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.

She says: “Back in the 2010s, I was working with a lot of nudity in my art. I was doing figure drawings of live nude models and putting them on Facebook and Instagram – only to have those images taken down by the site. Or I’d be pitching for projects, only to have my images censored... It annoyed me because there’s a long and celebrated history of nudity in Western art. In art schools around the world, including those in Singapore, art students are taught to draw the human figure looking at live nude models. So why are we censoring nudity in art?

“That question propelled me to embark on a research journey in graduate school to understand how we perceive the human body, why nudity in art incites so much offence and regulation, and how various artists tackle the depiction of the body in the face of these restrictions in South-east Asia.”

The answers to these questions are extremely complicated and only partially answered by the exhibition Collecting Bodies. Culture, religion, historical heritage and political developments have a lot to do with how each society views the genre. So much so that, unlike classical Western artists who used nudity to celebrate the ideal human physique, contemporary South-east Asian artists often use nudity to make social commentary. “Nudities, in all its plurality, serve as carriers for stories. This show is a glimpse into a world where bodies of art and bodies in art are carried gently for posterity,” says Chen. 

This isn’t the first time that The Culture Story has mounted a nude art show. In 2021, it staged Of Human Bondage, a selection of nude art belonging to Chong. It drew positive responses from art lovers and prompted the Chongs to do a second show, this time with other prominent collectors, namely Angie Ong and Ong Yew Huat, Yeap Lam Yang, Lito and Kim Camacho, Cheryl and John Chia, Jimmy Chua, Linda Neo and Albert Lim, Diana and TK Quek, Guy and Henny Scott, and Jackson See.

The works on display range from blue-chip artists (such as Cheong Soo Pieng, Jimmy Ong, Mangu Putra, Kitagawa Utamaro and others) to young emerging talent (Nguyen Quoc Dung, Vanessa Liem, Pucuk Cemara, Liu Hsin-Ying and others). The many highlights include a shunga (Japanese erotica) book from the 1800s, two Cheong Soo Pieng paintings, a rare figure drawing by Elmer Borlongan and a large print by Ahmad Zakii Anwar.

In January 2023, The Culture Story will release the catalogue of the exhibition written by Chen, which promises to be an indispensable resource on nude art in the region.

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Collecting Bodies: A Short Story About Art & Nudities In Asia runs at The Culture Story from now till 31 March 2023. As the private art space is not open to the public at all times, visitors are encouraged to email admin@theculturestory.co for viewing dates.