Who’s afraid of nude art?

A SMALL but excellent exhibition on nude art is set to bust our anxieties over nudity. As the organisers of the Collecting Bodies exhibition point out, nude art hangs on the walls of many major art museums around the world, especially in Europe and America. But here in Asia, even in cosmopolitan cities such as Singapore and Tokyo, people appear ambivalent about the depiction of bare breasts and penises in art. 

In the virtual world, social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram have removed images featuring nudity, even when it is partial or abstracted. Most famously in 2016, Facebook took down a Pulitzer Prize-winning Vietnam War picture of a naked girl running away from napalm bombs (which is dubbed the Napalm Girl photo, which is incidentally now on display at the National Gallery Singapore’s Living Pictures exhibition) – only to backtrack and reinstate the photo after a global outcry. 

For Chen Yanyun, this collective nervousness and unease over nudity was precisely what led her to focus her doctoral thesis at The European Graduate School on nudity in art in Singapore. And when art advocate Chong Huai Seng and his daughter Ning invited her to curate a show on nude art at their independent art space The Culture Story, she naturally accepted.