Sex and desire in South-east Asian art

[SINGAPORE] Remember Annabel Chong, the Raffles Girls’ School alumna who gained notoriety in the 1990s as a pornographic actress in the US?

New research now suggests Chong was less a person than a constructed identity – a persona created by performance artist Grace Quek (Chong’s real name) during her time studying art and gender politics at the University of Southern California. 

Now, Quek has loaned photographs, costumes and personal artefacts to “Passion Is Volcanic: Desire In Southeast Asian Art” – the first show by National Gallery Singapore to be given an R(18) rating. 

The materials complicate Chong’s mythology, reframing her not as a scandal, but as a woman asserting control over her own body and narrative. Her story now is more deliberate and self-aware than it first appeared.

Such a perspective is bound to be divisive – which may explain why the media can publish only a small set of approved images (none featuring Quek’s contributions), and visitors are not allowed to photograph the exhibition at all.

As a result, a show this open and intelligent ends up feeling oddly constrained.

Curated by Dr Adele Tan and Kathleen Ditzig, it brings together more than 70 works from across South-east Asia and different time periods. Rather than presenting a straightforward survey of erotic art, it looks at how ideas of the body, intimacy and pleasure have shifted over time.

Some works place desire within a spiritual framework. A 14th-15th century sculpture of Vajradhara and Prajnaparamita shows two figures embracing and kissing – a physical union representing balance and enlightenment, rather than something taboo. 

Other works move closer to everyday experience. Lavender Chang’s 2024 deliberately blurred photographs of real-life couples in China making love speak to both human desire and state surveillance, shaped by the pressures of censorship.

SEE ALSO

20 photos that show how dramatically Singapore has changed in two decades

Ai Weiwei in Singapore: Drones meet van Gogh in anti-war exhibition

Singapore’s food and hawker culture take to the stage

Across the exhibition, artists approach desire in very different ways. Indonesian painter Basoeki Abdullah’s nudes reflect a period when the human body was tied to ideas of beauty and modernity.

Malaysian artist Ahmad Zakii Anwar’s Sixtynine paintings, with their suggestive arrangements of bananas, introduces humour and play. Thai artist Pinaree Sanpitak also opts for humour with a roomful of soft, breast-like cushions that invite viewers to rest, recline and nestle within them.

Other top regional artists in the show include I Gak Murniasih, Nguyen Quan, Long Thien Shih and Agnes Arellano.

Elsewhere, the tone becomes more critical. Vietnamese artist Nguyen Thi Thanh Mai reworks gynaecological instruments into decorative pieces – a pointed metaphor for how the female body has long been reduced to something to be examined, objectified and consumed.

From the Philippines, Julie Lluch’s sculpture of a flower, inspired by famous painter Georgia O’Keeffe, points to a related issue – how images of the female body are often read through a male lens. O’Keeffe herself insisted that she was always painting flowers, but critics frequently interpreted them as erotic.

Among the Singapore artists are a never-before-seen nude drawing by venerable sculptor Ng Eng Teng, a series of Bugis Street photographs from Judy Chia, and works by openly trans artists Aki Hassan and Marla Bendini. 

At Tuesday’s (Apr 21) media preview, long-time arts writers were surprised to encounter, for the first time, the homoerotic works of Tan Peng – a talented Singapore artist whose tender paintings of men are collected by local museums but have never been publicly shown before.

Taken together, the entire exhibition makes a simple but important point: sex and desire have been part of Asian art for centuries, even if they have not always been openly discussed.

What “Passion Is Volcanic” does is bring those conversations into clearer view – not as shock value, but as part of a broader, ongoing story about how we see ourselves.

Passion Is Volcanic: Desire In Southeast Asian Art runs at National Gallery Singapore from Apr 24 to Aug 30.