22 23 (1) When Was Modernism? A Historiography of Singapore Art Kevin Chua It may not surprise anyone to know that art his- tory, at least in Singapore, had neither a birth, nor really an afterlife. 1 Its current incarnation has been chastened by easier, more accessible forms of art writing, whether the journalism that passes for art criticism, or the occasional screeds that pop up on social media—catchy, but quickly forgotten. Art writing in Singapore is often couched in the language of boosterism. One hears talk about the country “developing” in art: having more exhibitions, more spaces to display art, more hot young artists. Cue the next media dar- ling! Dollar figures are trotted out to justify the latest buying spree, as though market valuation were the only determinant of good art. Watch this brushstroke turn into that price point. Let me be clear that I have little confi- dence that art history can write against such idle chatter. But in order for the discipline as it exists in Singapore to mean something, to matter, it needs to undergo rigorous self- examination: What are its goals? What are “our” key texts? 2 What constitutes the real work of art history? No doubt securing a work of art’s production and reception, as well as uncover- ing new objects and material evidence, should still be a fundamental task of art history. But I don’t think this is enough. Most art histories in Singapore tend to what I would call “his- toricist culturologies”: simple iconographical and sociocultural unravellings of a work of art within a given place and time. Yet these rarely attain what Erwin Panofsky once called “ico- nology”: a total understanding of a work of art in its context, including an unpacking of the cultural or collective unconscious triggered by the work. 3 Art-historical writing often pays insufficient attention to form; works of art are too quickly explained—or worse, decoded. A familiar assumption is the complete translat- ability of image to word. Art historians and critics often struggle to catch up to what many artists already know: that investing in form in- troduces a time depth into the work, and can secure a work’s passage through historical time. What follows is a selective history of art- historical writing in Singapore—a historiogra- phy—via three broad periods. 4 Each poses the enduring question of modernism. If spatially situating modernism in Singapore entails as- sessing it within its regional context of South- east Asia (or Asia), equally important is a con- sideration of temporality: How did modernism emerge out of a long span of historical time? (Modernism is treated here as both an effect of modernity, and a cultural response to it.) The challenge, as I see it, is not so much to move from national to regional-global accounts, but to decentre the national within the regional- global. Taking into account a spatially enclosing “what,” I will simultaneously try to grasp mod- ernism’s time-trickling “when” (my title echoes Geeta Kapur, but also Raymond Williams). 5 The 1300s–1890s, 1920s–1960s and 1970s– 2000s were, as we shall see, three moments of modernism in Singapore: three moments in the defeat of labour and the rise of capital. 1) 1300s to 1890s 6 National Museum of Singapore curator Wong Hong Suen’s chapter “Picturing a Colonial Port City: Prints and Paintings as Visual Records of 19 th Century Singapore,” in the book Singa- pore through 19 th Century Prints and Paintings, published in 2010, is a recent treatment of 19 th - century art in Singapore. 7 An example of strong, rigorous scholarship, the essay is well-researched, and thorough with regard to the existing histori- ography on 19 th -century landscape painting. These prints, produced by British and Eu- ropean artists travelling in the Malayan region and intended for consumption back home in Europe, employed the representational genre of the picturesque. While Wong is familiar with the critique of the picturesque—indeed, many of her discussions of particular prints are informed by that critique—more could have been made of why the picturesque was cri- tiqued in the first place, as ideology, by Marxist historians and art historians such as Raymond Williams, John Barrell, David Solkin and Ann Bermingham in the 1970s and 1980s. 8 In its 1 Or maybe it was stillborn: while T.K. Sabapathy has written about the history of the discipline of art his- tory in Singapore in the 1960s and 1970s (in Road to Nowhere: The Quick Rise and the Long Fall of Art History in Singapore (Singapore: Art Gallery, National Institute of Education, 2010)), one wonders whether such mourning is really melancholia (in Freud’s sense), and productive for the future of art history in Singapore. 2 While C.J.W.-L. Wee’s bibliographic list (“Shortlist: Sin- gapore,” for the Asia Art Archive, available at: http:// www.aaa.org.hk/Collection/Shortlists) is capacious and rigorous, one cannot tell the art-historical stakes. 3 Whitney Davis, “Visuality and Pictoriality,” RES: An- thropology and Aesthetics no. 46 (Autumn 2004): 9–34; Jas Elsner & Katharina Lorenz, “The Genesis of Iconol- ogy,” Critical Inquiry 38, no. 3 (Spring 2012): 483–512. 4 My essay is indebted to Nora A. Taylor, “Writing Con- temporary Southeast Asian Art History,” in South- east Asian Studies: Pacific Perspectives, ed. Anthony Reid (Tempe, Arizona: Program for Southeast Asian Studies Monograph Series, Arizona State Univer- sity, 2003), 179–92; Nora A. Taylor, “Introduction: Who Speaks for Southeast Asian Art?,” in Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art: An Anthology, eds. Nora A. Taylor & Boreth Ly (Ithaca Southeast Asia Program Publications, Cornell University, 2012), 1–13. 5 Geeta Kapur, “When Was Modernism in Indian Art?,” in When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (New Delhi: Tulika, 2000), 295–324; Raymond Williams, “When Was Modern- ism?,” New Left Review I, no. 175 (May/June 1989): 48–52. More than simply saying that modernity was “incomplete,” Kapur plumbs the specific uptake of modernism in India. 6 On my use of the “1300s” as a period starting point, see Leonard Y. Andaya & Barbara Watson Andaya, “Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Period; Twenty- Five Years on,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 26, no. 1 (1995): 92–8. I am using this “early modern” periodisation to decentre the conventional privileging of the 19 th century in the (art) histories of Singapore. Though no art-historical writing exists for this 1300s– 1890s period, one might juxtapose artworks with vari- ous forms of indigenous writing, such as inscriptions, stories, myths, and in the 19 th century, European travel writing. The intra-regional artistic networks that Nora A. Taylor discusses (in “Art without History? Southeast Asian Artists and their Communities in the Face of Geography,” Art Journal 70, no. 2 (2011): 6–23) hark back, I think, to this early modern period in Southeast Asia. European colonialism, in other words, tended to disenable these intra-regional networks. 7 Wong Hong Suen, “Picturing a Colonial Port City: Prints and Paintings as Visual Records of 19 th Century Singapore,” in Singapore through 19 th Century Prints & Paintings (Singapore: Editions Didier Millet & National Museum of Singapore, 2010), 30–53. 8 Wong, ibid., 32. When Was Modernism? Charting Thoughts