Georgette Chen: An Uneasy Home in a Circumscribed World

Her indebtedness to Paul Cézanne seems to have lived on beyond an early infatuation, plainly visible in Still Life with Cut Apple and Orange (1928). Chen’s mature compositions, such as Coconuts and Chillies (1973), continue to feature the multi-perspectival space characteristic of the French artist’s still lifes; a basket of chillies, improbably depicted at an angle as if seen from above, echoes a plate of Cézanne’s cherries. The lingering shadow of the French master seems present even in her portraits. Works like Malay Maiden (1961) and Rohani (1963), while perhaps recalling a long European history of academic portraiture, strike such a performative note that one is put in mind, rather, of Cézanne’s paintings of his uncle Dominique Aubert, who posed for him in various costumes, almost in the spirit of a masquerade. So concerned was Chen with the details of her sitters’ traditional outfits that they seem overwhelmed by the visual and cultural freight of what they wear, as if they are simply anatomies on which to hang sartorial signifiers of an essentialized identity.

Therein lies the rub. It is perhaps high time that critical understanding of Georgette Chen accounts for the outsider’s gaze that frames her famous portrayals of everyday life in Singapore, a gaze characterized by its untroubled focus on a narrowly defined sense of Southeast Asian-ness, at a point when the region was experiencing decisive historical change. Born in Zhejiang, China, in 1906, she lived a peripatetic life of both privilege and hardship before her eventual settlement in Singapore in 1953, when she was already well into her forties. It is a biographical fact that she shares with her fellow Nanyang artists, such as Cheong Soo Pieng and Liu Kang. They were likewise born and educated in China, and arrived in Singapore at various times, from the early 1930s to the late ’40s. Credited by art history with synthesizing what would come to be known as the Nanyang style, these artists brought forms of Western avant-garde modernism and Chinese ink techniques to bear on portrayals of their new home in the tropics. As the artist Redza Piyadasa—who, along with pre-eminent Singaporean art historian TK Sabapathy, was responsible for laying the discursive groundwork vis-à-vis the Nanyang school—remarks: “The Nanyang artists were the first to have consciously worked toward the establishment of a distinctive Malayan and even regional identity in art by bringing together multiple influences and approaches through their unique experimentations.”

The present exhibition amply demonstrated that Chen’s version of a Malayan vernacular, not unlike Liu’s depictions of Balinese women or Cheong’s Cubist scenes of kampong life, is a highly circumscribed pictorial construct, the finite parameters of which too often foreground motifs that suggest timeless traditions or essentialized local color. There is little, in Chen’s visual universe, to signal what Singapore was in the decades after the war: a polity struggling to emerge from the ruins, and coming to terms with a new order where the British colonial regime and its imperatives were increasingly fading into the background. (The closest she seemingly came to such an admission, in her typically artful way, are the conspicuous Chinese characters 南洋 [nan yang] on a newspaper in Family Portrait, painted around 1954.) Singapore Waterfront (c. 1963) emphasizes the colonial skyline of downtown Singapore, and old wooden boats docked along the shore; Malay Family (c. 1961) depicts the eponymous subjects in their atap-roofed village home, set against a ubiquitous backdrop of palm trees; the most modern elements in Boats and Old Shophouses (1960) are several parked cars, one of which apparently belonged to the artist.

Reproduced on a wall in the exhibition is a quote from Chen that sums up her feelings about her new environs: “I cannot think of a more ideal place than these peaceful shores for an artist to live and work. He is surrounded by natural scenic beauty with all the typical motifs of our plural society . . .” That assessment seems redolent of desire rather than reality, and nowhere is the gap between the two more apparent than in the case of Satay Boy (1964–65), a work that stands out for the fact that Chen dated it—a rare occurrence. The painting, despite its outdoor setting, was created in her studio, with the artist hiring a carpenter to fabricate the satay stall, and asking friends and neighbors to pose for her. As she wrote to a friend: “The satay man . . . is a most picturesque subject to paint.” It is precisely the performance of picturesqueness, however, that betrays the work. When widespread race riots broke out in late July, 1964, Singapore witnessed some of the most explosive violence to rock its already fraught merger with the Federation of Malaysia. The carnage spread from the civic district to Geylang Serai (and elsewhere), right on the doorstep of the Siglap neighbourhood where Chen lived and worked. For the region, it was a precarious era of decolonization, Communist incursions, and political and communal chaos, but that context is barely evident in the show. It is the knowledge of that historical reality that inflects, or should inflect, how the painting is read today. Given her elevated place in the canon, it no longer seems feasible, with the benefit of hindsight and shifting standards of curatorial practice and scholarship, to take Chen’s output solely at face value.

A more cogent model of critical exhibition-making seems called for here, where appreciation and scrutiny alike are possible. (The Guggenheim Museum’s “Basquiat’s ‘Defacement’: The Untold Story,” with its lateral exploration of historical contexts, provides an apropos example.) The Nanyang school has for too long been emplotted in the history of Singapore’s art as the originary moment of an indigenous, reflexive articulation, but there are other contenders. Just two floors down from “At Home in the World” are the museum’s permanent Singapore galleries, where works of the social realist movement are on display. Artists such as Chua Mia Tee, Tan Tee Chie, and Choo Keng Kwang depicted the nationalist and socialist sentiments that were rife then, particularly among the working classes—an ideological stance that ensured the movement’s sidelining in a staunchly anti-Communist atmosphere after independence. The differences between the Nanyang and social realist persuasions are as much political as they are aesthetic, and the latter artists were certainly just as selective in their choice of subject matter. The fact, however, remains that, at one of the most turbulent and consequential periods in the country’s history, Georgette Chen opted to pay tribute to her adopted home with pictures of tranquil landscapes and staged scenes of satay sellers. These works do not define the entirety of her career, but the NGS exhibition highlighted the pressing need for a critical re-evaluation of her time in Singapore. 

Georgette Chen’s “At Home in the World” is on view at National Gallery Singapore, until September 26, 2021.

To read more of ArtAsiaPacific’s articles, visit our Digital Library.