3 late artists with inclusive visions

“WHOSE turn is it to speak now?” is the first line of a powerful poem printed on the red walls of National Gallery Singapore’s new exhibition titled Familiar Others. Penned by Filipino poet Gawani Domogo Gaongen, the poem attempts to give voice to her country’s long silenced indigenous communities, particularly their women. (“She who knows the language of her ancestors… the language of the earth… the language of the birds, of wild pigs.”) The poem suggests it’s time to give the marginalised their “turn to speak” about their lives and grievances.

The poem was written in response to a work in the Gallery’s new showcase of 3 late South-east Asian artists, who had looked upon communities other than their own with dignity and respect. Through their writings, paintings and/or photographs, they showed an uncommon interest in depicting and documenting marginalised communities, long before concepts such as “decolonisation”, “orientalism” and “otherness” became popular in critical discourse.

The 3 artists are Singapore’s Yeh Chi Wei (1913 – 1981), who frequently travelled to Sabah and Sarawak and made beautiful paintings that illuminated Borneo’s indigenous peoples and traditions; Indonesia’s Emiria Sunassa (1894 – 1964), who depicted the diverse peoples of the Indonesian archipelago through her art; and Filipino-Catalan photographer Eduardo Masferre (1909 – 1995), who used his camera to capture the indigenous communities of the Cordillera region in the Philippines. The show is curated by the Gallery’s senior curator Phoebe Scott.