Art diaspora comes to Singapore

Dr. Zoé Whatley, curator of Translations: Afro-Asian Poetics, exhibiting at Gillman Barracks during Singapore Art Week (SAW), tells us about a faux-African warrior mask made by British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare in 2020.

Called Hybrid Mask (Cru), it’s a Eurocentricized view of his native Nigerian masks—a comment on colonialism, race and class. (The “Cru” is meant ironically.) “Famously, in art college, Yinka was told his work didn’t look African,” says Whatley, “so he began to incorporate Dutch wax textiles, knowing that the full art of that was not itself an indigenous West African product, but something that came through the Dutch in Indonesia. So all of a sudden, it seemed very African, but with these other undertones.”

What happens to the artist diaspora, whether from Africa or Asia, when their work becomes a translation of their new surroundings, filtered through personal history?

Answer: Nothing is ever really lost in translation. It just gets deconstructed, decapitated, reimagined. 

More than anything else, the second edition of Art SG held in Marina Bay Sands Convention Centre during SAW underscored the importance of diaspora, immigration, assimilation, and cross-pollination in a city-state that is increasingly positioned as a Southeast Asian cultural hub. 

Gallery after gallery at the fair played out this reality of artists filtering their work through adopted spaces abroad, then bringing it back home. At the same time, some 80% of the galleries were international (a sign of Art SG’s growing clout), so the fair welcomed lesser-seen regions into the mix. 

Dr. Whatley’s Translations is a large-scale, six-room interweaving of Asian artists interacting with African methods (like Ogawa Machiko, the first woman artist to study West African ceramic methods at Tokyo University of the Arts, adding new layers to her work), and African artists redefining how to work abroad, like Zimbabwe’s Misheck Masamvu, who defines his art in three words: “destination, deprivation, and decapitation” (i.e., “moving the work from one place to another”).

All over Art SG we saw transplanted artists. Nigerian painter Ken Nwadiogbu flies half a world away to show his London-spawned orange “thermal” paintings. Vietnamese artist Tran Trong Vu transports his installation The War Illusions—with plastic gun-toting soldiers hiding amid a field of blue paper flowers—halfway around the world from A2Z Gallery in Paris, which shows Asian artists exclusively, only to have it displayed here in Singapore for Art SG.

There’s something, maybe, about prophets and artists being strangers at home. But it goes deeper, and stranger.

Our Singapore tour began with Tropical, an ongoing exhibit at National Gallery which juxtaposes a Frida Kahlo portrait (monkey perched on her shoulder) with Pacita Abad to examine the “lazy Asian” art trope found in the exotic paradises of Gauguin, and how this view was challenged by works from immigrant artists in Latin America, Indonesia, the Philippines; and there Abad is again at Art SG, with canvases shown at Singapore’s STPI Creative Workshop & Gallery, alongside Geneva-HK Galerie Urs Meile, which brings Asian artists to Switzerland and back to Singapore again.

The late Abad is “having a moment,” as they say in art critic circles, with a major retrospective touring Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Toronto, reexamining her work as the quintessential Asian female itinerant artist, wandering from Manila early on, making the world her art bed. (Her nephew Pio Abad and wife/artist Frances Wadsworth Jones’ work is also there at Translations: a reimagined Romanov-era diamond tiara bought by Imelda and recovered as evidence in her New York trial.)

Why the lens on Singapore as the new “cultural hub”?

Tong Tay, director of Sector Development at National Arts Council, which organizes SAW, notes the city-state is historically “porous”: “You could come in, set up shop however you want.” Practically speaking, he says, “We are not too nationalistic, we are looking at what the region offers us, and offer a platform to share that with the world.”

NAC routinely supports fellow Southeast Asian artists in shows abroad (such as upcoming Art Fair PH), as well as nurturing local artists with grants and lofts. “We’re becoming so global, and the mobility really allows us to be where we want, and make the most of it. Singapore is one platform that encourages those kinds of working collaborations.”

For Magnus Renfrew, co-founder of Art SG under The Art Assembly, building art roads between Asia, Africa, and elsewhere comes about through “research about where the natural audience is going to be coming from”—but also recognizing a cultural moment. “I think that there’s been this moment of reckoning in the West, particularly focused on the reevaluation of work by African-American artists and artists of African descent,” perhaps following on the Black Lives Matter movement. “I think that the conversation is a bit further behind for East Asia and South Asia.”

Having worked with Art Hong Kong, Art Basel Hong Kong, and Taiwan’s Tapei Dangdai fair prior to Art SG, Renfrew says “in certain respects, we were quite ahead of the curve on geographic diversity, and the art world has been very much moving along that path as well.”

Events like Art SG and SAW seek to show us what’s lost in art’s translation—and what’s gained.

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Thanks to Art SG lead partner UBS, National Arts Council, Marina Bay Sands for their service and support. Visit artweek.sg to know more.