J.Panicker

Ten years ago, I watched a video of a very angry lady going on about why she could not vote for Hillary Clinton in the then-presidential election. I do not recall the substance of her argument, but what stayed with me was her outrage. She spoke about the blue dress scandal and how her children had learnt the word “semen” before she thought they had any reason to know it. If you were a millennial Singaporean, you too could have been accidentally introduced to a word at an age you probably had no business knowing yet. That word could have been “gang bang”.

Singaporean Annabel Chong gained international notoriety through the 1995 pornographic film The World’s Biggest Gang Bang, which became a seminal work within that genre. Her inspiration for the performance drew on Messalina, the wife of the Roman emperor Claudius, whose reputation as an insatiable and immoral woman was shaped by misogyny. Chong was seeking to expose the double standard where sexual appetite confers status upon men but shame upon women. She described the performance as an attempt to challenge the expectation that female sexuality should remain passive, and to test how audiences would respond to a woman assuming the role of the male stud. However these intentions were eclipsed by the lurid attention the event eventually got.

So it was very strange to encounter what came across as a shrine or homage to her, Annabel Chong, among the art works in an exhibition on desire in Southeast Asian art at the National Gallery. According to the display, Annabel Chong was the pornographic persona of Grace Quek (her real name). It began with two of Chong’s dresses, bringing to mind that kind of ceremonial formality of First Lady gowns, followed by artefacts from the gang bang, caps and T-shirts made for its participants, snapshots of interviews, one included a local playwright who wrote a play on her persona. Basically, the display reflects her as a performance artist all along. There were no snippets or stills from the gang bang show, which did make me wonder whether it was considered too scandalous to be shown in a gallery exhibition on desire (read on for what wasn’t scandalous enough). At the same time, I was wondering what the larger objective was here: to reconsider her as a figure within local cultural history? If so, I wonder if the display was more interested in the spectacle and its salaciousness of the event. It glazes over some of the controversial aspects. At the time of the event, the persona Annabel Chong wasn’t adequately protected nor paid for the act. Back then, it felt like Chong was a pawn in this whole spectacle. She was perhaps too ahead of her time or the society we live in for her efforts to make performance art out of porn.

Passion is Volcanic: Desire in Southeast Asian Art is a current exhibition at the National Gallery, the first R18 one exploring over 70 art works exploring desire, the body, and sexuality in Southeast Asia. You will have your ID checked before you’re allowed entry into the exhibition and no photography is allowed. The exhibition also gives significant space to queer artists and same-sex desire, with the inclusion of works long held in the collection but rarely seen. In Singapore, where Section 377A was repealed only a few years ago, that visibility is very significant.

This exhibition left me uneasy about some of the ways it represented the female body. Its title, Passion is Volcanic, comes from an essay by Singapore artist Liu Kang about his travels in Bali, where he compares the passion of Balinese women to volcanoes. It felt like a strange choice to me, given that his Bali works were criticised for romanticising and exoticising Balinese women – some of that work was on display.

The exhibition opened with Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s video called Living, in which the corpse of a young woman in a slip lies on the floor. The artist places a dress over her body, smoothing it down, and for a moment I was reminded of the dress-up doll stickers of my childhood. I found the work disturbing, even creepy. There was no information, at least that I could find, about the young woman’s identity or how she died. She also appears very young, possibly even a preteen, which made me wonder what it means to place her body within an exhibition like this. The work was described as a “sensuous engagement with the dead”. But if the exhibition is inviting us to think more expansively about desire and sensuality, this felt like a line I wasn’t sure it should be crossing.

I just continued on and, for the most part, encountered interesting works. But there were parts of Passion is Volcanic I just couldn’t reconcile with. For all the R18 framing, some of the more overtly suggestive works, think banana arrangements, ruffled forms, bejewelled obstetrician tools, felt literal.

There was also something strange about the atmosphere of viewing the exhibition itself. No photography is allowed, and you’re constantly aware of gallery staff watching as you move through the space. It made the act of looking feel surveilled. In a country where surveillance already feels so pervasive, it was exhausting.

Some works that intrigued with me:

Agnes Arellano, Haliya Bathing

This artwork felt like poetry. Tucked into a dim corner of the gallery, it seemed almost moonlit. It depicts an Indigenous moon goddess stranded in the human realm, rising from a pool of tiny stones. Circular forms radiate around her like ripples in water; a hand rests on her swollen stomach, her head tilted back towards the sky. Arellano cast the sculpture from parts of her own body. It was so tender and otherworldly. I do not have the words to do it justice.

Xiyadie, Cave

Traditional Chinese paper-cutting, Cave shows two conjoined human forms an intimate moment amid nature.

Erotic betel nut cutter

I don’t remember the details of this artefact. It was an ornate seductive slicer-scissor type gadget in the form of a couple who come together in a kiss when the blades meet.

Marla Bendini, Tiger Lily

A large painting of a naked figure seen from behind, the body transforming into a tiger.

Hanuman Wooing A Sea Mermaid

I cannot recall the details, but this was a scene from the Cambodian Ramayana where Hanuman woos a sea princess.

An artwork by Jason Wee

I never knew Sex and the City was banned in Singapore previously. Wee takes a sexual moment from the series, reducing it to an enlarged patch of pixels. It was a funny response to censorship.

S. Namasivayam, Untitled, Charcoal on paper

Solamalay Namasivayam feels underrated within Singapore’s art canon, so this was great to see.

It closed with another work I struggled with: Pinaree Sanpitak’s Noon-Nom, a Museum of Ice Cream-pink ball pit filled with breast-shaped cushions. Visitors are invited to jump in and play. I looked up the artist afterwards, trying to understand what I was meant to experience. The work came out of Sanpitak’s experience of becoming a mother, and from her seeing a visual connection between the breast and the Buddhist stupa, with the installation intended to evoke maternal comfort. But after walking through the exhibition, I found it difficult to experience the work that way. I could only see it as a part of the female body abstracted and turned into a prop.

As I walked through the exhibition, I kept thinking about two works I had encountered years ago in an independent gallery, as part of an exhibition that explored what it means to inhabit a brown body. I think they came back to me because of the way both artists interrogated the gaze directed at the female Indian body. The works were by local artists, Priyageetha Dia and Chand Chandramohan.

I remember Chand’s papercut collage depicting herself, surrounded by florals. She stares straight back at the viewer, half her body exposed, unapologetic, a flower tucked behind her ear. I saw my own brownness in her, the softness of her body, features I recognised in myself and the women in my family. I felt a kinship in that recognition, a small prickle, knowing that our bodies might not fit conventional beauty standards here. Alongside her appears Sarah Baartman, complicating the way I looked at the portrait.

What I recall from Priyageetha Dia’s work was this black inflatable doll with breasts exaggerated to almost absurd proportions, beside a digital print repeatedly declaring, “The brown body is a black body.”

I think what stayed with me about both works was the connection they drew between brown and Black female bodies. Also, rather than simply presenting the nude or sexualised body, they asked who is doing the looking and what that gaze carries with it. Both works were painful and introspective.

On the whole, Passion is Volcanic is generous in its treatment of sexuality and desire, but I was saddened by how the female body was represented. Also, it felt more like spectacle than something afforded real depth.