A nuanced exploration of the early days of conceptual art in Southeast Asia through the work of Johnny Manahan (Philippines), Tan Teng Kee (Singapore), and Redza Piyadasa (Malaysia), “A Fact Has No Appearance: Art Beyond the Object” is, for senior curator Russell Storer, a valuable comparative exercise in how conceptual art practices took hold at slightly different time frames in Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines.
“This exhibition is a chance to see three artists who brought aspects of conceptual art into their work, who were all working around the same time,” notes Storer. “I think conceptual art certainly took hold more strongly in the Philippines, thanks to venues like the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP), as opposed to somewhere like Singapore, where there wasn’t that kind of a central hub. There were certain flashes, to be sure, like Cheo Chai-Hiang’s “5’ x 5’ (Singapore River)” in 1972, or Tan Teng Kee’s fire sculpture in 1979, but as a whole, conceptual art didn’t come into a proper format in Singapore until the 1980s, with the formation of the Artist’s Village, for instance.”
Curator Adele Tan, who curated the section on Malaysian artist Redza Piyadasa, sees him as a classic case in how a formative art education acquired overseas helped him to disseminate the newest ideas about modern art back home in Malaysia. “I think Piyadasa often comes to mind as the critical voice of modern Malaysian art, because he was pushing at the boundaries of how Malaysian art was conceived at the time,” says Tan. “He tried to move away from what he calls a ‘retinal’ appreciation of art, and towards a more ideatic approach to thinking about art-making and the reception of art — a stance that had much to do with his own training in England, at the Hornsey College of Art in London from 1963-1967.”
Immersed in the artistic milieu of London during the 1960s, Piyadasa quickly absorbed these lessons and applied them to his own practice. “Disciplinary boundaries at the time were breaking down, and people were moving between painting and sculpture a lot. Piyadasa’s own early works focused very much on incorporating elements of the environment into them, as seen in his ‘open paintings,’ where the wall, for instance, was incorporated into his work. In a similar fashion, his ‘Propositions’ also incorporate his own students’ work, painted over by himself,” notes Tan.
A subsequent sojourn in Honolulu in 1975 to pursue his postgraduate studies at the University of Hawaii encouraged Piyadasa to further his burgeoning interest in Asian art histories. “During this time, he wanted to re-present Southeast Asian art history, and activate it for a present consciousness, so to speak,” Tan tells me.
“A lot of the works from this period don’t exist anymore: they have a kind of temporal existence, as it were. In any case, this desire to move away from an object fetish was already something that Piyadasa was starting to think about. The concept of time, history, and its sediments interested him profoundly. And unlike most Western conceptualists, he was also a cultural historian who was interested in exploring what made up the landscape of Malaysia and Southeast Asia.”
One of the self-evident stylistic strands at this exhibition is Piyadasa’s predilection for a certain declarative mode of art making — something which, according to Tan, was closely tied to the racial politics of Malaysia and the artist’s position within that landscape. “I think Piyadasa’s declarative mode stems from his status as a Sinhalese in Malaysia, who then converted to Islam when he married his first wife, the artist Fatimah Chik,” she points out. “He wanted to announce himself in the social fabric of Malaysia, particularly in the wake of the 1969 racial riots and the First National Cultural Congress in 1971, which tried to work out the cultural paths for Malaysia based on more ethnicized lines.”
“This was a point in time when Piyadasa was searching for where he would fit in. Being declarative made him stand out, and this was his statement-making posture, so to speak. As an artist, he wanted to distinguish himself by making that cut in the prevailing ideology of the time,” says Tan.
Meanwhile, Russell Storer, senior curator at the National Gallery, curated the section of the exhibition devoted to Malaysian-born Tan Teng Kee, who came to Singapore in 1970 after finishing his studies in Dusseldorf, where he studied metal sculpture. “In order to find a job here, Teng Kee wrote to the only person he knew in Singapore — Lee Kuan Yew — who helped him get a teaching position at the former Baharuddin Vocational Institute, the first school in Singapore devoted to design and the applied arts,” says Storer.
“While in Singapore, he introduced a lot of new ideas about sculpture to the local art scene. Teng Kee was very much interested in using found and industrial materials, and deploying techniques like welding and joining,” he notes. “He left all of those aspects in the work, so that the process of sculpting was very evident, instead of a polished, finished kind of work.”
While the rapid pace of development in Singapore during the 1960s and 70s was something that was reflected in Tan’s work, the spirit of the time also offered him many opportunities for major commissions that were highly visible. “The other thing Teng Kee is best known for is his public sculptures,” Storer notes. “He got a couple of major commissions during the 1970s — Plaza Singapura commissioned him to make a piece fashioned from a series of brass pipes, which was abstract and new for the time, while OCBC Bank also commissioned a sculpture made out of cut-out pieces of steel, which is now installed in Bras Basah Park.”
Tan is also often credited for creating the first performance work, or Happening, in Singapore. “In 1979, Teng Kee had an outdoor exhibition near his house: he hung his paintings and installed his sculptures in a park just outside it,” notes Storer. “It was the first instance of an outdoor exhibition, as far as I’m aware, where he just invited friends and students to celebrate his work in open space. He also wrapped one of his sculptures in newspaper and set it on fire — and this fire sculpture is now widely acknowledged as the first Happening in Singapore.”
To some observers, Tan also embodies a certain bicultural background that reveals how art making during this time was often divided along linguistic lines, with English- and Chinese-speaking artists forming separate communities. “Teng Kee went to Chinese schools and learnt calligraphy in Hong Kong, but also elected to study Western painting while he was there. He was also part of the Modern Art Society, which was composed primarily of Chinese-educated artists,” notes Storer. “In a way, Teng Kee was of a generation where English- and Chinese-educated artists were kind of separated, and came from different communities.”
The final section of “A Fact Has No Appearance,” dedicated to Philippine artist Johnny Manahan, is curated by Clarissa Chikiamco, who begins by pointing out that Manahan has an outsized reputation in his native country for his work in a very different field.
“Johnny is very well known in the Philippine entertainment industry. But he actually practiced as a visual artist from the 1970s up until 1982,” notes Chikiamco. “A lot of people don’t know about his artistic background, and the seminal works that he produced during this period. I think Manahan can be credited for making the first Philippine video artwork in 1972, which was exhibited in a gallery at the Cultural Center of the Philippines as part of the 13 Artists Award, founded by Roberto Chabet in the 1970s and designed to show a ‘recent-ness,’ or ‘turning away from the past,’ in Chabet’s own words.”
“Manahan was part of that second batch of artists in 1972, and he made this video work as part of this show. A lot of people thought that video was something connected to his work in the entertainment industry, when in fact he linked it to his practice in photography, another field he was interested in,” Chikiamco points out.
The works on display here also foreground Manahan’s experimental forays in conceptual photography. “He was also part of a 1974 group show called ‘Otherwise Photography,’ where he tried to rationalize how artists from his generation were using photography in a very different way — not journalistically, or to make pretty pictures. Manahan made photography where the idea was paramount,” she says.
In researching the historical material related Manahan and the other two artists, Chikiamco and her colleagues ran up against several thorny questions that were particular to that time. “During this period, art wasn’t seen as a precious material. After an exhibition, works were destroyed, discarded, or gradually got lost,” she notes.
“So how do you go about representing something that isn’t there? In Manahan’s case, we were lucky because we discovered that his last video work from 1982, which was shown at the Paris Biennale, still existed, and was actually in good condition,” Chikiamco shares. “So our museum took the initiative to convert it, and put it on display here. It’s basically the first time in 30 years that it’s being exhibited again.”
“A Fact Has No Appearance: Art Beyond the Object” runs at the Concourse Gallery 1, National Gallery Singapore through June 19, 2016.
Resource: http://www.blouinartinfo.com
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