SINGAPORE — It was the nice ol’ days — années folles, the “crazy years,” a moveable feast. In good climate, amid the gang of tables on the Dome Cafe or on the streets of Montparnasse, that stomping floor of the College of Paris, one was prone to run into buddies, colleagues, lovers, fashions, enemies — that complete teeming mass of artworld humanity. On the Horde’s Ball, an annual occasion held to lift artists’ funds — and a rattling good social gathering — a determine with a bowl minimize and spherical, black-rimmed glasses, his hand on a flapper’s higher again, meets your gaze for only a second, grinning.
There’s a jolt of familiarity, after which a flood of heat — kinship present in an surprising place. That’s how I felt, a minimum of, after I locked eyes for the briefest second with Foujita Tsuguharu, that zany Japanese-French artist iconic for still-lifes, nudes, and self-portraits that usually function pleasant or inquisitive cats. I checked out him from a celadon-painted room within the Nationwide Gallery of Singapore this previous April; he checked out me from a black and white video filmed a century in the past, projected onto the wall. Such exchanges are simply one of many manifold ways in which Metropolis of Others: Asian Artists in Paris, Twenties–Nineteen Forties transports viewers into interwar Paris, the beating pink coronary heart of the Western artwork world.
Shimizu Toshi, “Paris At Night” (1926), oil on canvas
That coronary heart, it’s essential to notice, would have failed if not for the recent blood consistently pumping into it within the type of international college students, artisans, and emigrés. The College of Paris, which gave us Picasso, Chagall, Modigliani, Mondrian, and numerous others, is now identified to have anchored a golden age of artwork. However within the Nineteen Thirties, these whipped right into a nationalist fervor wielded the time period as a pejorative exactly for its robust affiliation with foreigners. These foreigners weren’t simply Europeans and People, but in addition Asians from all throughout the continent. Artisans from what was then French Indochina have been introduced in to lacquer propellers, prompting modern ornamental and hybrid artwork varieties; dancers from India and Japan honed their craft at in style and experimental venues; college students from throughout entered academies and shaped artist teams, providing their data to the melting pot of Paris earlier than some returned to their homelands, their affect rippling out via historical past.
Although the exhibition focuses on these artists, the title Metropolis of Others doesn’t refer simply to these “othered” in historic Western discourse as a subsection of a metropolis of “insiders.” Quite, it remaps interwar Paris itself — this metropolis with almost a ten% foreign-born inhabitants — as a metropolis of others. This intervention feels notably pressing as I write from New York Metropolis — the present capital of the artwork world — in what a few of us have forgotten has all the time been a rustic of others.
Metropolis of Others is a behemoth of labor: Greater than 220 artworks sourced from 50 lenders, accompanied by greater than 200 items of archival materials, together with images, catalogs, and movies. Given this overwhelming mass of fabric, curators Phoebe Scott, Lisa Horikawa, Teo Hui Min, and Roy Ng have achieved a improbable job making ready an exhibition that successfully imparts common factors to a broad viewers whereas concurrently rewarding viewers who take the time to dig deeper.
Lê Phổ, “Tonkinese Landscape” (c. 1930), lacquer on wooden, 5 hinged panel display; mounted on wood panel with gold leaf design (possible later)
On a structural degree, it does so with clear part titles that group disparate works and ephemera. The primary part, “Workshop to the World,” particulars the affect of ornamental arts and design on the artwork world — Artwork Deco had simply made its manner onto the worldwide stage by way of the 1925 Worldwide Exhibition of Fashionable Ornamental and Industrial Arts in Paris — with lacquer as a specific focus. Certainly, 1 / 4 of the employees from Indochina (present-day Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, then colonized by France) dwelling in Paris within the 1910s lacquered propellers for World Conflict I. The part focuses on artists who collaborated with French designers whereas creating their very own works, equivalent to Sougawara Seizo and Hamanaka Katsu — importantly, this exhibition could be the first time a number of items by the latter are seen collectively, as a lot of his work was misplaced in World Conflict II.
The second part, “Theater of the Colonies,” examines Paris as each the colonial middle of the French empire and a web site of anti-colonial protest — one spotlight right here is the artwork of Nguyễn Ái Quốc, who would turn out to be higher often known as Ho Chi Minh, the insurgent chief of Vietnam. He contributes a collection of anti-imperialism cartoons, together with one wherein a lazing French passenger barks at an Indochinese rickshaw puller, the spokes of the wheel studying “exploitation,” “oppression,” “assimilation,” and extra. The third part, “Spectacle and Stage,” facilities dance: Imported by way of the World and Colonial Expositions, Asian kinds turned in style (often in caricatured kind) in sure venues, together with some the place artists got free rein to innovate new kinds. Subsequent, “Sites of Exhibitions,” traces the locations the place these artists confirmed their work, from salons to museums to industrial galleries, whereas “Studio and Street” delves into their lived expertise, with works depicting studios, streetscapes, and social scenes. It ends with “Aftermaths,” wherein the artwork world grappled with the trauma of struggle, and Paris progressively misplaced its title because the capital of the artwork world.
Left: Mai Trung Thứ, “Self Portrait with Cigarette” (1940); proper: Mai Trung Thứ, “Self-Portrait with Glasses” (c. 1950), oil on canvas
Metropolis of Others additionally creates order out of such an advanced historical past by emphasizing networks, equivalent to artist societies grouped by nationality. And it seeds reoccurring characters all through: Just a few protagonists pop up all through the present like outdated buddies, amongst them Foujita, Georgette Chen, Liu Kang, and Lê Phổ. Mai Trung Thứ’s “Self Portrait with Cigarette” (1940), for example, wherein he arcs his eyebrow coyly, fancying himself a dandy, seems at the beginning of the present; one other self-portrait with a cigarette from round a decade later sees him wizened, wanting off into the space nearly wistfully relatively than assembly the viewer’s gaze. (Mai would later additionally file Ho Chi Minh’s go to to France.)
And Xu Beihong, identified immediately as one of many 4 pioneers of Chinese language artwork however then as “Ju Péon,” a 20-something-year-old scholarship pupil, seems in {a photograph} on the very starting of the exhibition, posing within the courtyard of the Nationwide College of Wonderful Arts. Halfway via, he reappears, at age 30, within the type of a realist portray he made from his spouse, Jiang Biwei, from 1925, who wears a European-style Twenties-era day gown. Once more we see him, seven years later, represented by an ink piece that appears fairly much like a basic Chinese language ink portray to my eye. Such a development signifies that this was not a matter of an Asian artist subsuming European options into his artwork throughout time, however relatively the nonlinear story of an artist combining all types of influences to forge a singular profession.
Nonetheless, many of those artists don’t take pleasure in a transparent trajectory, as their names or work have been misplaced for myriad causes, together with journey, struggle, or historic accident. The present marks these historic lacunae, and so they land with a way of actual loss. The names of Vietnamese artisans listed on a wall label, for instance, are identified solely as a result of the French authorities saved espionage recordsdata on them.
Set up view of Metropolis of Others, that includes a copy of a 1933 archival {photograph} of holiday makers to the Exhibition of Chinese language Portray at Musée du Jeu de Paume and a vitrine containing a catalog signed by Xu Beihong
Modern curatorial interventions additionally pull the viewer into the historic interval with out cheapening the archival supplies, enlivening what might be a concurrently dry and overwhelming expertise into one thing extra felt. For example, a 1933 archival {photograph} of holiday makers to the Exhibition of Chinese language Portray at Musée du Jeu de Paume, an establishment that exhibited and picked up artwork from international colleges, is blown as much as larger than life-sized. Within the unique {photograph}, two Asian girls in qipaos gaze down at artworks housed in a vitrine. Right here, a real-life vitrine takes its place, which incorporates an unique catalog for that very exhibition, with a handwritten word by Xu.
Metropolis of Others attracts out the anticipated path of affect, demonstrating how French tradition permeated the work of those artists. Foujita, for example, nearly solely painted nudes of White girls as a result of he felt it was a strictly European custom, in keeping with the wall textual content. The pale-toned oil-on-canvas portray “Reclining Nude” (1931) borrows the determine’s dramatic, swept-over pose from Henry Fuseli’s “The Nightmare” (1781), however Foujita’s linework is distinctly calligraphic. Utilizing a particularly exact brush loaded with sumi ink, he rigorously renders every line of her twisted physique in addition to every fold of the crumpled cloth beneath her; look intently, and also you’ll see how the oil pulled away from the water-based ink to create these odd white haloes round every line. And the Japanese painter Sakata Kazuo cast a powerful bond together with his instructor Fernand Léger, and was influenced by his fashion — each of their work are daring, vivid, and inflected by cubism. Importantly, nonetheless, this affect didn’t all the time take the type of an artist borrowing components from European traditions: Wifredo Lam encountered the primitivism of Picasso in Paris and declared, “It irritated me that in Paris African masks and idols were sold like jewelry”; he would go on to reclaim and re-embed Afro-Caribbean and diasporic traditions throughout the visible language of Modernist artwork.
Foujita Tsuguhara, “Reclining Nude” (1931), oil on canvas
Certainly, the exhibition is especially skillful in teasing out the tangled, relatively than unidirectional, paths of affect dispersed all through these creative legacies as time handed, artists moved, borders shifted, and tastes modified. It underscores the dearth of a transparent middle and periphery: On the time, for example, Japan had annexed each Taiwan and Korea, and artists from all three nations blended in Paris. And Xu, who additionally moved to Tokyo to review artwork, would come to Singapore to arrange a Chinese language portray society, the place he would increase cash for the nation’s struggle towards Japan, which he had known as residence mere a long time earlier.
Elsewhere, it exhibits how artists self-othered by taking a look at themselves via the European gaze — and generally discovered themselves within the course of. Indian painter Umrao Singh Sher-Gil Majithia evidences his self-fashioning by dressing himself in varied guises — in a single work, he wears only a loincloth; in one other, he holds a guide and spectacles in his lap. “Our long stay in Europe has aided me to discover, as it were, India,” his daughter, the Hungarian-Indian painter Amrita Sher-Gil wrote, as quoted within the exhibition textual content. “It seems paradoxical but I know for certain that had we not come away to Europe I should perhaps never have realised that a fresco from Ajanta or a small piece of sculpture in the Musée Guimet is worth more than the whole Renaissance!”
Left: Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, “Amrita Sher-Gil Looking into the Mirror, Simla, India” (c. 1932); proper: Self-portrait by Umrao Singh Sher-Gil
Certainly one of my favourite examples of the ways in which affect is misdirected or difficult is an anecdote the wall texts relay about Vietnamese painter Nguyễn Phan Chánh, who contributes a number of the most stunning works on this present, which is saying lots. He painted on silk — historically a Chinese language medium, however one which he felt represented the Vietnamese character. In a letter, the director of the Indochina Financial Company gently advised that his work can be “much more appreciated by the French public if they were a bit less monotonous in tone.” Satirically, the reverse was possible true, if his important reception was any indication. After the turmoil of World Conflict I, nostalgia for the realism, steadiness, and concord of the Greco-Roman custom animated the Paris artwork world by way of the “rappel à l’ordre” or “return to order” motion, aligning together with his and sure different Asian artists’ serene figurative strategy.
As an entire, the exhibition upends the standard methods we take into consideration historical past, affect, and progress. It asserts that France, an energetic imperial energy, may commit atrocities overseas on the similar time that the French state was buying works by artists from these areas, suggesting the price of the very tradition it was destroying. It crucially emphasizes that imperialism was deeply contested by many throughout the imperial core — I used to be struck particularly by the outline contemporaneous artwork historian Jeannine Auboyer utilized to painter Vũ Cao Đàm as being “lost in the Parisian jungle,” casting the French metropolis in a time period typically used to savage Southeast Asia. A small part can be devoted to the Surrealists, together with André Breton, who known as for a boycott of the Exposition Coloniale, which showcased the “civilizing mission” of the French empire. They launched a counter-exhibition known as The Fact Concerning the Colonies. Roughly 8 million guests attended the previous; just a bit over 4,000 visited the latter. But it surely occurred, and that issues. It’s proof of refusal from throughout the coronary heart of the artwork world, an archival proven fact that resists erasure. And sometime, historical past will inform of immediately’s battle for justice — in addition to those that have been complacent, or complicit, or culpable — simply as starkly.
This era has taken on a sure nostalgic sheen, as the ultimate hurrah of an artwork world that fell from grace. The exhibition’s closing part, “Aftermaths,” tells of this artwork world’s downfall by way of the rise of fascism, outbreak of struggle, and dissipation of the worldwide creative ferment below the burden of nationalist violence. It’s a sobering finish, a reminder that vibrant, pluralistic creative communities are fragile. Metropolis of Others recovers a largely misplaced chapter of artwork historical past, nevertheless it additionally asks us to contemplate the threatened circumstances of our current. The greatness of interwar Paris lay in its otherness; ours would possibly too.
Itakulla Kanae, “Portrait of an Artist” (1928), oil on canvas
Itakulla Sumiko, “Afternoon, Belle Honolulu 12” (c. 1927–28), oil on canvas
Lê Văn Đệ, “The Family Interior in Tonkin” (1933), oil on canvas
Left: members of the Affiliation of Chinese language Artists in France who have been schoolmates on the Nationwide College of Wonderful Arts, Paris; proper: Georgette Chen, “Self-Portrait” (c. 1934), oil on canvas
Xu Beihong, “Trees and Personage” (1932), ink and colour on paper
Left: Foujita Tsuguharu, “Self-Portrait with Cat” (1926), oil on canvas; proper: Sakata Kazuo, “Composition” (c. 1926), oil on canvas
Nguyễn Ái Quốc, “Cartoon of a Rickshaw Puller” (1922/2025)
Metropolis of Others: Asian Artists in Paris, Twenties-Nineteen Forties continues on the Nationwide Gallery Singapore (1 Saint Andrew’s Highway, Singapore) via August 17. The exhibition was curated by Phoebe Scott, Lisa Horikawa, Teo Hui Min, and Roy Ng.
Editor’s word: The author’s journey and accomodations have been paid for by the Nationwide Gallery Singapore.
