Nauti

Post-independence Singapore had a defining image, and it was the River.

It appeared on tourism postcards and in travel brochures [1], in the lobbies of new buildings, in oil and Chinese ink and watercolour: bumboats, labourers, godowns, the half-built waterfront behind them. Almost every artist working in Singapore in this period painted it at least once, and many painted it repeatedly, across decades.

The question worth asking is: why this subject in particular?

The river changed in plain view.

The years after independence were full of events. Communities were resettled, housing was rebuilt at scale, industries were established from nothing. Racial violence in 1964 and separation from Malaysia in 1965 sat within the same decade, alongside sustained labour disputes.

The river ran through the middle of it. It was public, central, and it changed visibly and continuously across those years. An artist could stand on the bank and watch it happen. As the waterfront was progressively cleared from the late 1970s, these scenes became records of a place that no longer existed [2].

It was also the most viable subject an artist could choose.

A subject that could be painted openly was also a subject that could be sold, shown and collected. The Singapore Tourism Board built its campaigns around the river [3]; it was one of the few images that carried the country's name abroad. Locally, river scenes were exhibited widely and acquired into the National Collection. Several of the artists most associated with the subject were Cultural Medallion recipients [4].

The point is not that the state commissioned river paintings, or that the Cultural Medallion was awarded for painting them. It is narrower and more mundane: the subject sold, it exhibited, it was collected, and it carried no risk. For a working artist, that is a considerable set of reasons to return to something.

Most artists working then were Nanyang painters, and place was the whole project.

The majority of practising artists in Singapore in this period had arrived from elsewhere, many having left China permanently. The Nanyang style they worked in was concerned with taking hold of a place by painting it: the light, the houses, the trade, the ordinary business of the tropics.

For a group of artists building lives in a country that was still deciding what it was, the river was the place to start. What reads from the outside as an official picture was, up close, something more personal, the parts of a new home worth holding onto.

The River was where all of it converged: the change worth recording, the subject worth selling, the place worth belonging to. Painted often, the river became the image of the country itself.

The other subject that recurs across these decades is the body: nudes, bathers, figure studies, made by many of the same artists who painted the River, in the same years.

So why so little of it in public?

Getting the work made was the first problem.

Figure study is one of the oldest disciplines in painting, the means by which anatomy, proportion, weight and gesture are worked out, and every academic training in the European tradition passes through it. The artists were not reaching for something illicit; they were doing what their training required.

But doing it needs a model, and life models were scarce in Singapore and difficult to engage. Many of these artists had trained in or come from China, where nude modelling had been publicly contested for decades [5] and campaigns to outlaw it carried real force. That history came with them.

The public side was closed off.

The YMCA barred nude works from exhibition in 1952, and public display remained contested for decades after, the objection framed as a rejection of sensual Western influence [6], a concern that ran through the period and touched far more than art.

The subject was never formally banned. It was simply that the institutions had no place for it.

Bali 

Recently out of colonial rule, 1950s Bali arrived with a reputation thirty years in the making. Dutch colonial tourism marketed the island through Europe on the covers of books like L'Île des seins nus, The Island of Bare Breasts. American André Roosevelt named it "the Last Paradise" in 1930 and made a film that started the American travel trade there.

For Singapore, it was a short journey away. Artists went often and stayed long, and the volume of Balinese nudes from these years reflects the time spent there.

Liu Kang travelled in 1952 and wrote about the trip the following year [7]. His account calls the human body the most curvaceous form in nature, describes it as a great pity that Balinese women had begun covering themselves with the sarong, and writes that Balinese passion runs like the volcanoes, deep enough that a man caught in it becomes an obedient slave.

The paintings carry that framing into the composition: the figure observed at a distance, set in tropical scenery, presented as documentation [8].

Read as a record of a place and its people, the work became publishable. But if you ask us, Liu Kang’s essay reads less like ethnographic study than like someone describing something he had been kept from.