What is Modernism and why is National Gallery Singapore reframing it?

Baffled, yes.

The Manila art scene during the Roaring Twenties couldn’t make heads or tails of Victorio Edades’ 1928 painting of men lost in rough, unlovely labor. 

Curator Lisa Horikawa says that when Edades (considered by art critic Trickie Lopa as the “original bad boy of Philippine Art”) returned from his studies in Seattle, he mounted a homecoming exhibition and “The Builders” was the central work. She explains, “It was so different from the prevalent forms of art that were popular in the Philippines at that time — idealized pictures of landscapes or sceneries of coquettish Filipino maidens.” The Amorsoloesque ideal held court at that time and deviation was to court scandal. 

Horikawa adds, “Edades’ exhibition was received coldly. But it created a huge shock in the local art circle, and later on the artist began a modern art movement of sorts, which was rooted in local concerns and innovation of forms.”

To say that “The Builders” had a long-lasting impact is an understatement. In an exhibition which is ongoing until July 17 at the National Gallery Singapore, Edades’ seminal painting (on loan from the Cultural Center of the Philippines) — alongside works by other forward-thinking Filipino artists such as Fernando Zobel, Galo Ocampo, Anita Magsaysay Ho and HR Ocampo, as well as Singapore’s Georgette Chen and Indonesia’s Affandi, among others — is showcased together with masterpieces by European big shots such as Picasso, Matisse, Chagall and Kandinsky. 

Modernism as an art philosophy or movement used to be a club of exclusivity: you would see Matisse sitting by a table of flattened vases in fauvist red, a yellow cat filching for goldfish in a corner; Picasso surveying the Cubist women who have strolled into the parlor like angular sirens; Chagall debating colors with Kandinsky or some other dude; that prankster Dubuffet muddying up the walls with cartoonish crazies.         

Throughout the decades, there has been a rethink of Modernism’s own origin story with a heavy Eurocentric narrative, one that reads marvelously in art books. Now, the Modernist paradigm is ripe for another reexamination from the perspective of our neck of the woods.

 In “Reframing Modernism” — National Gallery Singapore’s first international special exhibition, which is co-curated and co-presented with Centre Pompidou, Paris, and is the inaugural show at the Singtel Special Exhibitions Gallery — works by significant Southeast Asian artists are shown side by side with the works of European artists.

“This is the first time in Singapore that visitors can view artworks from European and Southeast Asian masters in the same space,” explains Dr. Eugene Tan, the director of National Gallery Singapore. “We hope that the exhibition will inspire fresh and interesting perspectives of the received understanding of Modernism and modern art. Along with the gallery’s long-term exhibitions, ‘Reframing Modernism’ will reinforce our aim to further the understanding of modern art from Singapore and Southeast Asia within a global context.”

Thus, visitors will see a Chagall together with a Botong, an Affandi as well as Vicente Do Rego Monteiro’s “The Hunt” in one gallery; in another, a couple of HR Ocampo paintings are hung with some vintage Vassily Kandinsky and George Braque; meanwhile, a Picasso, a Jean Dubuffet, a Tang Chang (a monolithic self-portrait) and a couple of Zobel works occupy a third space.

Modernism grew when artists and philosophers started coming up with new ideas and new forms to reflect and represent what the hell was happening in their surroundings. A lot of shit was going down in the late 19th and early 20th century as brought about by socio-political forces (French Revolution, Industrial Revolution, etc.), leaving the latter-day Modernists or  “inmates” such as Nietzsche and Beckett or Stockhausen and Ezra Pound “running the asylum” (to steal a line from those Arkham X-Box games.)

“It was a celebration of the new and rejection of the old,” Tan explains. “So why are we now reframing Modernism? The story of Modernism has often been told as one that started in Europe and then spread to other parts of the world. But this is not a complete story. Because modernization happened all over the world. Modernity was something that every country in the world experienced.”

As such, the aim of “Reframing Modernism” is to examine how artists in Southeast Asia have responded to these conditions of Modernity, thinking of how to represent these changes, thinking about the role of art in modern society.

“It took two years to develop this exhibition,” Tan shares. The exhibition features more than 200 works by 50 artists, with approximately half from Centre Pompidou and the other half from Southeast Asia.  

“By drawing artists from different regions in the same exhibition, the goal was to unsettle some of the assumptions of the history of Modernism.” Thus, as visitors go through the three galleries hosting “Reframing Modernism,” they will have an idea as to how the practice of one artist relates to another — in terms of stylistic and conceptual concerns.

Interesting how the curators discuss some of the works in terms of their preoccupation with systems of colors and perception — so very modernist.

Curator Phoebe Snow points to a 1946 HR Ocampo painting and explains, “Like many of his contemporaries, HR Ocampo was concerned with representing the devastation of Post-World War II Manila. But with this work called ‘The Beggar,’ the artist was less preoccupied with the social subject matter, but much more with a formal concern of reducing the city into blocks of color. An arrangement of colors into interlocking shapes.” 

According to the curators of “Reframing Modernism,” HR Ocampo and Victorio Edades other artists in Southeast Asia were already exploring modernist notions of art-making — even if the ones being feted as rock stars were in Paris at that time, defining a movement, creating art history.

“Thus, by breaking down this hierarchy of temporalities, we are able to understand that there are ‘modernities’ outside of European modernity,” concludes Eugene Tan.

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“Reframing Modernism” is on view until July 17 at the Singtel Special Exhibitions Gallery, National Gallery Singapore. For information, email info@nationalgallery.com.sg.