Nanyang art
“The ‘Nanyang,’ translated as ‘South Seas,’ is a pre-modern trading term used by the Chinese for the Southeast Asian region, taking its compass direction south of China. Yet, Nanyang is not just a geographical term. It is an impression of a landscape and resource — a region rich in cultures with its various languages, ethnicities, customs, traditions and syncretic belief systems — that Chinese migrant artists encountered anew.” (Low Sze Wee & Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, “Some Introductory Remarks,” Siapa Nama Kamu? Art in Singapore Since the 19th Century, 15)
“To understand the emergence of the Nanyang School of painting, one critical task has been to locate the earliest of migrant artists who had trained in the art centres of the period such as Paris and Shanghai, and later made Singapore their home. These artists would eventually create artworks that expressed local subject matter in styles that integrated their understanding of Chinese ink painting and School of Paris traditions. […] These artists were well-travelled and reflected cosmopolitan influences in their artistic practice. Hence, a group of artworks have been brought together to establish traces that we have fondly begun to describe in curatorial discussions as the ‘proto-Nanyang School,’ as it charts emerging modernist strands of artistic practice in Singapore in as early as the 1930s when artists consciously reworked Western conventions to develop a local expression of self and place. The establishment of the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA) in 1938 could then be seen as part of this larger momentum that had already begun some years earlier.” (Low Sze Wee & Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, “Some Introductory Remarks,” Siapa Nama Kamu? Art in Singapore Since the 19th Century, 15)
“The Nanyang School reached a certain maturity by the 1970s when many of the seminal artworks associated with it were produced. These include Georgette Chen’s Lotus in a Breeze (c. 1970), Cheong Soo Pieng’s Drying Salted Fish (1978) and Liu Kang’s Life by the River (1975).” (Low Sze Wee & Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, “Some Introductory Remarks,” Siapa Nama Kamu? Art in Singapore Since the 19th Century, 18)
“The Nanyang School, as a movement has tremendously mobilised and visited the region of Southeast Asia, in effect also highlights the geographic position of Singapore set within a vast archipelago.” (Low Sze Wee & Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, “Some Introductory Remarks,” Siapa Nama Kamu? Art in Singapore Since the 19th Century, 18)
“In art history, Nanyang art holds a special significance as the first critical period in Singapore’s art development that shows a conscious attempt by artists to create a local art discourse.” (Ong Zhen Min, “Nanyang Reverie,” Siapa Nama Kamu? Art in Singapore Since the 19th Century, 42)
“Synthesis in Nanyang art is a trait that arose as a result of early art education reforms in China. The philosophy of Chinese and Western cross-cultural dialogue initiated by the Chinese art academies eventually found its way overseas through migrant Chinese artists. In Singapore, it was passed down to a new generation of artists through training channels such as the NAFA.” (Ong Zhen Min, “Nanyang Reverie,” Siapa Nama Kamu? Art in Singapore Since the 19th Century, 44)
“[Sabapathy’s] remark suggests that the creation of Nanyang art is based on a strategic selection of different styles and approaches, chosen for connotations and aesthetics that suit each artist’s sense of expression. Furthermore, as each Nanyang artist seeks his or her own interpretation of balance between Chinese and Western art, the process produces artworks with distinctly different approaches. This also accounts for artworks completed in a broad range of mediums (oils and ink) and styles that are classified as Nanyang art.” (Ong Zhen Min, “Nanyang Reverie,” Siapa Nama Kamu? Art in Singapore Since the 19th Century, 44)
“When espousing the concept of ‘local’ in subject matter, it is intriguing to note that the Nanyang artists, in reality, often viewed Southeast Asia from the point of a tourist, documenting their thoughts and memories of these new experiences in published essays and personal correspondences. As such, their approach can be described as an outsider’s perspective which creates an incongruity between their idea of ‘localness’ and an inherent exoticising of their subject matter. This point is made more critical when considering Nanyang art’s depiction of Southeast Asia as a tropical paradise in contrast to the wider phenomenon of its decolonisation during the mid-20th century. One commonly articulated criticism of Nanyang artists is how their romantic portrayal of life in Southeast Asia is often delinked from the social and political turbulence of Malayan society then.” (Ong Zhen Min, “Nanyang Reverie,” Siapa Nama Kamu? Art in Singapore Since the 19th Century, 47)

