The 1963 Modern Art Exhibition: Beginnings and Consequences (original) (raw)
Related papers
Spirit of Collectivism: Malay Art Societies in Singapore, 1940s–1970s
2021
Art societies played a pivotal role in the development and art practices of artists in Singapore in the early years. The Malay art societies were especially important during a period when the art scene centred around the dominant Nanyang discourse and overlooked artists from the minority communities.These societies offered platforms and opportunities for the early Malay artists with similar interests, cultural backgrounds and language to come together, interact and learn from one another. While most Chinese artists would have received their art education at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA), mentorship and classes by the seniors such as Aman Ahmad (Pak Man) and M. Sawoot (Pak Sawoot) at the balai rakyat (community centres) provided aspiring young talents with an alternative route to pursuing art studies. Women artists also helped lay the foundation for art societies like the Angkatan Pelukis Aneka Daya or APAD (Association of Artists with Various Resources), formed in 1962, to continue to be relevant today as it reaches its 60th year in 2022.
Singaporean Visual Arts in the 1970s
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Singapore Art History as a History of Mobilities
Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History, 2022
Moving away from the study of the history of art using place-bound and ‘rational’ terms, this article examines how the different forms of mobilities practiced by Singaporean artists have shaped their artworks, practices and identities. This is achieved through a study of artists who practiced ‘unconventional’ forms of mobilities: Suzann Victor, an ‘unofficial exile’ who moved to Sydney due to the fallout from the Brother Cane incident, which made it difficult for her to continue to practice in Singapore; Jimmy Ong, who shifted his practice to the United States to lead a “domestic life” with his former husband and Gilles Massot, a French-born artist who moved to Singapore to become an “Other.” Specifically, the paper seeks to answer: What are the different types of mobilities practiced by the artists? How do these mobilities impact their practice? How are these mobilities and their impacts perceptible in the artworks? What are the ways that these mobilities differ from the ones that are typically studied in canonical art history? In this paper, the artworks are studied as ‘fluid spaces’ that are shaped by the myriad forms of mobilities practiced by the artists – many of which cannot be described as completely ‘rational – rather than the product of a single form of mobility. The aim is to shift our study of art away from place-bound and ‘rational’ concepts towards the transience of the artists and the borderless nature of artistic influences and ideologies.
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This paper examines the significance of 5 th Passage to Singapore's contemporary art histories. This short-lived yet groundbreaking artist-run initiative operated from 1991 to 1996 at a time of momentous development for Singapore's contemporary art scene. Yet compared to other art developments documented for this period, there is conspicuously little critical examination of the significance of 5 th Passage. This article seeks to explore the array of reasons for the relative invisibility of 5 th Passage in Singapore's art history. Not merely a passive omission or forgetting, such invisibility includes conscious and unconscious suppression and censoring.
Groundbreaking-The Beginnings of Contemporary Art in Singapore
is an an art historian and lecturer at LASALLE College of the Arts, where he helped develop its art history programmes. He undertook the first extensive study of the history of sculpture in preand postwar Singapore, and is co-editor of Histories, Practices, Interventions: A Reader in Singapore Contemporary Art (2016).