4 - When art was political: Picturing and remembering decolonization, Merdeka and the Cold War in Singapore/Malaya

Presentation Abstract
In the Cold War, art, or more generally, the visual representations became a tool to propagate a binary ideology that either depicted a “free world” or a struggling socialist revolution. In Singapore and Malaya, the divided world was further complicated by a third force, nationalism and nation-building, which was reassured in the non-aligned movement as advanced at the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955. Singapore/Malayan Chinese artists were probably the most enthusiastic producers of multivalent pictorial works that included oil paintings, woodcarvings and sketches during the period from early 1950s to the 1970s. The “Chinese problem” as was complexly linked to identity politics, communism and ethnic conflicts, had been vividly reflected and contested in these visual materials.
This paper focuses on the visual languages that were picked up as a powerful weapon by the Chinese artists to not only voice their resistance, but more importantly to express their cultural imaginaries about the nation-to-be: a free and independent Malaya where all ethnic groups live and prosper equally. Moreover, an exhibition “From Words to Pictures: Art during the Emergency” was held at the National Gallery of Singapore in 2007, arousing public nostalgia, especially among the Chinese-educated senior citizens of Singapore. Working on catalogues, curatorial notes and art reviews, this paper also attempts to see how art works have been used to construct a nationalist art-historical narrative on one hand, and how people remember and construct collective memory differently on the other hand.