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Body and Communication: The ‘Ordinary’ Art of Tang Da Wu1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2018

C. J. W.-L. WEE
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Abstract

What might the contemporary performing body look like when it seeks to communicate and to cultivate the need to live well within the natural environment, whether the context of that living well is framed and set upon either by long-standing cultural traditions or by diverse modernizing forces over time? The Singapore performance and visual artist Tang Da Wu has engaged with a present and a region fractured by the predations of unacceptable cultural norms – the consequences of colonial modernity or the modern nation state taking on imperial pretensions – and the subsumption of Singapore society under capitalist modernization. Tang's performing body both refuses the diminution of time to the present, as is the wont of the forces he engages with, and undertakes interventions by sometimes elusive and ironic means – unlike some overdetermined contemporary performance art – that reject the image of the modernist ‘artist as hero’. Part of the cause for this distinctive art committed to historicity and a deliberate ordinariness is that artistic communication to him means provoking self-reflexive thought rather than immediate action. Over the years this has resulted in collaborative artistic workshops, in which he has imaginatively transferred art making from his body to the realm of ordinary people. These workshops become his particular extension of the neo-avant-garde's breaching of art's infrastructures.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 42 , Issue 3 , October 2017 , pp. 286 - 306
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2018 

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Footnotes

1

Thanks go to Koh Nguang How, for access to his personal archive, and to the former director of the Singapore Art Museum, Kwok Kian Chow, and staff members, for access to the museum's collection and library, and to the Kuroda Raiji and the staff of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum. Thanks also to Tang Da Wu, the Artists Village for providing documentation, Paul Rae, Lee Wen, T. K. Sabapathy, Ray Langenbach, Lee Weng Choy, Amanda Heng, Vincent Leow, T. Sasitharan, Cheo Chai Hiang, Cecily Cheo, Lucy Davis, Zai Kuning, Iftikhar Dadi, Salah Hassan and Lisa Horikawa.

References

NOTES

2 Photocopy of postcard advertising Tang Da Wu: Home Documentation, Art Base Gallery, Shenton Way, Singapore, 17 February–12 March 1989, reproduced in a set of archival materials put together by the Artists Village, 1 December 1999.

3 Cf. Chua Huat, Beng, Liberalism Disavowed: Communitarianism and State Capitalism in Singapore (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017)Google Scholar; and Wee, C. J. W.-L., The Asian Modern: Culture, Capitalist Development, Singapore (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 The daily ceased publication in Singapore in March 1983 and was then merged with Nanyang Siang Pau to become the present Lianhe Zaobao. However, a Malaysian variant of Sin Chew Jit Poh, still exists.

5 Examples for festival participation are First Move (1983, Alternativa III – Festival Internacional de Arte Viva, Almada, Portugal); In Between and Change (1983, 4th Performance Platform, Nottingham, England); and You're Welcomed and The Door – the Birth (1984, 2nd International Festival of Performance, Bracknell, England); for solo performances: Steaming Laundry (1985, Brixton Art Gallery, London), and No Fancy Brushes (1986, Royal Festival Hall, London).

6 Information on Tang is drawn from Quek, Bruce, ‘Tang Da Wu’, Singapore Infopedia (Singapore: National Library Board, 2009)Google Scholar, at http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/infopedia/articles/SIP_1541_2009-10-29.html, accessed 21 June 2017; and Toh, Charmaine, ed., Tang Da Wu: Earth Work 1979, exhibition catalogue (Singapore: National Gallery Singapore, 2016).Google Scholar

7 Many younger artists connected with the Village are now among the city state's leading performance and visual-arts practitioners. The Singapore Art Museum has recognized the work of a number of these artists; see, for example, Singapore Art Museum, Amanda Heng: Speak to Me, Walk with Me, exhibition catalogue (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 2011); and Singapore Art Museum, Lee Wen: Lucid Dreams in the Reverie of the Real, exhibition catalogue (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 2012). For more on the Artists Village see Museum of Contemporary Art, Situation: Collaborations, Collectives and Artist Networks from Sydney, Singapore, Berlin, ed. Russell Storer, exhibition catalogue (Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2005); and Lenzi, Iola, ‘The Artists Village and the Birth of Contemporary Art in Singapore: Koh Nguang How in Conversation with Iola Lenzi’, in Lenzi, Iola, ed., Concept, Context, Contestation: Art and the Collective in Southeast Asia, exhibition catalogue (Bangkok: Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, 2014), pp. 190–4.Google Scholar

8 See Sheares, Constance, ‘Contemporary Art in Singapore: Where East Meets West’, in Sheares, Constance, ed., Contemporary Art in Singapore: Where East Meets West, exhibition catalogue (Singapore: National Museum, 1989).Google Scholar

9 We can take as indicative a recent (and seemingly not ironic) headline regarding the Spanish performance artist Abel Azcona: ‘Heroic Artist Gets “Make America Great Again” Tattooed Around His Anus (NSFW)’, HuffPost, 16 March 2017, at www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/make-america-great-again-anus-tattoo_us_58cac967e4b0ec9d29d9bba0, accessed 25 August 2017.

10 Foster, Hal, ‘What's Neo about the Neo-Avant-Garde?’, October, 70, 1 (Autumn 1994), pp. 5–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Jameson, Fredric, ‘The Aesthetics of Singularity’, New Left Review, 92 (March–April 2015), pp. 101–32, here pp. 105–6Google Scholar.

12 Jameson, Fredric, ‘The End of Temporality’, Critical Inquiry, 29, 4 (Summer 2003), pp. 695–718, here p. 712.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 Ibid., p. 713.

14 Mashadi, Ahmad, ‘Tang Dawu’, in Bijutsukan, Fukuoka Ajia, The 1st Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale 1999: The 5th Asian Art Show: The Commemorative Exhibition of the Inauguration of Fukuoka Asian Art Museum/Dai 1-kai Fukuoka Ajia bijutsu toriennāre 1999: Dai 5-kai Ajia bijutsuten: Fukuoka Ajia Bijutsukan kaikan kinenten, exhibition catalogue (Fukuoka: Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, 2000), p. 184.Google Scholar

15 Belting, Hans, Art History after Modernism, trans. Saltzwedel, Caroline and Cohen, Mitch, with Northcott, Kenneth (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 6 Google Scholar; earlier, Belting notes, ‘Modernism thrived on the contradiction between these two models, the one turned toward the future and the other toward tradition, and thus found a necessary resistance against its own utopias’ (p. 5).

16 Ahmad, ‘Tang Dawu’, p. 184.

17 Fukuyama, Cf. Francis, ‘The End of History?’, National Interest, 16 (Summer 1989), pp. 1–18 Google Scholar. With the firm global emergence of China after the Asian financial crisis of 1997, and with the 2008 financial crisis, it is much less clear what the current contemporary moment represents – we are not living in a world that is posthistoire.

18 Poshyananda, Apinan, ‘“Con Art” Seen from the Edge: The Meaning of Conceptual Art in South and Southeast Asia’, in Mariani, Philomena, ed., Global Conceptualisms: Points of Origins, 1950s–1980s, exhibition catalogue (Queens, NY: Queens Museum of Art, 1999), pp. 143–8, here pp. 143, 147.Google Scholar

19 Chai-Hiang, Cheo, ‘“Current Issues” in Singaporean Art’, Artlink, 13, 3–4 (November–March 1993–4), p. 124.Google Scholar Cheo is referring to Joseph Beuys (1921–86) and Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968).

20 Masahiro, Ushiroshōji, ‘The Asia Section of the 3rd Kwangju Biennale and Asian Art Today’, in Arata, Tani and Yūzō, Ueda, eds., Invisible Boundary: Metamorphosed Asian Art. Traveling Exhibition: Asian Section of Kwangju Biennale 2000, exhibition catalogue (Utsunomiya: Utsunomiya Museum of Art, 2000), pp. 147–9, here p. 148.Google Scholar The ‘basic conventions of Asian modern art’ referred to are those that expressed ‘an aesthetic sense unique to their own cultural traditions while at the same time using a universal art language that could be internationally absorbed’ such as Japanese mono-ha and Korean monochromism.

21 Ibid.

22 World Bank, The East Asian Miracle: Economic Growth and Public Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). See Yew, Lee Kuan, From Third World to First: Singapore and the Asian Economic Boom (New York: Harper Perennial, 2013)Google Scholar. Lee (1923–2015) was the first post-independence prime minster of Singapore.

23 Jameson, Fredric, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002), p. 104 Google Scholar. For an expansion of my argument, see Wee, C. J. W.-L., ‘The Singapore Contemporary and Contemporary Art in Singapore’, in Wee, Low Sze and Flores, Patrick D., eds., Charting Thoughts: Essays on Art in Southeast Asia (Singapore: National Gallery Singapore, 2017).Google Scholar Japan is perhaps the major exception to the periodization offered, given their early manifestation of contemporary art; see Tomii, Reiko, Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016).Google Scholar

24 Tang Da Wu, ‘Life in a Tin’, photocopy of undated handwritten artist statement, p. 2 (library of the Singapore Art Museum).

25 Sabapathy, T. K., ‘ Trimurti: Contemporary Art in Singapore’, Art and Asia Pacific, 2 (June 1993), pp. 52–7, here p. 55.Google Scholar Japanese curator Suzuki Etsuko reiterates Sabapathy's position: ‘The art scene of Singapore has rushed into the realm of contemporary art at the end of the ’80s. As a matter of fact, [the] younger generation has begun to make their works in international styles without sticking to their ethnic tradition[s]’. Etsuko, Suzuki, ‘Between Ethnic Culture and Intimidated Culture’, in Tang Da Wu: Asian Artist Today – Fukuoka Annual V, exhibition catalogue (Fukuoka: Fukuoka Art Museum, 1991), pp. 7–9, here p. 9Google Scholar). On development and social engineering see PuruShotam, Nirmala Srirekam, Negotiating Language, Constructing Race: Disciplining Difference in Singapore (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Mahizhnan, Arun and Yuan, Lee Tsao, eds., Singapore: Re-engineering Success (Singapore: Institute of Policy Studies and Oxford University Press, 1998).Google Scholar

26 This rethinking was also necessary, from Cheo Chai Hiang's perspective in the early 1990s, because the modern art that preceded Tang faced unsurmountable challenges. The first was that ‘the highly accomplished work produced in the 1950s by a number of [Chinese-educated] younger painters and printmakers . . . were politically left-wing and actively involved in the anti-colonial movement. Predictably, the work of these artists was not well-documented and therefore not truly acknowledged [in the capitalist Singapore that emerged after independence from Malaysia in 1965]’; the second was that the works of artists linked to the Singapore Modern Art Society in the 1960s were products of the Chinese-language Nanyang University, shut down in 1981; and within an increasingly English-language dominated society, ‘their voices were again confined to a Chinese-educated audience’. The critical strategies that Tang and the Artists Village took had to be different if ‘they were to survive and operate successfully as practising artists in Singapore’. Cheo, ‘“Current Issues” in Singaporean Art’, p. 124.

27 The NMAG, which was opened in 1976, has since become absorbed into the National Museum of Singapore.

28 Ang Mo Kio was developed in 1973 by the state's Housing and Development Board (HDB) as their seventh satellite town. ‘Ang Mo Kio’, Singapore Infopedia (Singapore: National Library Board, 2009), at http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/infopedia/articles/SIP_230_2005-01-25.html, accessed 27 June 2017.

29 Presumably a reference to the Tao Te Ching (or Daodejing). This is a fundamental text for both philosophical and religious Taoism.

30 Tang Da Wu, letter to the director, Ministry of Culture, 27 March 1980 (letter on display, Earth Work 1979, National Gallery Singapore, 22 January–29 May 2016). Unfortunately, the film that resulted was lost. Curator Charmaine Toh suggests that ‘Earthdance is possibly the earliest example of video art in Singapore. [The film's significance lies in that r]ather than simply using the camera to document, Tang was clearly conscious [in his account to her] of the medium itself, taking it into account in the creation of work. Using the camera's viewfinder, Tang marked out the trapezoid area of the field framed by the camera. He then filmed himself repeatedly running along the edge of the marked-out area, creating a furrow in the earth’. Toh, Charmaine, ‘Notes on Tang Da Wu's Earth Work ’, in Toh, ed., Earth Work 1979: Tang Da Wu, exhibition catalogue (Singapore: National Gallery Singapore, 2016), pp. 12–13 Google Scholar.

31 Cited in Kwan Zi, ‘Art for Learning More than Appreciation’, Straits Times (Singapore), 9 April 1980, Section Two.

32 Toh, ‘Notes on Tang Da Wu's Earth Work’, p. 13.

33 Ibid.

34 Tang Da Wu, interview with the author, 14 June 2000.

35 Baumbach, Nico, Young, Damon R. and Yu, Genevieve, ‘Revisiting Postmodernism: An Interview with Fredric Jameson’, Social Text, 34, 2 (June 2016), pp. 143–60, here p. 144.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

36 Tang Da Wu, interview with the author, 14 June 2000.

37 LaSalle College of Art is now LaSalle College of the Arts. Cited in Lee Wen, ‘Interview with Tang Da Wu, Your Mother Gallery, Singapore, 6 Nov. 2005’, in programme for The Future of Imagination 3: International Performance Art Event, [Singapore,] 10–14 April 2006, p. 12. Lee Wen's artistic practice, as is the case with many of the artists associated with the Village, has ranged across a number of genres or forms.

38 Ibid., p. 13.

39 Ibid.

40 Hannah Abdullah, ‘Kiefer and Beuys: Cathexis and Cartharsis’, in Christian Weikop, ed., In Focus: Heroic Symbols 1969 by Anselm Kiefer, Tate Research Publication, 2016, at www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/in-focus/heroic-symbols-anselm-kiefer/kiefer-and-beuys, accessed 27 August 2017.

41 Apinan, ‘Con Art’, p. 143.

42 Da-Wu, Tang, ‘Message’, in Fukuoka Art Museum, Asian Artist Today – Fukuoka Annual V: Tang Da-Wu, exhibition catalogue (Fukuoka: Fukuoka Art Museum), p. 3.Google Scholar

43 Ibid.

44 T. Sasitharan, ‘Grim Tale of the Hornless Rhino’, review of They Poach the Rhino, Chop Off His Horn and Make This Drink by Tang Da Wu, National Museum Art Gallery, Straits Times, 15 May 1989. All subsequent quotations that follow are from this account. Sasitharan is currently the director of the Intercultural Theatre Institute, Singapore, formerly known as the Theatre Training and Research Programme.

45 Singapore is a multiracial society, with a dominant Chinese population, and Sasitharan is here drawing a distinction between we the entire audience and the section of it that is Chinese-Singaporean.

46 Tang has said, ‘Yes, all thinking, all planning, they are not a performance yet, until you [have] reached your audience. There is a very special kind of energy coming from the audience. Your performance comes alive and reaching its highest point’. John Low, ‘Performance Art Project: Interview with Tang Da Wu on March 24, 2001’, in The Substation, Open Ends: A Documentation Exhibition of Performance Art in Singapore at The Substation's Septfest, 7–21 September 2001, exhibition catalogue (Singapore: The Substation, 2001), n.p.

47 Performances also took place at Park Road in Chinatown and at the Marina Square shopping complex. Keong Siak Street has since become a significantly gentrified urban zone.

48 Low, ‘Performance Art Project’, n.p.

49 Scarlett, Ken, ‘The Shock of the Unexpected: Innovation in Singapore’, Art Monthly Australia, 55 (Nov. 1992), pp. 10–11, here p. 10.Google Scholar

50 Tang, ‘Message’, p. 3.

51 Low, ‘Performance Art Project’, n.p.

52 Davis, Lucy, ‘Processing Raw Material’, Arts Magazine (Singapore), September–October 1999, pp. 34–6, here p. 35.Google Scholar Or, as curator Tani Arata suggested in 2000, Tang ‘is forming a new type of art based on communication. His expression is the grass roots style never insisting [on] ideology, nor thesis but making much of free general communication ultimately reduced to individuals (between [the] artist and the participant)’ (‘Invisible Boundary: Metamorphosed Asian Art’, in Tani Arata and Ueda Yūzo, eds., Invisible Boundary: Metamorphosed Asian Art. Traveling Exhibition: Asian Section of the Kwangju Biennale 2000, exhibition catalogue [Utsunomiya: Utsunomiya Museum of Art, 2000], pp. 144–6, here p. 144).

53 Tang Da Wu, ‘Fast Moving Asian Contemporary Art: “Tang Da Wu and His Works”’, in Lecture Archives: The Fukuoka Asian Culture Series, The 10th Fukuoka Asian Culture Prizes 1999, interview of Tang by Ushiroshōji Masahiro, at www.city.fukuoka.jp/asiaprize/English/lecture/index.html, accessed 19 May 2006.

54 Davis, ‘Processing Raw Material’, p. 35.

55 Davis, Lucy, ‘Of Commodities and Kings: Tang Da Wu's Play with Psycho-geography and Public Memory’, Art AsiaPacific, 25 (2000), pp. 63–7, here p. 65.Google Scholar

56 Low, ‘Performance Art Project’, n.p.

57 Lucy Davis and Lee Weng Choy, ‘Tang Da Wu: Remaking Public Memory’, Substance (magazine of The Substation), May–June 1999, pp. 6–9, here p. 8.

58 Tang, ‘Life in a Tin’, p. 1.

59 List of work on display: Tang Da Wu: A Perspective on the Artist: Photographs, Videos and Texts of Singapore Performances (1979 to 1999), 22–31 May 1999, The Substation, Singapore, n.p.

60 Davis and Lee, ‘Tang Da Wu: Remaking Public Memory’, p. 7.

61 Duara, Prasenjit, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), pp. 9–41.Google Scholar

62 Tang, ‘Fast Moving Asian Contemporary Art’.

63 Invitation card for the opening of Hak Tai's Bow, Brother's Pool and Our Children: Tang Da Wu, Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore, 4 August 2017. Our Children is the second half of the exhibition.