In search of the uncontroversial nude: Liu Kang’s modernist pursuit in Nanyang

Abstract

This essay examines the problematic ‘primitivist’ positions adopted by the artist and viewer when engaging with the ‘Nanyang art’ of Singapore’s preeminent pioneering artist, Liu Kang (b. 1911–2004). In this re-evaluation of the artist’s modernist pursuit, I argue that Liu Kang’s experience of Bali – a place uniquely distanced from the cultural politics of mainland China and with access to nude models – provided the fertile conditions for the mastery and syncretising of artistic techniques in the formulation of modern Nanyang landscapes, which the artist later defined as Nanyang feng’ge (trans. Nanyang style). Subsequent politicisation of the Nanyang Style/Nanyang Art has overshadowed the more significant localisation of an exogenous picture category, ‘female nudes’.