In search of the uncontroversial nude: Liu Kang’s modernist pursuit in Nanyang

Abstract

This essay examines the problematic ‘primitivist’ positions adopted by the artist and viewer when engaging with the ‘Nanyang art’ of Singapore’s preeminent pioneering artist, Liu Kang (b. 1911–2004). In this re-evaluation of the artist’s modernist pursuit, I argue that Liu Kang’s experience of Bali – a place uniquely distanced from the cultural politics of mainland China and with access to nude models – provided the fertile conditions for the mastery and syncretising of artistic techniques in the formulation of modern Nanyang landscapes, which the artist later defined as Nanyang feng’ge (trans. Nanyang style). Subsequent politicisation of the Nanyang Style/Nanyang Art has overshadowed the more significant localisation of an exogenous picture category, ‘female nudes’.

Keywords:

• Modern Singaporean art
• Malayan art
• Nanyang style
• primitivism
• nudes
• Chinese diaspora

How did Bali become ensconced in the discourse of Singapore’s early modern art movements? It was hailed as a paradise full of tropical and Nanyang¹ sensibilities by Singapore’s preeminent artist, Liu Kang (b. 1911–2004), now celebrated as the country’s pioneering painter and remembered as a key figure in Singapore’s modern art movement called the ‘Nanyang Style’ or ‘Nanyang School’. These terms commonly signalled the stylistically diverse and syncretic paintings by a group of émigré Chinese artists, including Liu Kang, then working in Malaya (present day Singapore and Malaysia). A Bali painting trip which they embarked on in 1952 has since been canonised as a turnkey point for Singaporean visual modernity, as spearheading the development of the so-called Nanyang school (see for example Kwok 1994). Bali was often viewed as the equivalent of Tahiti, but being far more accessible to the painters based in the region then in search of the avant-garde spirit, has inspired countless paintings of languorous nude and semi-nude Balinese women, as well as lush tropical landscapes and genre scenes that are reminiscent of an idyllic pre-industrial past. Paradoxically, as paintings, they have been celebrated as the hallmark of Singapore’s visual and cultural progress.

Art historian Ahmad Mashadi has called for the de-nationalising of the Nanyang style in the context of Singapore’s visual modernity, arguing that ‘to limit the Nanyang to a construct of nation’ is to deny the ‘multiplicity of cultural mappings within an open system where the Nanyang may be read as dynamic frames to investigate the fluidity of diasporic modernity’ (2008, 92–95). Others have demonstrated that there was indeed a keen reception and opportunistic politicisation of these modern representations depicting the region’s landscapes and its peoples to account for its later consecration, here foregrounding the role of the colonial agencies in the shaping of narratives centred around these professional painters at the height of decolonisation and nationalism (Low 2012; Seng 2007; Wang 2013). Scholar Yeo Mang Thong debunks the myth of a coherent Nanyang school of painting; instead, he argues vehemently for the existence of a stylistically diverse art by local painters that reflected ‘Nanyang feng’ (lit. ‘wind’). This is a term that broadly encompasses the traditions, fashions and customs of the locale regardless of how they may be stylistically represented: as cubist, socialist-realist, expressionist, and so forth (2021).² Yeo pointedly questions the relevance of the Bali painting trip in the making of a cohesive ‘Nanyang style’, asserting that such a connection was a result of ‘mistranslations, misunderstandings, and misinformation’ (2021).

Japanese curator Rawanchaikul Toshiko, however, was of the opinion that Nanyang Art was predicated upon two broad styles of expression: one focusing on social themes, the other a reflection of the avant-garde spirit that entailed the employment of an Othering gaze. Here, she explains:

Native women in Bali, Borneo Island and other surrounding regions, whose appearances and lifestyles were different from those of the Chinese, became a favourite subject matter for these painters since it conveyed the ‘exotic flavour’ of Nanyang (Southeast Asia). A distinguish [sic] genre of painting was formed in this tendency. In the paintings of native women depicted exotically, sometimes even exposing their breasts, one can find the same gaze as Gauguin’s towards the Tahitian native people – the gaze towards ‘the other’ (2002, 24).

To Rawanchaikul, the Chinese émigré painters operated from the side of the ‘civilised’ as they fixed the exotic gaze on the savage ‘other’ just as French modernist painter Paul Gauguin with the Tahitians (Rawanchaikul 2002, 36). Pondering on Bali’s appeal, Australian scholar Alison Carroll (2011, 56) identified a number of Asian artists from the region itself going to Bali as a direct response to Gauguin, observing not only how the idea of Tahiti as ‘a paradise of difference from Europe’ was compelling to Asian artists, but also that the ‘power of Gauguin’s art fused both his stylistic influence and subject matter.’ The art historian, T.K. Sabapathy (1994), also highlighted the significance of the Bali trip to the émigré painters, arguing that the experience reconciled differences between Self and Other, and that Bali was in fact integral to their ‘respective Selfs’ even as they may find the island exotic and enthralling. In this regard, the artists’ primitivism was unlike other European painters residing and practicing in Bali, particularly in their ‘thematization of the female in Bali’ and the care taken to avoid presenting ‘the female as spectacle’ (Sabapathy 1994).

As this essay will show, however, the female has played a key role in figuring the nation, and so whilst not quite spectacle, does become the condition of possibility for male genius and, perhaps, collective identity. The objective here is not to redefine the meaning of Nanyang Style/Nanyang art, but to more accurately highlight the primitivist imaginary in its production and the reinforcement of the trope in its reception. There has yet to be any sustained or public discussion about Nanyang artists’ paintings of Balinese women or Indigenous women using such lens: for reinforcing the notion of Bali as a distant and mystical destination, for reducing their subject to romanticised stereotypes, and for assuming the position of authority in control of the gaze. Save for a handful of unpublished theses addressing the Chinese male gaze and more generally of Gauguin’s influence in the region, there has been limited discursive attention paid to this subject.³ More frequently, their works have largely been celebrated as representative of Singapore’s modern art movement as unique and original – where for instance the paintings of Liu Kang and his peers are prominently hung in the state gallery, or commemorated in a variety of ways. Notably, however, contemporary art practitioners have engaged far more critically on this subject in deploying strategic primitivism, for instance the 2001 Bali Project photographs appropriating Liu Kang’s Bali paintings by Agnes Yit, Lam Hoi Lit, Jeremy Hiah and Woon Tien Wei might be a case-in-point (Ho 2007, 20–25; Wang 2013).

Perhaps because Liu Kang himself had openly explained his admiration for the great Parisian Masters, including Paul Gauguin, to the point of wanting to embark on a painting trip to Tahiti, that his, and others’ evidently primitivist positions were elided if not celebrated for endorsing a universal language of avant-garde painting. Indeed Gauguin was not the only painter Liu Kang and the Nanyang artists admired. Chen Wen Hsi (1906–1991), who was part of the Bali painting trip, explained his approach:

I took off from Impressionism, and dabbled a little in Romanticism. I had tried the other styles too. I experimented with Fauvism, Expressionism and later, Cubism too. For a while, I was Post-Impressionist and Post-Expressionist. I don’t adhere strictly to anything. Depending on what my materials are good for, I’d switch to the appropriate style and do not necessarily stick closely to any particular one (Pitt [1983] 2006, 68).

Gauguin’s methods were one of many that he might find useful or inspiring – not unlike Liu Kang who wrote prolifically about his sources and vision ([1969] 2005a, 98–107). Regardless of the artists’ admiration of Gauguin and other Parisian modernists, their focus was on how the artists had reformed their paintings, for instance in the former case, to pursue more simplified forms, bolder colours, and flattened spatial effects. These technological innovations resulted from Gauguin’s embrace of the so-called ‘savage’ ways in Tahiti and his subsequent quest to elevate folk art and exotic foreign objects as an independent alternative force to the Western ways of depicting the world (Varnedoe 1984, 179). Whilst the two – subject matter and technique of representation – are ostensibly intertwined in Gauguin’s modernist primitivism, the Nanyang artists’ modernist pursuits struggled to be understood on similar grounds. Attempts to define the Nanyang style (vernacularly as Nanyang feng’ge) or Nanyang art were unable to fully reconcile the diverse and disparate subject matter of the tropics with the form: ultimately, it was deemed an eclectic approach that drew from a range of sources and employed diverse painting techniques, a kind of style of ‘no style.’ And if one agrees with Yeo, this was an art that was as diverse in form and in subject matter so that it might reflect Nanyang feng. Though the émigré artists teaching at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA) founded by Lim Hak Tai (1893–1963) in 1937 were most associated with this discourse, and subsequently celebrated in Singapore’s exhibitions as pioneering luminaries in the local art scene, there has been no consensus as to what works and which artists in Singapore and Malaysia worked in the Nanyang style. Scholars argue that it may include prewar artists Tchang Ju Chi and non-Chinese artists as well (Ooi 2012, 71–76). Tchang, for instance, had travelled to Sumatra as early as 1939 in search for inspiration and was well-regarded by Liu Kang and Chen Chong Swee for his paintings that conveyed ‘a quintessentially tropical flavour’ (Yeo 2019, 131).

Yet, many have argued that there was something common connecting the art by these Nanyang artists, often tracing to this formative moment when the four Chinese émigrés painted Bali. Sabapathy saw the Bali encounter as a ‘fecund site for these artists to consolidate their artistic ideology and practice in a Southeast Asian matrix’ (1994). The ‘eclectic expressions of the South seas’ was further deemed as one point of commonality (Ong 2012, 59). And so was the subject matter; Rawanchaikul suggested that:

the aborigine [sic] women and their customs from areas around Singapore such as Bali and Borneo, with their appearances and customs differing from that of Chinese, were considered appropriate subjects for Nanyang Art conveying the tropical sensibility, and thus led to the formation of an unique genre (Rawanchaikul 2002, 34).

In any case, portrayals of the tropical locality, and of women native to the region, were far from new. Scholars such as David Low (2020) have counter-argued against the relevance and prominence of Bali by pointing to the many painters who had worked in this so-called ‘unique genre’ long before the Nanyang artists. What was missed here however was the reception of the paintings, and how they had been politicised to serve particular nationalistic functions, beyond the intentions of the artists. Indeed, depending on which view one wishes to take, the nation’s or the artist’s, the ‘Nanyang style,’ which for a period of time was synonymous with the ‘Malayan style,’ has come to represent a moment of artistic zeitgeist in the discourse of modern Singaporean art (Low 2012, 220–260). As Yeo (2021) intimated, such terms, though similar in aims to create a coherent cultural identity, nonetheless represented distinct agendas: new art with Nanyang feng represented a ‘people’s hope for independence’, while Malayan style was evidently ‘a reaction to the wishes of the colonial government.’

The artist’s story, on the other hand, may tell a quite different side to the production of such modernist paintings – one that is far less caught up with the politics of art reception and, instead, more focused on personal aspirations and individual breakthroughs. In this essay, I argue that the experience of Bali did in fact play a distinct role in Liu Kang’s modernist practice and in his long, prolific career. Liu Kang works primarily in the oil medium and has produced many paintings of genre scenes, landscapes as well as portraiture and still life drawn from a variety of place cultures spanning Europe and Asia throughout his professional life as an artist. His paintings of the nude genre in comparison had been deemed ‘underrepresented’ by some scholars who observed that the vast majority of his nudes were in fact completed during his ‘early career’ period (1927–1954) and ‘golden years’ (1992–1999) (Lizun et al. 2022). Liu Kang’s paintings of Balinese nudes became his most representative. His painting Artist and Model (1954) (Figure 1) showing a half-nude Balinese model posing for an artist in the tropical setting of Malang, Indonesia, serves as a case-in-point to exemplify his style and oeuvre. Two recent examples include an adaptation of the painting by school children into a colourful collage, now hanging on the wall of the ground floor at National Gallery Singapore (Figure 2),⁴ and a portrayal of the painting in the comic book, Drawn to Satire: Sketches of Cartoonists in Singapore (Lim 2023, 35).

Figure 1. Liu Kang, Artist and Model, 1954, Oil on canvas, 84 × 124 cm. Gift of Shell Companies in Singapore, Collection of National Gallery Singapore. Image courtesy of National Heritage Board, Singapore.

Figure 2. Children’s collage of Artist and Model at the Keppel Centre for Art Education, a gallery for children, Ground floor, National Gallery Singapore. Photo by Yvonne Low, 2023.

Bali may have been a tropical paradise for other visiting artists for a myriad of reasons. But, for Liu Kang, access to Bali’s nude models was crucial to his modernist aspirations and ultimately set his career trajectory apart from other mainland modern painters of that period. This access became the linchpin to the subsequent development of his ‘Nanyang style’ which he eventually formalised in his later years having taken up local citizenship in post-Independent Singapore. Taking the cue from art historian Yuko Kikuchi to consider such developments from the perspective of refracted modernity and to take into consideration the actual processes by which originating ideas might be subsequently bent or modified in transference (2007, 1–17), this essay seeks to understand how Liu Kang’s pathway in then Malaya engaging with Indigenous cultures in the region had differed from other mainland Chinese modern painters and Parisian modern painters. In so doing, I will explore how Liu Kang’s engagement with modernist primitivism and shaping the public reception of his nudes have dovetailed with the wider colonial project that also had been constructing and perpetuating its own primitive imaginary of female subjects in the region. Because these are inherently racist and elitist positions that subject the representee to the power of the (often male) gaze, it is critical to fully explicate how the primitive gaze has been legitimised by the agencies of a modernising and decolonising nation both past and present.

Why Bali?

Anyone who has been to Bali will never forget the half-naked women. Those who have experienced it will always savour the memories, sometimes in their sweetest dreams. From the aesthetic point of view the Balinese should maintain their traditional way of life. Western civilisation has brought with it modern material comforts and scientific advances. Yet the price we pay is the erosion of our souls and the destruction of our peace and serenity.

– Liu Kang (1953)

By reading Liu Kang’s appreciation for the Balinese way of life and critique of Western civilisation alongside the many paintings he made of half-nude Balinese women basking in harmony with nature, we sense an undeniable debt to Gauguin’s idealisation of rural life and his iconography of the ‘primitive’ as the beautiful ‘savage’. Among his many portrayals shown at the 1953 Bali Exhibition, include Masks (Bali) (1953), Repose (1952), Embrace (1952), and Conversation (1952), all showing half-nude Balinese women in their traditional attire, either engaged in daily chores or lying languorously against a backdrop of exotic temple ruins. The oil painting, Masks (Bali) (Figure 3) in particular showed two semi-nude Balinese women in half embrace as they look admiringly at the intricately crafted Balinese mask in their hands. Was Liu Kang using the mask as a trope to signal to the commodification of the exotic crafts brought forth by cultural tourism in Bali? Or was it merely a signal of the very exoticism that he enjoyed about Bali, and was using it as a pictorial device to control the line of sight of the viewer? After all, it could not be a coincidence that the mask was placed just in front of the figures’ breasts, such that the viewer in following the figures’ gaze will surely bring them back to their breasts. According to Liu Kang, the women were the subject of anyone’s ‘sweetest dreams’ of Bali. Indeed, in spite of the title’s allusion to the traditional craft, ‘masks’, there is little doubt that the subject of the painting are the semi-nude figures, here portrayed as a female archetype (young, nubile, fair-skinned with oriental features) than bearing the likeness of any one particular person.⁵ Ho Tzu Hyen argues that the mask’s mouth placed at the woman’s ‘ocular breast’ functions as ‘a receptacle for sexual and tactile projection’ whilst the mask’s redness is itself a clear reference to sexual desire that is reciprocated by the women’s blushes (2007, 47). Ho’s analysis of Liu’s many paintings and photographs of women in Bali and later Sabah exposed the artist’s intentionality and his ideality of woman’s breasts. Far from contradicting this point, what this paper will show, however, is how Liu Kang had found in the primitivist modernist visual order the validation for its production and reception.

Figure 3. Full page reproduction of painting, Masks (1953). Reproduced from the exhibition catalogue Bali: Liu Kang, Chen Wen Hsi, Chen Chong Swee, Cheong Soo Pieng (1953).

Liu Kang’s portrayals of Balinese women are often compared to Paul Gauguin’s portrayals of Tahitian women. Both artists had depicted nude/semi-nude female figures to be in harmony with the tropical environment in rejection of industrialisation’s destruction of nature. Liu Kang appears to have emulated Gauguin’s methods, to avoid painting ‘too close after nature’ and to compose from sketches and photographs taken on site (Chia 2002, 194). Under feminism’s critique from the 1960s/70s, such depictions spoke of the fantasies and fears of middle-class men living in a changing world rather than any kind of universal human freedom (cited in Eisenman 1997, 18). Of course, Liu Kang, as an artist of the Chinese diaspora in search of a new home in a British colony, would not have reflected critically on his ostensibly primitivist position; his concerns might perhaps be located within the sphere of the ‘subalterns’ (Spivak and Morris [1988] 2010), where he might see allegiance with other oppressed peoples (future ‘Malayans’) and thus was markedly distinct from Gauguin, a white colonialist who found use for primitivism as a means to critique imperial culture (Eisenman 2005, 19). This distinction underpins the complexity of emulation, destabilising any straightforward transfer of iconographic particularity or formal specificity derived from Gauguin’s Tahitian paintings; it further brings to mind the tacit reminder by art historian Partha Mitter to also take into consideration the specific cultural contexts of the artists, including their artistic aims and agendas when reassessing the power and politics across the centre and periphery binary (2008, 536). If primitivism was an instrument, like to the French and English modernists who had envisaged alternatives to an oppressive imperial order (Eisenman 2005, 20), then to what ends might Liu Kang’s primitivism serve his own objectives?

Liu Kang’s seemingly Gauguinesque paintings of the tropical paradise of Bali necessitates first the consideration of his larger artistic aims and the ambivalent position he took as neither a white colonialist nor a ‘native’ colonial subject. As art historian Ruth Phillips reminds us, it was the modernist appreciation of ‘primitive art’ that accounted for its global adaptability, crucially transforming the ‘primitive’ ‘from an objectified category with fixed meanings into a movement – primitiv-ism’ (2015, 6). Re-reading Liu Kang’s earlier remarks about Balinese women, he may appear on the outset to harbour subtle criticism against the Dutch imperialists’ claims of a higher moral ground and their aims to civilise a ‘savage’ populace; however, it needs to be remembered as well that the Dutch themselves, decades before Liu Kang’s 1952 painting trip, had been using images of bare-breasted Balinese women to attract more tourists to Bali in a range of marketing (Vickers 1996, 2). The popular reception of romanticised Balinese landscapes and women by European painters, such as Dutch artist Willem Gerard Hofker (1902–1981) then based in the Dutch East Indies from the late 1930s, likewise suggests the commonplace representation of Balinese women as the sexualised ‘Other’, alongside the wealth of Orientalist art already circulating in the Western markets. Nonetheless, it is insufficient to view Liu Kang’s portrayals of Bali as merely following the footsteps of the European painters, Gauguin’s or Hofker’s, especially when taking into consideration his political status as a Chinese migrant with the view of staying on in Malaya permanently and all the anxieties that accompany the move and of being estranged from one’s homeland.

Born in Fujian province, China, Liu Kang moved twice to Malaya, first as a young child to Muar (in Johor), then again in 1937 with his wife when he was in his mid-twenties to escape the war in Shanghai, where he had been teaching (Chia 2002; Yeo 2011). The term ‘Nanyang Chinese’ referred to Chinese who identified with their own ‘Chineseness’, Chinese nationalists or otherwise. There were also ‘Nanyang Chinese’ who were loyal to the authorities of their country of residence and unenthusiastic about China (Wang 1981, 143). It may be premature to assume that all Chinese émigré artists had firm convictions to settle in Nanyang; instead, they started out more accurately as artists of the Nanyang, travelling the region and painting, without necessarily identifying with any one location. Historian Wang Gungwu explained that it was the treatment received in the host country, their prospects there, and conditions in their place of origin that led them to decide whether to stay or return (1996, 3). Liu Kang, like other émigré painters who had chosen to stay on in postwar Malaya in the city of Singapore following the dissolution of the British Empire, experienced the foreign non-Chinese ‘Other’ locally and regionally; how he subsequently described his experience of Bali was doubtlessly underpinned by similar sentiments of exoticism and curiosity all travellers across the world in search of new experiences might share.

As a diaspora artist in search of ‘home’, there is perhaps some comparability with the Japanese painters touring colonised Taiwan in how one engages with the Oriental-Other, such as to find an affinity in an imagined past and shared future. As shown in the study of Taiwanese landscapes during the colonial era, art historian Liao Hsin-Tien traced the role that Japanese painters such as Kinichiro Ishikawa played in discovering the Taiwanese landscape, arguing that such exploration of an untamed environment can be likened to undertaking a physical and psychological journey to the goal of civilisation; thus ‘overcoming the wildness like this is a symbolic triumph of modernity’ (Liao 2007, 39–66). In this context, Liao’s use of the term ‘untamed land’ was applied not only as a description of a ‘primitive’ place, but also of a place that is developing from chaos to order, from order to leisure, highlighting the function of modernisation as a mediator between tension and relaxation. Painting the ‘untamed land’ of Bali served a similar function to the city-dwelling Chinese émigré painters as a symbolic triumph of modernity in overcoming the wild. Rawanchaikul (2002, 36) observed the irony in how the Singapore-based Chinese émigré painters were aware that ‘Nanyang’ was viewed as the inferior to the ‘undeveloped land of the southern periphery’ of ‘China proper’ whilst they sought to find a home for themselves. This observation nonetheless suggests that Chinese émigré painters harboured similar elitist attitudes to the region’s native communities to those of the Japanese colonial painters in Taiwan. It is this internalised hierarchy that might distinguish Chinese émigré painters from other ‘Asian artists’ painting Bali (see Carroll 2011, 56–61). For many of the Nanyang artists, their career trajectory began not in the South seas, but back in mainland China, in the modernising and cosmopolitan centres of Shanghai.

Liu Kang’s modernist pursuit

Much has been written about the ‘cosmopolitan features’ in Liu Kang’s practice in part to correct the view that his art, as popularised by the discourse of Nanyang style/Nanyang art, narrowly represented ‘Malayan nationalism’ and that his intention was wholly nationalist in its outset (Yow 2011, 10–15). As scholar Yow Siew Kah has argued, Liu Kang was far less interested in creating ‘national art’, and much more concerned about reforming and creating a modern Chinese art especially during the immediate postwar period leading up to the country’s Independence (2011, 14). The issue was therefore not what the artists’ intentions, nationalistic or otherwise, were but rather, why pictures of Bali and Balinese subject and landscapes had appealed so much to the artists themselves who had later reflected on the impact the trip had on their practice. Chen Wen Hsi explained that the encounters with the Balinese had inspired his works: ‘There was an impact on my creativity … I also found many different motifs to paint. It was a training of techniques and skills … [and] was very helpful to what I did from then on’ (Pitt [1983] 2006, 70).

Cheong Soo Pieng, on the other hand, having been inspired by the trip, embarked on a number of painting expeditions in the region to Bali again in 1959, and then Borneo in 1961 in search of similar subject matter before going further afield to Europe (Cheong Soo Pieng Retrospective 1983, 11–27). To Liu Kang, the painting trip was significant, no less because the island offered the rare opportunity to sketch female nudes but also because it fulfilled the criterion of experiencing the ‘exotic ambience of a foreign culture’ that had been so formative to Gauguin’s work, an artist he clearly admired ([1953] 2005c, 108–112).

Liu Kang’s admiration for the Parisian modern painters was well-documented. He had remarked that he ‘had always loved Van Gogh and Gauguin, and am seduced by Matisse’; he wrote: ‘In my own work, I tend to favour a colourful, bright and bold approach’ ([1980] 2005b, 89). There were examples showing how he had indeed absorbed and transformed their painterly techniques as he experimented with the oil medium. My Bedroom in Paris (1931) shows evidence of the Impressionist technique: the displaced perspective in the rendering of the bed, the thick outlines to delineate shape and form, and flatness in the broad applications of colour. This work was completed during his five-year sojourn to Paris, after he had graduated from Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts, where he saw first hand examples of xiyanghua (western-style art) at galleries. Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts was a progressive art school founded by prominent figure Liu Haisu (1896–1994) who became an important mentor to Liu Kang. The academy offered Western painting, Western-style photography, copper-plate printmaking and English-language, and from 1914 offered life drawing classes to second and third year students (Kolesnikov-Jessop 2011, 93). Its ad-hoc and commercially slated curriculum was eventually replaced by a more vigorous programme modelled after that of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. The close ties between Shanghai Art Academy and the Tokyo School of Fine Arts were further fostered by the teachers who were educated in Japan and so the school was able to keep itself updated with the latest developments, via Japan (Andrews and Shen 2012). For instance, the development of outdoor plein-air landscapes was an essential part of art school training in China from its inception. Trips to outlying rural suburbs of Shanghai and Hangzhou, in particular, were organised as so-called sketch excursions. It also adopted the practice of life drawing from nude female models from 1920, and caused some degree of controversy (Zheng 2016).⁶ Liu Haisu, for example, faced threats from Confucianist warlord Sun Chuanfang and had to briefly seek refuge in Japan (Kolesnikov-Jessop 2011, 93).

Under the tutelage of Liu Haisu at a time in China when reforming and modernising Chinese art were debated, Liu Kang too was of the belief that life drawing was a central aspect of the practice of the modern artist. He once wrote:

I kept up the regular practice even during the Sino-Japanese War, when I returned to Nanyang. To me, the highest realm of achievement in drawing is the depiction of [the] human body. With elements such as proportion, symmetry and texture for the artist to deliberate upon, the human body is truly the most beautiful form in the universe. (cited in Kolesnikov-Jessop 2011, 88)

To Singaporean art critic, Chia Wai Hon, Liu Kang is ‘one of the very few Singapore artists who composes with the human figure, whether clothed or in the nude’, having ‘cultivated this deep and abiding interest in working from the nude model since his art school days’ (Chia [1997] 2002, 198). Whilst Liu Kang’s absorption and transformation of western modernist techniques is clear, there is no doubt that Liu Kang’s engagement with European modernism is a different articulation of modernity in itself; it took into consideration his views of Impressionism/Post-Impressionism based on his understanding of Chinese art and culture.

Like a segment of early twentieth-century reform-minded artists, Liu Kang understood western modernism as subversive and a challenge to established academic painting, that was not too dissimilar from the conflict between the ‘individualist’ painters such as Shitao and the literati court painters of the Ming period, such as Dong Qichang (Cahill 2009). In particular, he saw strong affinities between the approach of literati painters and the Impressionist modernists, that art should not be merely imitative, and where artists should be free to develop individual styles. He maintained, however, that it was essential to study the work of great masters, which was precisely what he did when he enrolled in the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Montparnasse during the five years that he spent in Paris, travelling and mingling with other artists (Kolesnikov-Jessop 2011, 96). Emulating the Masters’ art was a requisite process before one might achieve creative innovation. Liu Kang’s own pursuit and realisation of his artistic aims to achieve creative innovation in art was made possible not in Shanghai where he had returned to teach in 1933 but as it turned out, much later, in British Malaya during times of political transition.

In prewar and postwar Singapore, he was fully distanced from the reformist politics that found favour in the academic realist mode of painting, as championed and advocated by Xu Beihong (1895–1953). Xu, who had mastered the ideals of nineteenth century romanticism and academicism from European artists of the late 1800s, believed that art should be made in service of the nation, and that artists should adopt western realism (Andrews 1994, 29; Wang 2019, 66–82). Under the communist government, the western-modernist painters were accused of instilling bourgeois capitalist beliefs and thus suppressed (Croizier 1993, 135–154). Advocates of this approach who included Lin Fengmian, Liu Haisu and Liu Kang were thus caught up in an ideological divide in Chinese politics that saw a split between Western capitalist liberalism and Soviet-inspired Marxist-Leninism, and which led eventually to a decade long civil war between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party). Viewed in this context, the painting trip to Bali offered Liu Kang (and his peers in similar position to him) freedom from such repressive politics, and also the crucial opportunity to continue the practice of life drawing, which had been central to the reformist movement in Shanghai before he left. Also important was accessibility to nude models which were challenging to obtain in Singapore and elsewhere in the region, making places like Bali and Borneo attractive to painters. European painters such as Willem Gerard Hofker relocated to Bali from other parts of the Dutch East Indies, in part, to access nude models.

In much of Liu Kang’s writings, he has explained the significance and mastery of drawing and life drawing in particular for an artist; ‘if you can master a human body’, he once wrote, ‘you can draw anything’ (cited in Kolesnikov-Jessop 2011, 104). He saw in the human body a means to express ‘truth’, ‘virtue’ and ‘beauty’ (in Chen 1982, 65). A modest compilation of his figure drawings and paintings in a major retrospective exhibition catalogue, Liu Kang: Colourful Modernist (2011) show primarily female nudes, not male nudes spanning the 1950s through to 1990s. Liu Kang’s advocacy for life drawing in Malaya (later in Singapore) echoed common debates relating to the introduction of life drawing and the exhibition of the nude genre in China and Japan. For example, Japanese yoga painter, Kuroda Seiki’s infamous Morning Toilette (1893) showing a life-size female nude elicited an explosive reaction from the public that sparked a heated social and moral contestation over the introduction of the nude as a fine art genre in Japan (Tseng 2008, 417–440). Those trained in western-style painting held fast to the nude genre as its backbone, as signifying an ‘exemplary standard-bearer of culture and civilisation’ and ‘embodying the lofty aesthetic ideals and morals undergirding the modern nation’ (Volk 2010, 33). The decision to censor public displays of frontal nudes with a pink cloth from the waist down, but retain their place in the curriculum of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, highlighted the paradox of the nude genre and the conflicted sentiments of the Meiji government. In addition, the decision to select Kuroda Seiki’s triptych of three Japanese Nudes, Wisdom, Impression, Sentiment (1899) at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle, reflected the government’s esteem of the nude genre in the western academic tradition and recognition of the westernisation project in its self-strengthening ethos (Bryson 2003, 89–118). Domestically, however, the censorship of display, and subsequent self-censorship of the nudes as seen in Kuroda Seiki’s many half-nudes or back views of nudes, suggest that the nudes have all well and truly become, in the words of art historian Alicia Volk, ‘domesticated’ (2010, 60).

Liu Kang’s struggles to keep alive the practice of the nude genre both in Shanghai and later in Malaya (Singapore) are far from exceptional. If indeed his conviction that the mastery in drawing the human figure was to be quintessential to his practice and artistic development, then access to nude or semi-nude models in Bali cannot be underestimated, for, like other conditions, they formed the preconditions to enable his modernist pursuit. This needs to be understood as a dynamic and spontaneous process, or as Ruth Phillips has observed about primitivism, ‘processual and open-ended’ (2015, 6). Liu Kang’s Masks (Bali) (1953) discussed earlier, is a good example of his modernist appreciation of so-called ‘primitive art’: the colourful tapel (masks) hanging on the wall just behind the female figures, the votive-sized wooden sculpture of the popular Balinese Rice Goddess, Dewi Sri, on the table beside them, and the batik sarong strung around their slim waist. These are just some examples of the vast array of ‘traditional’ art forms that may be appropriated in service of his modernism. In this case, they were appropriated as iconographical particularities of modernist primitivism to enable the staging of female nudes who, as discussed earlier, are the main subject of the painting.

The formation of a female nude archetype is evident in these early examples already. None of the female figures were of identifiable women; and they often shared generic ‘oriental’ features, showing smiling, downcast eyes, a demure smile and smooth olive skin. That Liu Kang subsequently transposed this archetype from Bali to Malang, an East Java town, in his later piece, entitled Artist and Model (1954) (see Figure 1), was seen by T.K. Sabapathy as a consolidation of ‘a figurative repertoire in which the female figure settles into formal types’ (2002, 138). Though there is little elaboration on what other formal types they were, Sabapathy made clear that Bali remained influential in fuelling the artist’s thoughts however ill-fitting the transfer of the model from Bali to Malang might be (2002, 138). The work showed Liu Kang’s peer, Chen Wen Hsi, painting a picture of a topless woman. Both artist and model were depicted outdoors, seated on comfortable rattan chairs against a picturesque background of far off volcanoes and tropical blue skies. Artist and Model (1954) was an entirely imaginary exercise that demanded from the viewers the recognition of ‘objective’ truths – of places and peoples who existed. The painting earmarks the achievement of creative innovation that Liu Kang had been striving for since he left for Paris to learn from the Great Masters themselves. It also lent testimonial to the artist’s deep study and engagement with the modernist tradition made possible by his diaspora status. Liu Kang himself had always maintained that it was China that provided him with the ‘artistic vision,’ and namely ‘the breadth, the depth, the inner strength and the lofty ideals that typify Chinese art’ (Zhai 2000, 36–40). Yow Siew Kah added that it was the artist’s Chinese identity that predominated in his Bali landscapes and genre paintings, locating how the artist had drawn attention to the China-Bali cultural continuity in his 1953 essay ‘Trip to Bali’ (2011, 51). More crucially, however, is how Liu Kang has demonstrated astute awareness of the representational qualities of ‘art’, in his mimicking of the manner and look of the batik medium (Gu 2000, 22–35). This resembles how the Parisian modernist painters had broken from the tradition of representing the world the way it presented itself to the eye by creating a painting so sketchy that it leaves ‘the eye under no doubt as to the fact that the colours they used are made of paint that came from tubes or pots’ (Greenberg [1965] 1982, 6). By mimicking the effect of batik (technique of wax-resist dyeing on fabric), Liu Kang outlines his subjects in white, the section presumably protected and coated with wax. Liu Kang then colours in the oil paint using a viscosity that evokes the effect of dye on cloth – thin, broad sweeps of colour, that resemble nothing of the rich and thick viscosity typical of oil paints. This example demonstrates his absorption and transformation of modernism’s ideals by making ‘art-as-representation’ his subject: the transposition of the Balinese nude into a Javanese landscape and the mimicking of the batik art form. This breakthrough in artistic innovation resulted directly from Liu Kang’s engagement with the primitivist trope.

Much later, Liu Kang elaborated on his artistic approach (subsequently coined as Nanyang feng’ge [trans. Nanyang style]) – that the ‘subject should be tropical’; the ‘manner should be rustic and lyrical’; the image should be ‘bright and delightful’; and the ‘tone should be relaxed and solid’ (Zhai 2000, 36–40). He further defined it in the following way:

First, the theme should be the South seas, perhaps using the region as a guide, reflecting their tradition or landscapes and customs; urbanised city centres, results of the modernization and industrialization should not be included as a theme. Second, the painting style should be expressive, spontaneous and broad-sweeping rather than rigidly descriptive. Third, the tone of the painting should be bright and light, in combination with relaxed but steady brush strokes and lines, to reflect the thoughts and feelings of people of the tropics (Gu 2000, 22–28; “Conference transcript” 1986, 12–13).

Liu Kang immersed himself in the place and culture of Bali, a place uniquely distanced from the cultural politics of mainland China, and afforded access to nude and semi-nude models. These provided the fertile conditions for the mastery and syncretising of artistic techniques in the formulation of modern Nanyang landscapes. Artist and Model (1954) was a painting about modern art: it demonstrated his absorption and interpretation of the modernist ideals and also incorporated the lofty ideals that typify Chinese art. But it went beyond any mere imitation of Gauguin's paintings of the Tahiti scenes. Characteristics of what he later saw as central to Nanyang feng’ge are, in fact, traceable to this work and his travels to Bali’s ‘untamed lands,’ the experience of the ‘wildness’ and, evidently, abundant access to nude/semi-nude models. In short, Liu Kang’s appreciation of ‘primitive art’ and crucially, his knowledge of Gauguin’s primitivism, opened up a new trajectory to explore and amalgamate the female nude genre into his landscapes and genre scenes.

The Bali exhibition and the uncontroversial nude

Whilst the trip to Bali allowed Liu Kang to pursue his own modernist ideals and formulate his own idea of Nanyang feng’ge, the appeal of Bali and the Balinese subject matter to the local audience was also important. Its reception has undoubtedly exposed the complicity of the primitive gaze by the viewers. The 1953 Bali Exhibition, held across ten days at the prominent location of the British Council Hall, turned out to be a surprising success. Supported by the proto-nationalist Singapore Art Society (SAS), the exhibition was accompanied by a semi-coloured exhibition catalogue. It comprised of an essay by Liu Kang, entitled ‘Trip to Bali,’ and twenty-four image plates by artists Chen Wen Hsi, Liu Kang, Chen Chong Swee and Cheong Soo Pieng. The essay foregrounded the context of the exhibition, opening with how Belgian artist, Adrien-Jean Le Mayeur Merpres (1880–1958), their host in Bali, had been so inspired by Paul Gauguin that he moved to and settled in Bali, and eventually married the Balinese dancer Ni Pollok. Notably Le Mayeur had previously held at least four successful exhibitions of Balinese scenes and women (Ibrahim 2018, 36). Thus, Liu Kang was already contextualising the reception of the paintings as modernist and internationally sanctioned. Only two and a half decades later would this be adequately appreciated by art historians T.K. Sabapathy and Redza Piyadasa, who highlighted the approach as ‘a representational schema transforming visual stimuli into pictorial form’ that drew on Chinese pictorial traditions to the Schools of Paris (1979).

What has been given far less attention was how the exhibition and the paintings of Balinese nudes had been contextualised for the Singaporean audience by the British agencies at that time. For example, there was significant press coverage of the exhibition in The Free Press, which was known for its anti-colonial stance and support for the movement toward self-governance in the region. It ran a two-page spread showing the four artists at work in their studios and a photo montage of their paintings (Figure 4a & 4b). Notably, five out of eight of the paintings in the montage were of nude and half-nude Balinese women. The photos were taken by prominent British naturalist and curator, Carl Alexander Gibson-Hill (1911–1963). But why engage such a prominent figure to take these photos? Not only was Gibson-Hill a specialist in natural history, he was a frequent contributor to the Straits Times Annual, which often featured articles on cultural and social aspects of the colony and the emerging polity of Malaya (see also Toh, this volume). Gibson-Hill’s photographs of nudes in the local press mirrored similar articles featuring coverage of Indigenous cultures and communities in neighbouring states and ethnographic photo exhibitions by expatriate and colonial photographers, such as Derrick Knight (also supported by the SAS). Knight had previously exhibited his photographs as ethnographic representations of Southeast Asia at the British Council Hall in 1951. It stands to reason that pictures of such women was couched in ethnographic terms, as ‘objective truths’ rather than ideals of beauty or due to the centrality of the nude genre in western academic tradition – which may be viewed as foreign, irrelevant and controversial.

Figure 4. (a) and (b) Peter De Cruz ‘Local Artists At Work’, The Free Press, 16 November 1953, p. 8–9. Reprinted with permission, SPH Media Limited.

This tactical framing, if so, worked, because the exhibition ran for ten days with no recorded disruption. Noorshidah Ibrahim observed strong attendance of ‘elites of Singapore’ and favourable patronage support from the British High Commissioner, Malcom MacDonald (Ibrahim 2018, 41), for instance. It was a surprising outcome that the exhibition, with all the imagery of women, did not elicit protest or controversy, as other exhibitions of nudes experienced (Anonymous, The Straits Times, 18 Nov 1952, 1). Instead, it was a significant success and well attended throughout (Figure 5), that even the artists were surprised. Liu Kang admitted it was ‘quite an event at that time’ (cited in Sabapathy 1994). Chen Wen Hsi also remarked in kind:

When we came back, we felt that we should hold an exhibition on the customs and people of Bali. That exhibition broke new ground in Singapore. No one had something like that before. We started it. Someone called us the Four Master Painters, but we didn’t know how in the world that came about (Pitt [1983] 2006, 69).

After the exhibition, R.C.R. Morrell wrote in Straits Times Annual that he saw in the paintings the beginning of a ‘truly Malayan style’ and singling out works by the Nanyang artists (1953, 33–35). As I have discussed in an earlier essay, Tony Beamish published The Arts of Malaya in which he positioned Singapore as the art centre of the country (Federation), expressing optimism in the birth of a Malayan national form through the fusion of ‘cultures of the Far East, India and the West’. A ‘Malayan school of painting’, he said, had to start from scratch in a place where there is ‘no national tradition in the art’ to begin with (Beamish 1954, 13; Low 2012, 248).

Figure 5. Audience viewing the Bali Exhibition. Digitised by National Gallery Singapore Library & Archive, with kind permission from Cheong Leng Guat.

The timing of the exhibition in postwar Malaya clearly played a part in its popular reception. Stirrings of nationalism were triggered in part by Japan’s victories in World War 2 (WW2) which reflected the ineptitude of the British. The effects were various, but in particular, Malays were encouraged to think of independence from the British, which led to planning for Independence shortly after the war (Harper 1999; Provencher 1982). These modernist representations of the region by local artists fulfilled the aspirations of British officials keen to construct a Malayan identity. It needs to be remembered that Liu Kang and the other émigré Chinese painters were not like the many expatriate painters based in cosmopolitan Singapore, which already had a diverse and sizable community. Even though the Chinese were generally highly mobile ‘permanent sojourner[s] ready to follow opportunities’, the unique political situation of Singapore with its high percentage of racially Chinese population at the height of nationalism meant that migrants such as Liu Kang needed to consider settling since the idea of residing temporarily was considered politically ‘suspect’ and was ‘discouraged’ (Wang 1996, 2). Showing the readiness of the Chinese participating in a shared Malayan vision was very much on the agenda of the British colonial government then working toward Singapore’s Independence on the condition of its unification with Malaysia to form an expanded Federation of Malaysia. Whilst it was never the intention for Liu Kang and other Nanyang artists to produce ‘Malayan art’ following their Bali trip, there was no stopping others seeing their depictions as visions to a shared future. What was overlooked, on the one hand, was how Liu Kang had in fact been successful in localising an exogenous picture category, the (female) nude, in his modernist pursuit, and, on the other, that its production and reception were resolutely underpinned by the primitive gaze.

Concluding remarks: figuring the nation

As countries encountered Western modernism, picture categories that were not endogenous to the visual cultures such as the nude genre could cause ruptures in a variety of ways, such as the case presented above. There is no better example of a visual genre causing controversy than the female nude, which had come to represent Western culture as an ideal that is both desired for signifying modernity, progressivity and cultural parity with the West, but also feared and resisted for ideological and moralistic reasons. For a brief time, Liu Kang and other Nanyang artists appeared to have deftly avoided controversy in their adaptation of the nude genre within the context of ‘Nanyang art’ and ‘Malayan art;’ they managed to frame it as a kind of cosmopolitanism in the local modernist discourse. This was relatively short-lived; later, the elderly Liu Kang reflected on the challenges in painting and showing nudes in post-Independent Singapore, due to its strict censorship laws (Lizun et al. 2022). Not only did this lead to him producing more drawings of nudes than paintings, his subsequent paintings of nude figures were frequently set in the exoticized scenes of Bali such as in Balinese Woman and Children (1962) – arguably a kind of ‘self-censorship’ on the part of the artist (Lizun et al. 2022).

Liu Kang’s re-engagement with the genre in the 1990s, however, saw additional production of Bali-themed genre scenes, in which the portrayal of nude and semi-nude female figures continued to be staged in tropical settings so as to fulfil the pictorial convention first established by the modernist primitivist visual order. Both paintings, Nude (1996) (Figure 6) and Bathers (1997) (Figure 7), showed stark naked women romping the tropical ‘untamed lands’ collecting mangosteens and rambutans, or otherwise indulging in a carefree mid-day public bath collectively. It is no longer clear in these examples whether the women portrayed were indeed Balinese, given their fair complexion and skins; their Othering has been made complete by the full application of a well-used primitivist trope. This ostensible Othering exercise brings to mind the prominent incident in mainland China, that centred around Yuan Yunsheng’s portrayal of nude Dai (Thai) women of Xishuangbana, a minority ethnic group in China, in a 1979 mural for the Beijing Capital Airport. The approval of nude and erotic portrayals of minority women and not of Han Chinese women, argues Dru Gladney, serves crucially to construct Han identity; the distinction is most clearly delineated in the representation of Han women as ‘covered, conservative and “civilised”’ (1994, 104). In this regard, the nude iconography and its permissibility in visual culture, harbour the latent potential to make visible societies’ gendered and racial hierarchies. For a brief time at the height of decolonisation, the representations of semi-nude Balinese or Indigenous women are much more than ‘interesting’ subject matter for Malayan artists; domesticated and nude, they served crucially to figure modern development in the nation-to-be, and signalled cultural parity with the colonial West.

Figure 6. Liu Kang, Nude, 1996, Pastel on paper, 70 × 50 cm. Gift of the artist’s family, Collection of National Gallery Singapore. Image courtesy of National Heritage Board, Singapore.

Figure 7. Liu Kang, Bathers, 1997, Oil on canvas, 118 × 169 cm. Gift of the artist's family, Collection of National Gallery Singapore. Image courtesy of National Heritage Board, Singapore.

In this investigation, it is clear as well that their reception, the primitivizing gaze, was predicated on two compelling fictions: first, a modernist universality that was underpinned by the admiration of Paul Gauguin, and other Parisian masters; and second, the ethnographic truth or logic inherent in the perceived ‘objective’ representations of the local/regional communities’ way of life. Paradoxically in the latter’s case, the rhetoric at the height of decolonisation evolved from one of colonial justification to instead demonstrating the ‘free’ and ‘true’ states of its subjects. Both fictions, however, were nonetheless an outcome of the nationalist and modernising project that also uniquely produced its own image of the body. In Liu Kang’s case, his search for his nude subject may have begun in cosmopolitan Shanghai, but it was in ‘untamed’ Bali and ‘modern’ Malaya that it found its first uncontroversial home.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the two peer reviewers and Phoebe Scott for the close reading and feedback. A version of this essay was presented at the Chinese Studies Association of Australia Conference, University of Sydney, 7–9 December 2023. The author is grateful for the feedback received on that occasion.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yvonne Low

Yvonne Low is an art historian in Asian Art. She is a lecturer at the University of Sydney, teaching Art History and Curating in the Undergraduate and Postgraduate programmes. She researches on modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art, with an interest in Chinese diasporic cultures, women’s history, and digital methods. A member of the editorial committee of Southeast of Now journal (NUS Press), Yvonne is committed to advancing scholarship in the region. She is currently an advisory committee member for The Flow of History (AWARE/Asia Art Archive), The Womanifesto Way Digital Anthology (Power Institute, DFAT, 4A) and co-developer of digital tool, Artists Trajectories Map.

Notes

1 The term translates into ‘South seas’ and refers broadly to any part or whole of the island nations situated south of China including the Philippines, the Indonesian archipelago, the archipelago, the Malay Peninsular, Singapore, and the Southern part of Thailand. Chinese immigrants to these areas were observed to have named their newly established enterprise with the prefix, ‘Nanyang’. See Wang Gungwu (1981; 1996) and Wang Gungwu and Jennifer Cushman (1988).

2 Yeo has elaborated on Nanyang fengqing (flavour) in pre-war advertisements to refer to the rich, colourful natural landscape, social milieu, folk life, customs and manners found in the region (2019, 73).

3 This includes Ho (2007) and Ibrahim (2018).

4 This was an outcome of a collaborative project by a class of Year 1 Singaporean students invited to re-interpret Liu Kang’s work in a large-scale mosaic mural. Alongside the piece were other smaller paintings, portraits of Orang Ulu women with elongated earlobes and nostalgic scenes showing kampong villages and shirtless little boys playing. They were ‘local’ subject matter that were ostensibly inspired by the artists and their works presented in the Gallery’s long-term exhibitions.

5 Similar observations were made by Noorshidah Ibrahim (2018) and T.K. Sabapathy (2002).

6 An example of Liu Kang’s early Nude (1927) completed in China (part of the family collection) is viewable in an inaugural study on the materials and techniques by the Heritage Conservation Centre leading to numerous papers and findings (e.g., Lizun and Rogoz 2023).