Singapore
NCS
—
Before the ravages of World War II, Paris was the middle of the art world. The metropolis’s salons, colleges and cafes attracted painters from round the globe, with Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Piet Mondrian and Salvador Dalí amongst the many émigrés gravitating to France’s capital throughout the Nineteen Twenties and ‘30s.
Artists arriving from Asia, nevertheless, confronted a very totally different set of expectations than their European counterparts. Paris could have been a melting pot of overseas cultures (by the requirements of the day, not less than), but it surely was additionally the coronary heart of a colonial empire with a fascination for all issues unique.
“It seems that oil is a medium that is too heavy for their hands,” French art critic Henri Lormian wrote dismissively of the Vietnamese painters on present at a fashionable art exhibition in Paris in 1933. Instead, they were “habituated to light strokes of the brush,” he argued, including: “It is the memories of the arts of the Far East which seduce, much more than a laboriously acquired Western technique.”
In different phrases, their art was not “Asian” sufficient, nor their makes an attempt to embrace European art ok, for his liking.
Amid marginalization and disinterest, a technology of little-known artists from Japan, China, French Indochina and elsewhere in Asia nonetheless made their mark on Paris in the interwar interval. Many were compelled to stability the affect of their cosmopolitan environment with the exoticized tastes of potential prospects.
Now, a century later, a few of the period’s pioneers — aided by Asian collectors’ rising buying energy — are belatedly incomes the type of recognition bestowed on their Western contemporaries.
Take Le Pho, a Vietnamese artist whom the critic Lormian had as soon as disparaged over a nude portray he deemed “too occidental” — too Western. His work now fetch sums exceeding the million-dollar threshold, making him certainly one of Southeast Asia’s most bankable names. His “La famille dans le jardin,” a leisurely scene evoking French Impressionism however delicately painted on silk, bought for 18.6 million Hong Kong {dollars} ($2.3 million) in 2023, an public sale file for his work.
Then there’s Sanyu, a painter whose signature nudes — their flat perspective and flowing calligraphic strains knowledgeable as a lot by his Chinese art schooling as French modernism — now appeal to astronomical sums. He achieved little industrial success after shifting to Paris from his native Sichuan in 1921 and died in poverty 4 a long time later. Today, nevertheless, he is hailed as the “Chinese Matisse,” with the 2020 sale of a rare group portrait, “Quatre Nus,” for 258 million Hong Kong {dollars} ($33 million) confirming his standing as certainly one of modern art’s most coveted names.
The expertise of Asian artists in Europe is additionally attracting renewed tutorial curiosity thanks, in half, to a new exhibition at Singapore’s National Gallery. Almost 10 years in the making, “City of Others: Asian Artists in Paris, 1920s-1940s” brings collectively greater than 200 works from the interval, many on mortgage from French establishments and personal Asian collections.
Le Pho and Sanyu characteristic prominently, as do Japanese artist Tsuguharu Foujita and two of Singapore’s best-known painters, Liu Kang and Georgette Chen. The present spotlights how they grappled with their identities via looking out self-portraits, landscapes depicting their adopted homeland and road scenes exhibiting Paris via outsiders’ eyes. References to main Western art actions like Cubism and Surrealism are in the meantime restricted, eschewing the standard lens via which the period is often seen.
“We thought, ‘Well, if our story is about Asian artists in Paris, we should map their concerns, not try to map the concerns of Eurocentric art history onto them,’” the exhibition’s lead curator Phoebe Scott advised NCS at the preview, including: “Otherwise, we’re just reiterating the significance of Paris without giving something new from our region.”
The artists’ twin identities are sometimes expressed via the mixture of Eastern and Western methods. Foujita’s “Self-Portrait with Cat,” which depicts the artist surrounded by paint brushes and provides in his studio, nods each to European and Japanese traditions, its advantageous strains knowledgeable by “sumi-e” ink work. Elsewhere, works current numerous Asian sensibilities, from compositions evoking ancestral portraits to the use of unusually skinny canvases harking back to paper or silk.
Other work exhibit the artists ignored mastery of kinds like Impressionism. A choice of Chen’s rural landscapes, produced on a journey to Provence, ooze with the heat of Paul Cézanne; Japanese painter Itakura Kanae’s placing portrait of his spouse, “Woman in Red Dress,” displays the classical tendencies of “rappel à l’ordre” (or “Return to Order”), a French motion that responded to the upheavals of World War I by rejecting the avant-garde.
As nicely as absorbing influences, Asian artists in flip formed European art, mentioned Scott. The Paris scene had a “hybridizing aesthetic,” she added, citing the affect of African art on Picasso’s oeuvre for instance. And the presence of Asian painters added to the cultural combine, tapping into the longstanding curiosity in orientalist aesthetics evident in the “Japonisme” of the late nineteenth century, when a fervor for Japanese art, furnishings and artifacts swept Europe.
“It’s difficult to say that any individual modern Asian artist who came (to Paris) influenced French art,” Scott mentioned. “But was there an Asian impact, in general, on French art? Absolutely.”
For France’s extra established Asian artists, life typically revolved round the multicultural Montparnasse district, house of the so-called School of Paris.
They shopped for provides in the neighborhood’s art shops and networked in its bohemian cafes. It was right here that Sanyu refined his observational expertise by attending open life drawing periods at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière (which, to this present day, welcomes the public to its walk-in life drawing classes for a modest payment).
Foujita, in the meantime, was a outstanding determine in the Montparnasse scene and a good friend of the celebrated Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani, amongst others. The neighborhood there comprised “people of over 50 nationalities, including those from countries so obscure their names are barely known,” Foujita wrote in 1936. “It is no wonder this environment fosters unconventional ideas and creativity.”
There was a industrial crucial, too: Showing at the district’s industrial galleries and salons might assist artists promote work or meet potential consumers. A neighborhood marketplace for their art existed, and a few were “very financially successful” at the time, Scott mentioned, including: “But Paris was a crowded market for attention. Even if you got a commercial show, it didn’t necessarily mean that you could make money.”
Forging a social circle like Foujita’s was a “key factor” figuring out their success, mentioned Scott. “Some (Asian) artists had a very good network of connections in Paris that could support them — people they knew, or art critics who would champion their work.”
Yet, solo exhibitions and patronage were out of attain for the overwhelming majority of migrant artists. In recognition of this, a part of the Singapore exhibition is devoted to the artisans who labored in France’s ornamental arts workshops, enjoying an essential — however largely nameless — function in the Art Deco motion. An estimated one-quarter of Indochinese employees dwelling in Paris were lacquerers, and a choice of their jewellery and objects d’art are displayed as testomony to this uncredited function.
The exhibition ends — like a few of the worldwide artists’ time in France — with World War II. Those who returned house (or were drafted by their nations) typically confronted difficulties returning. Among them was Foujita, whose place in art historical past is difficult by his function in Japan’s struggle effort: He devoted his wartime apply to glorifying the efforts and bravado of the Imperial Army, severely hampering his fame upon his return to France in 1950.
The fame of Paris modified, too. Although promising Asian creatives continued to reach in the post-war interval (amongst them were Wu Guanzhong and the abstract painter Zao Wou-ki, now two of the art market’s biggest-selling names), the metropolis was now not the epicenter of the art world. New York was more and more the vacation spot of selection for budding younger migrants, however the business was additionally, the exhibition argues, turning into extra fragmented, a precursor to in the present day.
“New sites and hubs gained in significance with the energy of decolonization, asserting their independence and cultural identity,” the exhibition notes learn. “The post-war period marked the beginnings of a less hierarchical global art world.”
“City of Others: Asian Artists in Paris, 1920s-1940s” is exhibiting at National Gallery Singapore till Aug. 17, 2025.