalf The statements andremarks provide significant insights into the thoughts and attitudes ofartists , as form of artistic voices that render art historical readings
dynamic , linking and comparing intentionalities

with outcomes. This isnecessary to measure the conceptual and formal inflections that takeplace as aesthetic devices are adapted and put in use within specificcontexts and with varying points of entry.
These group of ethnic-Chinese
the Nanyang (Southseas ) artists the 1950s -artists were known collectivel y asa term that gained great currency byreferenced geographically and culturally to China. The artists

mentioned earlier, Liu Kang , Chen Wen Hsi , Cheong Soo Pieng andGeorgette Chen are commonly grouped together given their preponderance toward styles associated to Western modernism. Among them , thepractices of Chen Wen Hsi and Cheong Soo Pieng during the 1950s
showed a greater propensit y towards the Cubistic idiom. Cheong 's Malay

Woman (1950, fig.2 ), Bali Beach (1955 ), Brook(1953 , fig.3 ) and Chen 's
Couple (c. 1950s),Dance (1954, fig. 4 ) and FourHerds (c. 1950s ) areconducive for further investigations. In these paintings , the Chinese-nessor the notion of Self is rendered present by representations of the Other,through the artist 's fascination for the primitive and the idyllic. The
Nanyang or Southeast Asia and its peoples were after all , new to thesemigrant artists. Malay Woman provides an enigmatic dual imagery of
seduction and repulsion. Brook and FourHerdsexude a resonance of an
exotic land. For Liu Kang, Cheong Soo Pieng, Chen Wen Hsi and Chen
Chong Swee, Bali-

its landscape and women -more than othersubjects , offered a rich cultural imaginary. Their famous trip to Bali in

fig.2: Cheong Soo Pieng, Malay
Woman, 1950,oi l on board [color
plate 14 )1952 had been canonized as a critical turning point in the developmentof the Nanyang iconography . But Bali as a cultural imagery emerged in
Singapore as early in the late 1930s. A Belgian artist Jean Le Mayeur(1880-1958 ) held a solo exhibition in Singapore featuring works completed in Bali. In attendance was his beautiful Balinese wife Ni Pollok who would have appeared mysterious , exotic and enchanting. Chen
Chong Swee, overwhelmed by the impressionistic exuberance of the

fig.3: Cheong Soo Pieng,Brook,1953
oil on canvas

Belgian 's paintings and his wife wrote:
A Belgian artist who settled in Bali put up an art exhibitionin Singapore in 1938. This Belgian artist originally wanted
to go to Tahiti as he had a yearning for the type of life ledby the Post-Impressionist artist Gauguin. On his way there
he passed through Bali and found that there was no placeon earth like Bali -its dancing and singing so soul-stirringand its women so vigorous and graceful. ... Before theopening of the exhibition , the Belgian consul held a
reception on his behalf ... Figures dominated his Bali

268

fig.4: Chen Wen Hsi. Dance. 1954,oil
on canvas

paintings . His works be they sketches done in light colours
or bright coloured oil paintings , showed that they were
inspired by the bright and clear tropical sunlight. His
brightly clad energetic and graceful dancers , dancing to thebeat of the drums and bells, or his weaving women,kneeling beside th e loom weaving sarong cloth, fully
demonstrat ed the tranquil and fine life of the Balinese. The
painting partner [Ni Pollok , who later became his wife ] hebrought along, attired in traditional Baline se costumes , wason hand to receive guests. She offered herself for photographs bare-breasted. This created quite a stir in Singapore. 6
In Bali Beach (1955 ) and Artist and Model (1956, fig.5 ) represent a popular
regard for Bali as a Nanyang subject. The Other - the sitting or reclining
women of Bali - offers no voice. It is silent and docile , unconcerned by
the encroachment or gaze of the artists. It fulfils Ni Pollok's earlier
promi se and more. While it is common to regard these excursionary
fig.5: Liu Kang,Artist and Model.
1954, oil on canvas

interests as impulses to "transform 'primitive ' art to formulate a newartistic language " connected to the "aesthetic value and practice with rootsin the West" ,7 Bali as "inspiration " also symptomised the necessary
inflection prompted by streams of modernity advanced earlier throughPrewar China. Hence , the Balinese subjects - completed in diverse
modern styles Fauvistic, post-Impressionistic, Cubist and Realist become a symbol of the appropriated Nanyang , indexed to Chinese
diasporic mod ernity. Artists ' conceptions of the Chinese-ness of theirformalistic devices are indicative. Chen Wen Hsi (China 1906 - Singapore
1991 ) 8 regard ed his use of Cubist ic idiom as part of a general movetowards abstraction. Like Liu Kang, he considers that his re-articulation or
adaptation of th e "Western " form is inflected by a natural , an innate andinternalized notion of Chinese-ness and sense of civilization. He wrote:
This leads me to the controversial subject of
abstractionism, . .. on account of an increas ed tend ency in
man 's endevours to seek mental and psychological
freedom. More and more , the artist deviates from objectivism , but tries to express inner thoughts and ideas ... On th eother hand , if you studied the history of Chinese art , youwill find that as long as nin e centuries ago, there was atheory of painting being expressive of thought more thanshape , as was expounded by the great scholar Su Dong-po ,that "judging a pictur e by physical likeness is being
juvenil e, and that a true poet does not permit his writing
to be restricted by the rul es of poetry': I believe that myendevours in Art of painting have been largely influenced269

by Ba Da Shan Ren of early Qing Dynasty, and Huang
Sheng of Kang Xi years. For more recent source of impact, I
owe much to Wu Chang-shuo , Qi Bai-shi and my teacher
Pan Tian-shou. I was inspired by their simplicity , eleganceand almost effortless appearance. 9
That dynamic interaction between categories considered Western andtraditional was also a theme that was often used to read into the works ofCheong Soo Pieng (China 1917-Singapore

1983).' 0 Lake Wan Tho , aprominent collector and patron during the 1950s described Cheong:
Soo Pieng is, undoubtedly, the most versatile of the many
gifted people who practice the graphic arts in this country .
. . . He is an artist who has many strigs to his bow, or manybrushes in his painting box: thus, at one moment, he is
Chung Say P'un, painting in the techniques which are
traditional to the Chinese artist: but more often he is Soo
Pieng Cheong, or Soo-Pieng Cheong, or Soo Pieng
Choong, or even S.P Chong , a painter who is deeply
influenced by the artists of the West - Gauguin , Picasso ,Modigliani, Vlaminck, Braque."From the discussions so far, one may draw several broad speculations
about Cubistic tendencies in Singapore during the 1950s. Firstly, it is oneof several idioms being developed by modern artists. Cubistic works were
produced alongside others that appear Fauvistic and Impressionistic.
These styles were not regarded in any particular hierarchy or engaged
sequentially. The use of Cubistic elements was seen as part of a generalmove towards abstraction. Not burdened by strict Western theoreticalprecepts, Cubistic and other modernistic elements co-mingled withtraditional pictorialities found in Chinese ink painting. Given thispeculiarity, "the Cubistic " may be conflated into "the modernistic ';allowing us to develop broad assumptions about modernism on
Singapore art which may be characterised as non-hierarchical, open andadaptive in its regard for Western modern styles, hybridized, and stablisedby specific pictorial and thematic considerations rooted in tradition andthe region.
Secondly , in the absence of a pre-existing dominant style, theCubistic idiom was introduced to cultivate a proposition of the modern
filling a weak, if not a vacuum of critical practice. The vacuum of criticalpractice was circumvented by references to art historical precedents or
discourse that took place in mainland China, hence creating a proposition of a discursive continuum across geography , as a form of virtualities
of modernity arising from but independent from those originating from270

China , each cultivating its own grounds through engagements withlocalities and contexts. This is significant in shaping critical reception
amongst art writers and patrons of the period.
Thirdly , arising from localities and contexts , the modernistic or
Cubistic project in Singapore seem to privilege landscape and genre. The
figure is sustained in its readable form. Total fragmentation hardly occurs .
A "primitivist" regard for local cu ltur es made subject matters suc h as thevillage and village-life congenia l as express ive interests. In the works of
Liu Kang, Cheong Soo Pieng and Chen Wen Hsi, the island of Bali and its
people (fig.5 ) were transformed into a cata logue of iconographic themes
for the Nanyang artists.
Fourthly , these factors contribute to the popularity of the modern or
Cubistic style in the art market with Cheong and C hen enjoying record
sales during the J 950s. Comb ined with the critical acknow ledgement
they enjoyed, by default the modernists occupied a dominant or anincumbent position agai nst wh ich ot her avant-gardist positions may be
staked.
The period of the late 1940s and 1950s intersected with an emerging discourse of nat ion in Malaya and Singapore. Co loni al Singapore ,during th e imm ediate years after the War, was also a conducive groundfor th e reception and development of political ideas. For many of the
Nanyang artists who spent a large part of their formative years in C hin ain the 1930s and 1940s, the cumbersome question of politics- at least in
its agitative form - would have been somet hin g th ey would have regard
in amb ivalent terms. After all, the triumph of the Left in Chi na in 1949
had rendered "modern practices " problematic. Yet, for the younger art ists
emerg ing during the postwar co lonial Singapore, the continuing strugg leagainst imperialist values in mainland Ch ina would have found resonance in the context of a broad campa ign for Singapore 's independence.
Despite the banning of the Communist Party in 1948, Singapore
remained opened to leftist ideals, as student and labour movements
became new fronts for political engagements. The comp lexities of theemerg ing ideological struggles can perhaps be reflected in the term
Nanyang artis ts. It may be loosely regarded as a cultura l pointer orsign ifier, referring to a community of overseas Chinese artists who spent
their formative years in China but later migrated to Malaya, or those thatwere born in Malaya, but maintained clear emotiona l and intellectual ties
with China, represented by its emergent and diverse ideologies andhistories. The end of the Second World War had encouraged the emergence of newer political thoughts as co lonies , radicalized by the events of
the War, began to reassess their relationships with their respective co lonial
powers. Development of overseas Chinese identity in Southeast Asia,
concepts of cit izensh ip, education and culture within the years following
the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the Sino-Japanese271

War prompted many intellectuals and artists co flee co the Nanyang
region.
To facilitate these interests we can consider the following threeworks: Chen Wen Hsi's ln the Museum (1956, fig.6 ), Lim Hak Tai's Riot
(1955, fig.7 ) and Chua Mia Tee's Epic Poemof Malaya (1955, fig.8 ). The
daces for these works are not coincidental. They were painted during themost challenging period of Singapore social and political history,
highlighted by political agitations and riots.

In the Museum (fig.6 ) is one of Chen Wen Hsi's most accomplishedcubo-expressioniscic undertakings completed during the 1950s. The
canvas surface is rendered into grids, most visible at the upper left of thepainting. Elements are organized in compartments

and compacted tightly,

fig.6: Chen Wen Hsi,1n theMuseum, 1956,oil on canvas

without a coral fragmentation of the subjects depicted. The natural
structure of the animal bones provides a strong Cubiscic motif for theartist, which he deploys advantageously as angular paccerns repeatedacross the canvas. Chen 's work exemplifies a proposition for a universalise
fig.7: Lim Hak Tai,Riot. 1955,oilnotion of aesthetic ideals. In his own words:

on board... what we are seeking in art is not just physical likeness ofshape of shape and form, but the composite image andspirit, the overall beauty and cohesion of the painting. The
artist apportions the space of his picture into various parts ,and creates images of different features and objects inseveral parts. These parts , these features, these objects are so
designed that there is balance, harmony and complementation among them , and they produce a coral image of theconcept of the artist. Likewise, he may construct his lines indifferent ways, whether straight or slanting , continuous or
broken , central , symmetrical or oddly located , whether
simple lines or forms or geometric design, -they all lend

together to produce a symphonic effect of the beauty andmessage intended by the artist. 12
By juxtaposing the common man against the rarified field of zoologicaland anthropologicalinvestigations of the colonial museum , Chen Wen

Hsi may have well introduced an access to a critique on colonial dominance vested through its taxonomic exercise in ordering and discipliningoriental cultures. Contrast this subtlety against Chua Mia Tee's (China
1931-) Epic Poemof Malaya (fig.8 ). The Realism ofChua's work is
startling. It is a powerful imagery of optimism and anxiety. A group ofChinese students sat transfixed , listening to a reading of a nationalise
poem, oblivious of the incoming storm that sweeps across the iconic
landscape of tropical vegetation in the background. But the dark clouds
are also ominous in its declaration of an impending transformation. A

272

fig.8: Chua Mia Tee,Epic Poemof
Malaya, 1955, oi l o n canvas

shaft of light piercing through the clouds onto the gestured hand testifies
to this. Int eresting ly, it is not the "progressive moderns " that wereusurping the "Realises: it is the other way round . While you nger, C hu a
may be seen as Chen 's contemporary. Chua belonged to a group of artists
consisting of young Chinese middle-school graduates , who were oriented
to the political left. This is not surprising , the intellectual ties that theoverseas C hin ese community maintained with mainland China throughout the late 1940s and 1950s through a system of privatised education ,facilitat ed the transfer of political ideas , fermented by anti-co lonial
sentiments and the need to sustain cu ltur al pride and identity. Acting as acatalyst , the living cond itions in Singapore in the first half of the 1950s
were poor. A quarter lived in poverty , characterized by poor housing andhigh unemployment , and exacerbated by the co lonia l neglect for theeducationa l needs of the Chinese. Through paintings and woodcuts, theSocia l Realist depicted urban hardships , destitution , political suppression,
the valiant strugg les of the working class, distinct from the landscape andfigurative genre of the modernist. 13 As a political avant-garde, thephilosophical roots of the Social Realists including C hua and the Equator
Art Society (estab lished in 1956) may be traced to the developments in
Ch in a during the 1930s inspired by the ideas of Lu Xun , ga inin g prominence among overseas C hin ese when the Sino-Japanese War erupted in
1937. In Singapore in 1938, Ma Ge w hose writings focused on development of the concepts ofNanyang

identity, called for a nationalist

awakening amongst the overseas Ch in ese:
The present state of silence w hen it comes to the discussion
on the direction of artistic efforts shou ld not continue ... I
call upon the Malayan and Sin gapore Chinese arts circle toact ively discuss the obligatory responsibilities of the visua larts forces in this great age ... This is no longer a time "foran ': Even if it is "for an : there is a need to recognize thesocial context of art, in order to grasp the sp irit of thetime. 14
By the early 1950s, with the question of China resolv ed , younger artist
turned their attention towards an emerging anti-colonia l movement. For
these artists , "art belongs to society -it is public , and shou ld serve thepublic ~ They "are prepared to commit all ... efforts to help Malaya ga in
her independence and her process of nation building ~ 15 Given themodernist dominance and the ambivalence towards the anti-co lonia lcause , these art ists were ab le to take up an avant-gardist position. Their
position against the modernists is clear:
The so-ca lled Cub ist Art is actua lly a type w hich denies the273heritage of tradition , discards humanity and truth in art,and emphasizes hypocrisy and anti-realism. Reason,
progress , love for humankind, peace and harmony areforsaken and replaced by a decadent art which tries topropagandize bestiality, violence and anti-humanist

ideas.

Every art worker has a responsibility to denounce andexpose the true nature of this contagious and diseased art.
As Malayan art workers, we should not only posses a keeneye for painting , but should at the same time have a sharp
discretion for politics. Our criticisms should be
unprecedentedly and closely committed to realism. All
rash actions will undoubtedly lubricate our enemies '
weapons and cause a hindrance against our own art. This
will not only be a loss to the art world; it will be a culturalloss and the loss of all Malayan citizens! 16
It seems that the "symphonic effect of the beauty " of self-expression as
expressed by Chen Wen Hsi cannot be reconciled with the strident
position of the Realists , where "anything that belongs to or connotes
beneficially to the opposite social classes should be isolated and a painful
blow delivered to the head so as to destroy it completely." 17
Lim Hak Tai (China 1893 -S ingapore 1963) 18 in his work entitled

Riot (fig.7 ) attempted to bridge the divide. Here he depicted the violent
labour and student riots of 1954 and 1955, depicting these events using a
Cubist language. As an educator and leading personality of the art scene
in the 1950s, he was more concerned with the task of consolidating thediverse efforts of ethnic-Chinese

artists working in Singapore. His own

practice as an artist reflects the many trajectories of art making taking
place during the mid-1950s. As an artist living in a period of tumultuouschange sympathetic to the political activism of his young students, manyof his own works showed interests in promoting social concerns,
reflective of the preoc cupation of other socially engaged artists of thetime. Yet as an educator, he was also concerned in advancing the languageof art making. He advocated an opened engagement with a diverse rangeof thoughts and traditions:...... Marinetti, a pioneer of the Futuristic style advocateddiscarding all the set moulds left behind by the Classicism
school so artists could create works that are in tune withthe times . And he had good reasons for thinking so. The
20th century is a scientific age of advanced social thinking
and education , everything is in flux , it is good time to startwith any engagement as long as our have a sound background, system and education .... How does the artist274

create? Does he go chrough a long period of un ceasin gpractice before he reaches his zenith of his arc? I do notchink we sho uld d iscard all chat o ur predecessors left
behin d indi scrimin ately. Rath er, 1 am all for a flexible wayof in tegra tin g the essence of arc of th e m asters, Or ient al
and Western, and cakin g fro m th em aspects that are mostsuit ab le for th e Na nyang regio n .19
Lim Hak Tai pro posed an open, ad aptive, and co ncurr ent explo ratio ns
int o a range of aesth etic and co nceptu al co ncern s:
1. Th e fusio n of cultur e of th e d ifferent races

2. The co mmuni cation of Or ien tal and Western arc
3. Th e d iffusio n of scienti fic spirit and soc ial think ing ofth e 20th centur y
4. Th e reflection of th e needs of th e loca l peop le
5. Th e expressio n of loca l trop ical flavour
6. Th e edu catio nal and social fun ctio ns of fin e art 20
Whil e th ese idealism s - co -o ptin g th e diverse and often co ntradi crory
int erests o f th e moderni sts and Realists - seem ed to be nothin g m o rethan a m ediato ry accempt to app ease che co nt estin g parties, th ey reflect ageneral du ality o f anxiety and o ptimi sm surroundin g th e perio d , and inparticul ar che qu estion o f identit y form ation amon g th e ethni c-C hin ese
co mmunit y in Sin gapore. le co incided with th e co ntinuin g accempt s by
emi gre ethni c-C hin ese arti sts to defin e th eir cultur al identit y in relatio n
to politi cal and cultur al develo pm ent s in C hin a, and at th e sam e tim e, anincreasing resonance of nation alise tend encies in art as an outcom e of th eanti-colo ni al stru ggles in Singapore link ed to th e qu estion of citizenship ,language and C hinese edu catio n . Thi s co ncu rrence o f th e search for
cultur al and n ation al identiti es provided th e compl ex basis for art
develop m ent durin g th e tim e. Co ntinuin g int erests and engagem ent s
with C hina as a co nt emp o rary and hiscorical/civilisatio nal enti ty mu se be
seen as necessary reco ur se to cr itically examin e and synth esize newer
propositio ns and loca licies.21 Criti cally here in th e case of Cubi sm , ic
allows a transn atio nal m appin g, tracing che co m plex circulatio n andevoluti o n of ideas across tim e and space within Asia, and its int eractio ns
with oth er simult aneo us developm ent s.
By and large, C ubi sm is co mm o nly pr ivileged as a Western art
movem ent. Its use or ado pti on by m odern Asian arti sts - whose practices
are lackin g in th eir co ntributi ons co specific found ational di scour ses ofm oderni sm in Eu ro pe -is seen to be prob lem atic. Co nfi ned to limit edco ncepts of o rigin ality and auth ent icity, qu est io ns in to th e merit s andvalue of the Asian engage ment s were often raised . Yet, a criti cal co nsider-275

ation of history allows for th e app reciation of d iscour ses th at bifu rcateand evolve in co njun ctio n to di fferin g co nt exts and situ atio ns, loca ted
within "wid er histori es of cultur es and state unit s" as expressed by John
C lark, produ cing "constra int s, instituti o nal stru ctur es, and th e resour cebase for develo pm ent s within art': 22 Lim Hak Tai was we ll aware of thi seven in 1955 :No o ne can deny th e fact that th e fin e art of Na nyang has
its di stin ctive traits-

it is locate d at th e meetin g po int of

East and West; it enj oys rich natur al resour ces and a multi racial backgro und which facilit ates cultu ral exchanges; auniqu e tro pical flavour in form s its di stin ctive style. Theo nly sho rtco min g is th at it is shackled by the co lo ni al ruler
in its efforts to move in to m odern tim es. Neve rth eless, th e
wheels of time rumbl e o n and after th e two Wo rld Wars,th e co lo nies are wa kin g up to fight for ind epend ence.23
By loca tin g our di scussion in relatio n to move ment of peop les and ideas,
and th eir encount ers with localiti es and hence co nstraint s, we m ay loca te"Cubi sm" as part of a larger cultu ral and arti stic nego tiatio n with shiftin g
and evolvin g co ncept s and im agin aries of moderni ty, heteroge nou s,
p redi cated by specific di scours es o f self, society and natio n. Disciplin ed bysocial and politi cal circum stances, the hege moni c centr ality of Mo dernism o r Cubi sm as a Western precept di ssip ates, and its place a propo sitio nof a dynamic in terloc kin g of m odern vision s within Asia. Here too , th e
emergin g post-co loni al attitud e need not only be read in relatio n to th edi verge nt or differenti ated positio ns betwee n th e im agin aries of th e Westand th e East, but also -as seen in th e wo rks and statement m akin g ofartists like Liu Kang, C hen Wen H si and Lim Hak Tai -th e strategic

m od ul ations betwee n East and East (between Na nyang and C hin ese
m odernit ies), th e form er in form ed by th e latter, bu t sustain ed to add ressth e latt er's lack o f co ntinu ity and but yet affirmin g th e hi storica l andrh eto rical relatio nship s.

Notes:
I. Liu Kang, quoted in Kwok, Kian C how, "Liu Kang and Singapore Arr~ injoumeys: Liu !Vmgand HisArt(Singapore: National Arts Council and Singapore Arr Museum, 2000), p. 15.
2. Ralph Croizier, ""Post-Impressionists in Pre-War Shangai: The juel anshe (Storm Society) and the Fate ofModernism in Republican China",in john Clark, ed., Modernityin AsianArt, University of Sydney AsianStud ies Nu mber 7 (Sydn ey, Wild Peo ny, 1993). p. 152.
3. Mo Zhai, '''APillar in the Southern Sky:The Position of Liu Kang in Modern Art History"injoumeys: Liu
Kang and His Art (Singapo re: Nationa l Ans Co uncil and Singapore Art Museu m, 2000 ). p.38.
4. See Croizier,op. cit., p.135.
5. See Zhai, op. cit., p.39.
6. Chong Swee Chen, 1969, quoted in Kwok, Kian Chow,Cl1a1111els
and Confluences(Singapore: Singapore Arr
Museum , 1996), pp.30·3 I.
7. Kwok, ibid., p.40.

276

8. Che n Wen Hsi was born in Guangdo ng Province, C hina. He gradu ated fro m Xinhua Academy o f Fine Arts
in Shanghai in 1932 and taug ht at Sout h C hina College in Shantou from 1946 to 1947. He settled in
Singapore in 1947 and taught Ch inese trad itional paintin g at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NA FA) in
Singapore from 1951. Throughout the 1950s and the 1960s, Chen wo rked cons istently in oils, prod uc ing
sem i-abstract compos itio ns explor ing the qualities of line and co lour. By the late 1970s, he bega n to cater his
atte nt ion increasi ngly towards C hinese ink painting, but by this time, infusing Abstract and Expressionist
elements into h is ink works.
9. C hen Wen Hsi in cooperatio n with E.L. Pan. "Half A Cent ur y's Life of an Artist: in Chen \VenHsi
Retrospective(Singapore: Natio nal Museum, 1982), unpagina ted.
10. Born in Ch ina, Cheo ng Soo Pieng studied at the Amoy Arr Academy and Xinhua Art Academy. He cameto Singapore in 1946 and taught art at the Chinese Arc Schoo l and Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NA FA).
Throughout h is practice, Cheong had shown a remarka ble to adapt and innovate. In 1950, he became wasone of the first to exper iment with Cuba- Expressionis tic techn iq ues wh ile contin uing to explore the tropicalenvironment aroun d him. In 1952, he went to Bali with Che n Wen Hsi, Chen Chong Swee and Liu Kang.
O n his retu rn , he created a distinc tive style of figure and landscape painting, characterized by stylization andlyrical co mp ositions. He continued to develop his d istinctive Balinese themes throug hout the 1970s,
increasingly ap plying elements of ornamentat ion. He also excelled in Ch inese brush paint ings, ofte n
combining trad itiona l pictorial traditions with Cub istic elements, emphasizing lines and subtle tona l values.
As a lecturer at NA FA, he was extremely influent ial.
11. Loke Wan Tho, Speech, Octo ber 10, 1956,q uoted by Kwok, 1996, op. cit., p.45. See also Lake's descriptio nof Chen Wen Hsi: "'Mr Wen-Hsi, of co urse, bega n his caree r in Chi na, and so we wou ld expect h im to be
influence d by the emphasis wh ich that cou ntry's artists have always placed o n nuance, and the swift, sure andsentient line. In this form of expression he is,of course, as maste r. But he is also able to peer through tha t
window wh ich opens onto the Western world, and with h is imagi nation thereby enriched, he in tu rnenriches us with the prod uct of his fancy abroad" Loke Wan Th o, Speech, December 23, 1958, quoted in
Kwok, ibid., p.6 1.
12. C hen Wen Hsi, op. cit., un paginated.
13. Th e young socia l realists were not alone in raising co ncerns against mode rn istic tendencies. Che n Chong
Swee, who enjoyed a preeminent status in Singapore art since the late 1930s, lamented in 1967: "Surely the reis no excuse for a piece of art to be incom prehe nsible! Art is not just for self-expression or self-gratificatio n ..
It is to enlist symp athy for the dow nt rodden. Still another piece o f an may portray joy and happi ness; again
it conta ins an invoice to rejoice with the artist. Hence all works o f art are created with another person inmind that is the reade r, the listener or the viewer.... Therefore the works of the so-called expressio nists, being
incom prehe nsible, are treate d merely as deco rative arc. Th ey at mos t adorn the parlou rs of the rich . It is
unavoidable that such works will be eliminated and destroyed by the passage o fri me~
14. Ma Ge, "Z hi Mahua huajia men" (1938 ) in Fan Xiu,ed .,Ma/ma xin wenxue daxi (Singapo re: Shijue shu ju,
1972) v. 8, pp.5 10-5 14, quoted by Kwok, op. cit., p.27.
15. Foreword, from exh ibit ion cata logue of Singapore Ch inese H igh Schools' G radua tes of 1953 Art
Association, 1956.
16. Lee Tian Meng,'"Th ree Reasons Against the Ideas of Pab lo Picasso: 1956.
17.A h Si,"The Un ited Front of Art Must Rid Formulaic Art Ideas: 1956. Even in 1966,seve ral years after thesevere pu rging of the pol itical left in Singapore, the artists of the Equato r Society remained uncomprom ising: "The value of the genuine school of art lies in the fact chat it does not lose its integrity amidst the uglycomme rcia l deal ings belonging to the decade nt bourgeois?' See Equato r Art Society 5th Exhibitio n,
Ca talog ue Foreword, 1966, quoted by Kwok, op cit., p. 72.
18. Lim Hak Tai is one of the most influential figu res in the development of arc in Malaya. Born in C hina,
Lim was a teache r at Xiamen Academy of Art and the Jimei Teac hers'Training College, C hina, specialising inmethamacics and art ed ucatio n. He arrived in Singapore in 1937, and proved to be influentia l in thedevelopment of modern art activ ities in Malaya. Amongst the ma ny students tha t studie d under him in
Chi na was Cheo ng Soo Pieng, who later joined him in Singapore. In 1938, toge ther with the Singapore
Alumni of Jime i Teacher's Training Co llege in Xiamen, Ch ina, he initiate d the estab lishment of the Na nyang
Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA). His cont ribution to the Na nyang Style is difficult to define. As an educatorand leadi ng pe rsonality of the art scene in the 1950s, he was concerned with the task of conso lidati ng thed iverse efforts of ethnic-Ch inese artists working in Singapore.
19. Lim Hak Tai, "'Art of the You ng Malayans~ 1955, reproduced in Impr ints, op. cit., pp.26-27.
20. Jb;d.
2 1. Ethnicity as a d imension in art h istorical investigation may also be advanced throug h the framewo rk ofmult icu ltura lism and the formation of ethn ic and national identities. For examp le, the politica l strugg les ofthe m inority Malays since the end of the War in Malaya- characte rised by attem pts to secure greate r
pol itical concessions, argued in 'primordia list' terms, seen in the eventua l formation of Federat io n of Malaya
in 1957- may be located in the artistic practices within specific and cross-re ferential manner. Inte r-ethn ic
engage ments offer a rich grou nd for investigation, espec ially given the widespread popularity of the village
landscape and village life as a theme among the Nanyang artists. Int er-eth n ic engagements can also be
investigated th roug h mediatory institutional frameworks like the mult i-cultu ral Singapore Arr Soc iety(establ ished in 1949).
22. John Clark ,Modem Asian Art (Sydney: Crafts man House, 1998 ), p.19.
23. Lim, op. cit., pp.26-27.

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Session 2

Discussion

Moderator (Hayashi Michio) : We have about one hour for the discussion
session. Three papers were given in the afternoon which raise many
issues and if I may randomly pick up some of them , the first issue whichreally interested me is the formation of a counter-discourse against theWestern notion of art , which was most typically addressed in Mr.
Supangkat 's paper . I think the issue of the concept of kagunan may
provide a good entry point for our discussion.
The second issue that I think is very important is, ro put it broadly, asort of anxiety and optimism concerning the reception of modernism inAsia. Mr. Mashadi was the one who addressed this issue in his paper , but
this is really a common thread that runs through all of the three papers
given in this session. And if we take the case of diaspora artists in
Singapore as an example, we can find an interesting negotiation with thisanxiety of modernism by resorting to the strategy of hybridity in which
artists create a strange, almost schizophrenic, synthesis between Cu bis tic
idioms and Chinese landscape tradition. I think this question of how tocope with the anxiety of modernism underlies all the papers.
The third issue I want to draw your attention to is the question of
the medium or media most typically manifested in the use of murals in
the Philippines. I mean the use of a Cubistic style in public art , including
murals , played a very significant role in transforming the significance of
Cubism in the postwar period in the Philippines. The process of"kitschfication ; Cubist style turning kitsch in the 1970s under the Marcos
regime, is particularly interesting. This process seems to correspond to thetransformation of Manansala 's style in the 1960s and the years thereafter.

If we look back on the Singaporean case, to a certain extent, similar things
seem to have happened in the history of the Nanyang School. But it has
to be emphasized that the situation of the Philippines seems somewhat
exceptional. Compared to other Asian countries , somehow the Cubism or
Cubistic style continued to play a significant role in the Philippines as abasic artistic vocabulary for a long time although its connotation might
have changed from avant-garde to conservative. This longevity of Cubiststyle in the Phillipines seems to be unique in Asia. I don't know if there isany easy explanation to that , but it may be an interesting topic for our
discussion.

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Having said that , now, maybe we should start with Mr. Supangkat 's paper.
I really want to ask the question about this kagunan,the concept which
you mentioned in your paper. The fact that it was not derived from a premodern indigenous tradition is what surprised me. That it was rather
invented as a sort of counter-discourse to resist the notion of "art "imported in the process of modernization / Westernization. So, Mr.
Supangkat, could you elaborate a little bit more on the concept ofkagunan'Jim Supangkat: Thank you for the question, Professor Hayashi. The term

kagunan is not related to modernism or modern thinking. It emerged in
the 18th century and describes the intermixing of Javanese culture andthe Western culture brought in by the Dutch colonial people. Thisdefinition developed within the Javanology Institute established by thecolonial government.
So the term kagunan did not exist before the colonial times and wasinvented by Javanese culture after adopting many aspects of Westernculture. The term is a translation of the Greek term mousiketechne. In
aesthetics, the term mousiketee/meis the basis of fine art or High Art , andrelated to the effort of identifying art as part of spiritual activity or
sensitivity. The term does not define art practice , but inquires, "What is
art?"Moderator (Hayashi): And did the term have this nuance of ethics ormorality from the beginning or did it gradually acquire that dimension?
Supangkat: We have yet to find clear proof, but when it appeared in theJavanese texts of the 19th century, the term kagunan was discussed in a
progressive manner , and clearly used in the context of morality. There
were several attempts of different readings of the term , but they did not
develop into a polemic. Exploring the relationship between kagunan andcontemporary developments is not popular. As I mentioned in my paper ,the term for art in Indonesian is seni, and not kagunan. Seni means art in a
broad sense and seni rupa means visual art, more or less. Considering thedefinitions and the history of of these terms, it is quite clear that theseterms in Indonesian are related to the definition of kagunan, which has amore philosophical meaning.
Since the term kagunan emerged in the very early stages of adopting
Western culture, I see it as something related to the ideology of art in theWestern sense in Indonesia. It's not an interpretation of what art is, but anideology or the basis of an art tradition. I tend to compare it with theideology of art in Western art.

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Moderator (Hayashi): It is currently used by young artist and arc critics inIndon esia?
Supangkat : Artist and critics nowada ys use the term seni, not kagunan.
Bue if you look at works in Indonesia, from both the "modern art period"
and the "contemporary art period ; they show similar perceptions of what
art is. This simil arity transcends beliefs about what art is, and, therefore,
does not show a particular belief in today 's arc developments. It is neithera matter of definition nor a matter of interpretation. To me it is quite
clear that this perception is a common ground in understanding art in
the Western sense among Ind onesian artists and crit ics.
Moderator (Hayashi): Mr. Mashadi , please .
Ahmad Mash adi: I just want to follow up with my question. If kagunan
can be deployed as a concept or as an idea by which artworks being
produced by Indon esians can be interpreted , then do you think that theartworks produced by the Bandung School (artists from the Faculty ofFine Art and Design at the Bandung Institute of Technology are known as
the Bandung School ) will be congenial to an int erpretation based on
kagunan, because the notion of kagunan as you had highlighted it will bebased on utility, morality , and doing good?
Supangkat: Yes.I think it's quite clear that even in the Cubistic works by
the Bandung School, we see this kind of morality that could be related to
kagunan, as in the work of Ahmad Sadali. So when they started producing
Cubi stic paintings , they all used themes that went back to moral
considerations of human life, social justice, and so on.
Moderator (Hayashi): But in 1954 when the Bandung School artists
exhibited together in Indonesia , they were harshly criticized for being
Westernized and believers in "art for arc's sake" or the autonomy of art. So
what you're proposing is that you can probably reevaluate what theBandung School did , not from the viewpoint of Western modernism , butfrom the viewpoint of kagunan? ls that what you are proposing?
Supangkat: In some sense you are right. While the majority of artists inIndonesia can be immediatel y related to kagunan, its relation to theBandung artists is comparatively obsucure. The fact that the Bandung
art ists were modernists and the ot her s were kagunanists is not the only
cause for th e rivalry between the Bandung artists and the rest.
The rivalry was heightened because the Bandung School had

280developed from an educatio nal system supported by drawing teachers
during the co lonial times. It was not at all an art academy and thu s could
not be co nsidered as part of an art infr astru ctur e. In co loni al times th ere
was no art infratru ccure: no art mu seums , no art academy, no art journ als,
no critics and no art historians.
H ence, ed ucation by drawing teachers becam e the only institutionalsour ce of art development. Those who pra cticed art and gave private
drawing and painting lessons were considere d arti sts at the time. Their
op ini ons , which they claimed to be based on academic considerations ,became qualifying standards for works of art. Conseque ntl y, thi s qualification discriminated against works by self-tau ght art ists, and this became
the basis of th e rivalry. Self-taught artists who were mo stly nationalists ,accused artists who were ed ucated by drawing teachers of being
co loni alists.
The rivalr y co ntinu ed even afte r th e edu cat ion system of drawing
instru ction in Bandun g develop ed into the Facult y of Fine Art and
Design at th e Bandun g Institute of Technology. Self-taught artists later
founded an art academy in Yogyakarta in th e years after Indone sia's
ind epe nd ence.
The polari zed rivalry could be seen as a conflict between conceptsof art underlin ed by Soedjojono, th e pioneer of mod ern art in Indonesia ,and concepts taught by Ries Muld er, a Dutch stain ed-g lass artist who
became th e "guru " at the Bandung School. Srihadi Soedarsono, th e mo st
renowne d painter in Indon esia today, was once a Soedjojono follower.
When he entered the school in Bandung , he faced difficulti es because
Ries Mulder criti cized his painting and advised him not to treat moralit yor ethical problems but to concentrate on formal issues. Thi s is ju st an
exampl e to illu strate a hypothe sis, so furth er research is necessary.
Moderator (Hayashi ): Is th ere anybody who wa nt s to follow up on thisissue?
Mashadi: I have one more comment on this issue. Of course man y ideas
and concepts h ave emerged in Ind onesian art circles sin ce 1945. You haveas early as 1946 the statement by Gelanggang, a gro up of art ists led byDarab in , and th en later in 1963, the Manifest of Kebud ayaan , which aga inclaims or de als with uni versalistic ideals. How com patibl e do you thinkthese idealism s are, Ge langgang and Manifest of Kebu d ayaan , in relation
to this concept of kagunan?
Supangkat : As I mentioned earlie r, it is not relevant to see kagunan
through conflicts of idealism and beliefs that emerged in art history.

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Problems related to kagunan do not reflect the contradiction between
traditionality and modernity . As presented in my paper, the problem ofkagunan is an ideological matter based on particular ideological differ-ences that show how the translation of art in the Western sense, outside
the Western world, has resulted in a different understanding of art.
For example , very basic perceptions in Western art tend to see the"thingness " of art; art as a noun-ish phenomenon. During the process oftranslation, the perception outside the Western world did not follow thissense. The influence of kagunan in the understanding of art today inIndonesia shows this tendency; the terms kagunan, seni , and seni rupa areadverbial. This is why artists in Indonesia tend to carry an expression of
the aesthetic in their works and imbue them with meaning. The words
emphasize experience linked to a sense of morality.
Moderator (Hayashi): Thank you. Professor Tsuji, please.
Tsuji Shigebumi: It may not be appropriate to make a generalizedcomment at this point , but as I listened to this afternoon 's session, it
seemed that there is always a spiritual and cultural movement in the
different backgrounds of the Cubism that emerged in different locations
at different times , in a way that is quite different from how we understandAlfred Barr's Cubism. I may be making remarks that foreground Session
4, the session I am moderating tomorrow , but before Cubism emerged in
France, there were several movements similar to that of William Morris ;movements related to artistic spirit and community solidarity. They
placed a strong emphasis on morality.
When Cubism emerged in Japan - and it is a pity that we do nothave adequate information on Yorozu Tetsugoro 's position on this- theShirakaba group , among other movements in Japan, was eagerly finding apersonalise character in the works of post-Impressionist artists like
Cezanne . But Yorozu chose to use Cubism from the several avant-garde
movements that were introduced in his time.
I would assume that there was an aspiration for a kind of panhuman morality at work , rather than artistic and formal endeavors among
the Salon Cubists. So, Cubism was not simply disseminated from one
location to another, as understood in a traditional art historical framework , but emerged in close sequence with a kind of spiritual aspirationthat peaked at different times. As Professor Clark pointed out, different
discourses, so long as they are discourses , they may be concerned withspiritual and moral aspirations , rather than just formalistic achievements.
John Clark: Well, I would like to ask Professor Flores, if I may, about art

282and the Philippines. There is a high level and varied modern art in thePhilippines. When we look at Cubism in the Philippines , why is it thatyou see avant-garde or reactionary or decorative Cubism? Cubism did
create a major trend and historical conditions in the Philippines. Why
were those conditions met? In other words , it must have had a very highlevel of art from the outset.
Moderator (Hayashi): Well, then , let's hold the morality issue for the
moment and talk about the special situation in the Philippines. Why was
Cubism widely accepted and appropriated in various methods and fields )What are the conditions which made it possible for such a long-lastinguse of Cubism in the Philippines, Professor Flores?
Patrick Flores: That is a difficult question. I think there are many ways toaddress the issue, and one factor is that modernism in the Philippines wasinterdisciplinary at the outset. The modernists who were at the forefrontof the movement were not just visual artists, so their kind of modernism
reached a wider public beyond the confines of the art world. H.R.
Ocampo , for instance, was a fiction writer who wrote fiction in Filipino,in the vernacular. Neorealist Ramon Estella was a filmmaker andImpressionist Juan Arellano was an architect of the neo-Classicaltradition. So I think this is one way of tracking the development ofmodernism and marking the multiple publics within which it operated.
Also, I think the polemical debates in the late 1920s up to the 1950s
stimulated an environment of critique. There were debates berween theAmorsolo School , the conservative school, and the Edades group, which
later became the Neorealists in the 1950s. The intelligentsia supported themodernists , so they were allowed to ventilate their views in newspapers
and in public . Those debates made their way to the front pages of somenewspapers. So art was in the air at that time because of these polemical
debates. I think this is to partially answer the question on what kind ofurgent texture that Filipino modernism had taken on.
Moderator (Hayashi): Let me ask you a very simple question , Professor
Flores. Looking at the development of Manansala 's art , you compared his
early piece , Madonna of the Slums, and the 1975 Madonna which are very
similar in style but completely different in terms of connotations. In theearly Cubistic works in the Philippines by artists such as Legaspi andManansala , they all deal with the issue of the sufferings of the proletariat
and laborers. So, I wonder if the suppression of Marxist thought in the
posrwar period had something to do with this change of the use of
Cubistic style in later periods.

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