City of Others: Asian Artists in Paris, 1920s-1940s @ National Gallery Singapore - A Major Exhibition

City of Others 

Asian Artists in Paris, 1920s-1940s

National Gallery Singapore

2 April - 17 August 2025

Itakulla Kanae 

《赤衣の女》(Woman in Red Dress), 1929 

Oil on canvas, 116.8 x 80.3 cm 

Collection of Matsudo City Board of Education 

Image courtesy of Matsudo City Board of Education.

Yun Gee 

《莫伯特广场》Place Maubert, 1929 

Oil on canvas, 73 x 60 cm 

Private collection 

Image courtesy of Tina Keng Gallery 

National Gallery Singapore presents City of Others: Asian Artists in Paris, 1920s-1940s, the first major comparative exhibition dedicated to Asian artists in the French capital city during this dynamic period in modern art history. Challenging conventional art history narratives, this groundbreaking exhibition places Asian artists at the centre of focus, highlighting the relationship, interactions, and influences between the local and migrant artists, as well as the Parisian community. City of Others explores themes of identity, belonging, cultural exchange, creativity, and resilience through the lives of Asian artists who exhibited, worked, and lived in Paris as they navigated the culturally vibrant yet challenging time in interwar Paris.

Over 200 artworks – including paintings, sculptures, lacquerware, and decorative arts – along with 200 archival materials and images are on view at the Singtel Special Exhibition Gallery of the National Gallery Singapore, showcasing the presence of Asian artists in Paris during a period of global migration. City of Others offers visitors a glimpse into the experiences of these artists, highlighting their diverse journeys and creative exchanges. For the first time, visitors can uncover new connections and comparisons across diverse practices and perspectives.

Amrita Sher-Gil 

Untitled (Woman Wearing Shawl). c. 1932 

Oil on canvas, 42 x 33 cm 

Collection of the Dabriwala family

Mai Lan Phuong

Autoportait aux lunettes (Self-Portrait with Glasses), c. 1950 

Colours on silk, 45 × 32 cm 

Collection of Mai Lan Phuong

Dr Eugene Tan, Chief Executive Officer and Director of National Gallery Singapore says, “We are excited to present City of Others, a groundbreaking exhibition that challenges traditional assumptions in art historical narratives. As the Gallery celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, we seek to deepen our exploration of our region's art history within a global context by reframing narratives through a distinctly regional lens. City of Others continues our commitment to present fresh perspectives on modern art by highlighting often-overlooked figures who played important roles in shaping this significant period in art history. We are grateful for the support of our partners and sponsors who have made this exhibition possible.”

Delving into the stories of how Asian artists lived, worked and exhibited in Paris, City of Others examines what it meant to be the ‘other’. Spread across three gallery spaces in multiple sections – Preface, Workshop to the World, Theatre of the Colonies, Spectacle and Stage, Sites of Exhibition, Studio and Street, and Aftermaths – the exhibition examines the diverse experiences of these artists.

Examining the Asian artists’ experience in Paris

Georgette Chen 

Self Portrait, c.1923

Oil on Canvas. 35 x 27 cm 

Collection of National Gallery Singapore

The exhibition opens with Preface, introducing visitors to the different ways Asian artists in Paris, often regarded as ‘other’ or outsiders, presented themselves to European audiences. Through portraits and self-portraits by modern artists like Lê Phổ, Mai Trung Thứ, Georgette Chen, Liu Kang, and Pai Un-soung, visitors see how these artists used art to present themselves as creative individuals grappling with their identities as migrant artists while navigating public expectations and perceptions.

Cartier Paris

Portique gravity clock, 1927

Onyx (base), nephrite (columns and lintel), with platinum, 

gold, coral, jade, diamonds, rubies and enamel, 

23 x 12.1 x 7 cm, Cartier Collection 

Credit: Nils Herrmann, Cartier Collection 

© Cartier

Jean Dunand 

La forêt (Forest). 1930 

Gold and silver lacquer and hinges; 12 panels, total 300 x 600 cm 

Collection of Mobilier National 

Image courtesy of Mobilier National; 

Photo by Isabelle Bideau, GME-7196-000

Workshop to the World focuses on the growing presence of Asian artists and artisans who contributed to the Art Déco movement in Paris after the 1920s. This section highlights the active involvement of Asian artists in France’s decorative arts workshops, including artists who successfully sold and exhibited under their own names and those who remained uncredited workers. The influence of Asian artisans on the Art Déco movement is shown through jewellery and objects from the Cartier Collection (the heritage collection of the Maison), as well as lacquerwares from the atelier of leading designer Jean Dunand. Newly uncovered archival documentations reveal the profiles of highly skilled artisans and labourers from Vietnam who were part of Dunand’s atelier workforce.

Theatre of the Colonies, the second section, explores Paris as a simultaneous site for colonial propaganda and anti-colonial resistance through art and visual culture. Using stills from the International Colonial Exposition of 1931 as the exhibition backdrop, visitors are transported to the government-initiated Expositions, which showcased the products of colonial empires. This provided a platform for Asian artists to present their work to an international audience. At the same time, as the capital city of a sprawling French colonial empire, anti-colonial activists often displayed their resistance by employing images, texts, and exhibitions to expose the violence and exploitation in the colonies.

The third section expands the narrative beyond the visual arts to highlight the presence and influence of Asian dancers in Paris. Spectacle and Stage showcases the significance of Asian dance in the dynamic cultural scene of the 1920s to 1940s, exploring how dancers navigated accessibility, experimentation, and exoticism to find success in Paris. In a theatre-like setting, visitors may watch dance archives, film clips, and archival images of prominent dancers such as Raden Mas Jodjana from Indonesia, Komori Toshi from Japan, and Uday Shankar from India, who developed new dance forms during their time in Paris.

Lê Phổ 

Le peigne blanc (The White Comb), Undated 

Ink and colour on silk, 33.5 x 24 cm 

Collection of Sunseal Asia Limited 

Photo © Aguttes

Lê Phổ 

L'Âge heureux (The Happy Age). 1930 

Oil on canvas, 126 x 177 cm 

Private American collection 

Photo © Aguttes

Occupying the entirety of Singtel Special Exhibition Gallery 2, Sites of Exhibition delves into the diverse platforms through which Asian artists exhibited their works in Paris, including nationally themed exhibitions, commercial galleries, and salons. Being in Paris at the height of its public “salon” exhibitions offered these artists opportunities to exhibit their work, receive critical feedback, secure sales, and attract commissions. These exhibitions served as a stage for constructing narratives of identity balancing artistic expression with public appeal. The section also presents artworks originally displayed at special exhibitions of Japanese and Chinese modern art at the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s.

Liu Kang 

View of Sacré-Coeur, 1931 

Gouache on paper, 25 × 16.5 cm 

Collection of the family of Liu Kang 

© Liu Kang Family

Montparnasse, which was known as an artistic hub in Paris, attracted artists and creatives from all over the world. Filled with art studios, informal art schools, and cafes, Asian artists would have had daily exchanges and interactions with other artists and creatives – many of whom were also migrants, often from other parts of Europe – such as Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, and Moise Kisling. The fifth section, Studio and Street, highlights the impact that the bohemian social and artistic life of Montparnasse had on artists, notably Foujita Tsuguharu, who was a central figure in that scene. It also profiles several long-term artistic migrants to Paris – including Sanyu and Pan Yuliang – who also chose to settle in the Montparnasse area.

Sanyu 

《仰卧裸女》Reclining Pink Nude with Raised Arms, 1930s/1940s 

Oil on canvas, 80.5 x 129.5 cm 

Collection of Leo Shih 

Image courtesy of Leo Shih

The exhibition closes with Aftermaths which signals the impact of World War Two and subsequent decolonisation movements on the art world of Paris. Struck by the traumas of war, artists experimented with new visual language to break from the past, prompting a shift in artistic styles as artists reckoned with the cultural and geopolitical changes of the post-war world. Migrant artists sometimes faced difficult decisions about whether to return to their countries of origin. Meanwhile, decolonisation also brought a new energy to modernisms elsewhere in the world.

NATIONAL GALLERY SINGAPORE

1 St Andrew’s Road, Singapore 17895

www.nationalgallery.sg

Sanyu at Asian Art Museum – Guimet – Paris

SANYU
Guimet Museum - Asian Art National Museum, Paris

June 16 - September 13, 2004

After the great war, Paris decided to live to the full : « After the stress, strain and anger…men lift up their heads once more, open their eyes and enjoy life. A frenetic desire to dance, to buy, to be able finally to walk heads held high, to cream, to howl, to throw money out of the windows. A furia of vital forces takes over the world », according to Fernand Léger. Artists from five continents meet in Montparnasse and a new generation of painters  mingle on the terraces of the Dome and the Rotonde creating « the first colony of truly international artists in the history of the world, said Marcel Duchamp. Sanyu arrived in Paris when he was twenty years old. He belonged to a group of young Chinese painters who had been given scholarships to study in France organised by Cai Yuanpei, then President of Peking University, in tandem with the French authorities.

The years of Apprenticeship : 1920-1930

The Self-Portrait in the Atelier by Foujita shows that other painters from Asia had come to live in Paris. Sanyu decided not to enter the Ecole Nationale  des Beaux-Arts, but opted for the less academic studio of the Grande Chaumière. From this period, he has left us humourous pencil drawings and watercolours of his fellow students. The strokes are assured and often heightened with gentle colours. A group of watercolours from these formative years  is hung in the second gallery facing the early still-lives painted on canvas in clear, luminous colours. Yet his major focus of interest was still centred on the nude, a genre wich allowed him to  express his talent. Hence, he produced a great number of preliminary drawings, delineating with maestria his models as if they were preparatory studies. These fill an entire gallery. 

 
From 1929 onwards, Sanyu really began to paint nudes on canvas. These works can be seen in the two following galeries. Like Foujita, he depicts women horizontally placed against blocks of colour without giving any impression of depth. The Japanese painter fad devised his own technique for his nudes. First, he prepared the canvas to obtain a smooth milky surface on which he then drew with a very fine brush. It is likely that Sanyu drew inspiration from this, but used a thicker preparation, re-enforcing the outline of the drawing with a dark contour as he sought the perfect outline.

Occasionally, he engraved in that juicy paint  surface ornamented patterns exactly like Chinese potters who incise them  into the wet clay. Sparing with colour, his palette comprised black, white and pink. Nevertheless, at that time, he was influenced by the artistic curnets in Paris. His faces, framed by black hair cut like a boy with one gigantic jet-black eye call to mind the portraits of Kiki. As a reminder of that legendary model of Montparnasse, Le violon d’Ingres  (The violin of Ingres)  -a later print after the original by Man Ray in 1924- showing Kiki’s back, is hung next to her profile in bronze cast by Pablo Gargallo in 1928, obvious links between the surrealists and the artists of the Ecole de Paris.

Maturity : 1930-1940 

In the1930’s, a man appeared out of the blue and provided him with an income at the very moment when his family in China could no longer do so. Henri-Pierre Roché (1879-1959) one of the most active art dealers between the wars immediatly  grasped Sanyu’s potential and bought around 111 paintings and 600 drawings. Sanyu, free for some time from material concerns, went enthusiastically back to painting again. Moreover it is during  this very productive period that he succeeded in arriving at an invisible marriage between the western realist perception of nature and the implicit tranquility of Chinese aesthetics. His calm, harmonious and figurative works are enchanting.

Even though he chose more often than not apparently banal ordinary subjects, he managed to put a distance between them and everyday reality. To give an idea of this work, two rooms are dedicated  to group animals and flowers paintings. What is important is not the subject in itself but Sanyu’s ability to transpose it into a poetic visual universe. Horses or cats are shown in natural poses which emphasise their sensuality, flowers in pots or vases climb upwards the light with their calligraphic stems and transparent petals –autonomous works created by the artists imagination.

Sporting interlude and the Post-war : 1940-1966

During ten years, sanyu trained hard at sport. By  this time, he had invented a new game called the ping-tennis, which he hoped would become fashionable and resolve all his financial problems. He went as far as Berlin to show this new sport to the Olympic committee in 1936. Later in 1948, while he was staying at New York, he intended to promote his ping-tennis. He painted less and we have had to wait until the Post-war period to see him working again in his studio of the rue de la Sablière in Montparnasse. His forms took an unexpected modernism : his nudes became both more linears and monumentals (fig.4). He succeeded in detaching them from any context. His drawing became more muscular. At the end of his life, he painted enormous, bizarre and wild landscapes. The vast perspective without limits is staffed with tiny animals directly reminding us of the tragic loneliness of the master landscape artists of the Northern Song era (960-1127). Both lyrical and grandiose, their « language » has already become abstract. Sanyu, as a final metamorphosis of Chinese artist, brought the pictorial tradition of his native country to  the doors of modernity. The majority of these late landscapes are today in the National Museum of History of Taipei, where Sanyu should have exhibited them. Fate decided otherwise. He died in an accident in 1966. We have had to wait for the XXIst century to see them again in the west during the first retrospective exhibition devoted to him.

Curator : Jean-Paul Desroches with Catherine Pekovits and Rita Wong, ghest curator.

Guimet Museum - Asian Art National Museum, Paris
www.guimet.fr