Singapore Stories in the DBS Singapore Gallery
Various artists · Nineteenth century to the present
The long-term exhibition in the City Hall wing, called Singapore Stories: Pathways and Detours in Art, is the place to understand what the National Collection is about. It runs through a suite of former municipal offices on the second floor and follows the art of the island in loose chronological order, from watercolours and prints made by colonial officials and visiting artists in the nineteenth century, through the migrant Chinese painters who founded art schools here in the 1930s, to the post-independence decades of abstraction, social realism, performance and installation.
The core of the story is the group of painters known as the Nanyang artists, who fused Chinese ink traditions with the colour of the School of Paris and the light of the tropics: Liu Kang, Chen Wen Hsi, Cheong Soo Pieng and Georgette Chen, all teachers at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts. Look for Liu Kang's Working at the Brick Factory, Chen Wen Hsi's Gibbons and Cheong Soo Pieng's elongated figures of Malay and Dayak villagers. Opposite them hang the social realists of the 1950s, above all Chua Mia Tee, whose National Language Class of 1959 shows Chinese students learning Malay, with the words Siapa nama kamu, what is your name, on the blackboard, a picture of the hopeful year Singapore won self-government.
Later rooms bring in the Modern Art Society, the sculptor Han Sai Por, Tang Da Wu's performance and installation works from The Artists Village, and video and photography from the 1990s onward. The display is refreshed in stages, so individual works rotate, but the arc stays the same. Give it an hour, and use the free daily highlights tour if you can; it is the best introduction to the art of a country that many visitors do not expect to have an art history at all.
Did You Know? In Chua Mia Tee's National Language Class the blackboard reads, in Malay, what is your name and where do you live.
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