Primitivism and affiliation: Yeh Chi Wei’s Borneo images

Abstract

Yeh Chi Wei was a leading figure in the Ten Men Art Group, an informal group of artists who initiated an ambitious programme of travel throughout Southeast Asia in the 1960s. Borneo was a privileged site in Yeh's overall body of work, which he often presented as a place of a more authentic and enlivening mode of being, in contrast to the monotony of industrialised modern life. The approach shown in the works, as well as in the surrounding discourse, bears similarities with the Euro-American model of primitivist modernism, which has itself been linked to hierarchical cultural relations and tied to the history of colonialism. If we understand ‘primitivism’ as a conceptual relation between self and other, then we might ask what relations were being articulated by Yeh’s paintings of Borneo, and what meanings they held in the context of a decolonising Southeast Asia? This essay proposes some speculative answers from three registers: displacements and itineraries; objects and archaism; and nation and region. Each register is intended to hold in tension aspects of primitivism, alongside new possibilities for meaning generated within the specific context in Southeast Asia.

KEYWORDS:

• primitivism
• modernism
• Singapore
• Borneo
• Yeh Chi Wei
• Ten Men Art Group

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Parts of this paper are adapted from a previously-published essay (Scott 2022), written for the exhibition Familiar Others: Emiria Sunassa, Eduardo Masferré and Yeh Chi Wei, 1940s–1970s at National Gallery Singapore, 2022, for which I was the exhibition curator. The section on Yeh Chi Wei from the catalogue essay for that exhibition is revised and expanded here. For this essay, I would like to thank the two anonymous peer reviewers, as well as Yvonne Low, Alex Teoh and Welyne Jeffrey Jehom for their very helpful comments and corrections. Thanks are also due to Yeh Toh Yen and Jacey Yeh for their support for my research on Yeh Chi Wei, and for allowing me to reproduce images from their collection. Any errors of fact and interpretation are my own.

2 This title of the work was previously translated as Clapping Hands in Yeh’s 1969 catalogue, as well as in Yeo (2010, 191). However, on the advice of Yeh Toh Yen that this is a misunderstanding to do with the original translation, the work is presented here as Drumming.

3 The paintings do not always specifically indicate which of the ethnic groups from Borneo the represented figure belonged to, nor are they necessarily accurate renderings of particular ethnic groups. Yeh Chi Wei also often compiled the paintings later in his studio, based on his collection of photographs and artifacts. I have taken the approach of referring to these representations as ‘Bornean’, unless there is a specifically identifiable community involved. This term has also been selected in preference to ‘Dayak’, which is a collective term for different ethnic communities in Borneo, and is sometimes used as a collective self-identifier. However, as its use is not always common to all of the communities in Borneo that Yeh Chi Wei could have visited, I have opted not to use it here.

4 There were not always ten artists in the group, nor were they all men. The composition of the group was loose and participation in the trips fluctuated, although Yeh was consistently present. The initial group of ten who made the first trip, to Malaysia’s East Coast in 1961 were Yeh Chi Wei, Tan Seah Boey (Chen Cheng Mei), Lim Tze Peng, Choo Keng Kwang, Cheah Phee Chye, Seah Kim Joo, Lee Sik Choon (Lee Sik Khoon), Lai Foong Moi, Yeo Tiong Wah and Tan Miow Keng (Yeo 2010, 238).

5 Another part of Borneo, Kalimantan, was initially part of the Dutch East Indies, becoming part of Indonesia after decolonisation.

6 Yeh Chi Wei’s travel photographs are held in digitised form in the collection of the Library & Archives of National Gallery Singapore. The photo albums relating to Borneo are not captioned, and approximate dates have been given to the images based on contextual information elsewhere in the albums, such as identifiable participants of the different trips.

7 The full list of participating artists in the 1965 trip were Yeh Chi Wei, Tan Seah Boey (Chen Cheng Mei), Seah Kim Joo, Lim Tze Peng, Choo Keng Kwang, Tan Choo Kuan, Liew Fong, Shui Tit Sing, Tan Pek Cheng, Tan Chor Tee (Tan Choh Tee), Chee Pek Hoe and Yeo Hwee Bin. The 1968 trip included a larger group of artists: Yeh Chi Wei, Choo Keng Kwang, Shui Tit Sing, Tan Choo Kuan, Tan Teo Kwang, Tan Seah Boey, Seah Kim Joo, Lim Yew Kuan, Huang Pao Fang, Liu Kang, Chen Jen Hao, Chen Sueh Fong, Wee Hock Chin, Chan Lang Hwee, Lee Sin En and Lim Thian Hong (Yeo 2010, 253, 259). It was originally a female member of the group, Chen Cheng Mei, who organised the Group's earliest travels, but she later handed over administration of the trips to Yeh Chi Wei (Nelson 2021, 231–232).

8 Special thanks to Alex Teoh for helping with the tentative identification of sites on this journey – including in figure. 2 – based on the images available in National Gallery Singapore Library & Archives.

9 The term ‘reality effect’ is borrowed from Roland Barthes, meaning an accretion of extraneous details to suggest the veracity of a literary representation. Linda Nochlin borrows the term to refer to an approach common in 19th century Orientalism, with a polished level of ethnographic detail (Nochlin 1989).

10 With thanks to Yeh Toh Yen for sharing this background on the collection.

11 This is similar to the phenomenon that Abigail Solomon-Godeau observed in Gauguin’s primitivist paintings of Brittany, where the works eliminate the traces of the very modernity that brought the artist to the site, favouring instead the impression of picturesque timelessness (Solomon-Godeau 1989, 315–319).

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Phoebe Scott

Phoebe Scott is a Senior Curator and Curator of Research Publications at National Gallery Singapore. Her curatorial projects include Between Declarations and Dreams: Art of Southeast Asia since the 19th Century (2015 – ongoing), which was one of the National Gallery Singapore’s inaugural exhibitions; Reframing Modernism: Painting from Southeast Asia, Europe and Beyond (2016); and most recently, Familiar Others: Emiria Sunassa, Eduardo Masferré and Yeh Chi Wei, 1940s-1970s (2022–2023). She is also an Adjunct Lecturer in art history at the National University of Singapore. Prior to joining the Gallery, Phoebe completed her PhD on the subject of modern Vietnamese art.