Art of Tang Da Wu

This document is downloaded from DR‑NTU (https://dr.ntu.edu.sg) Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Body and communication : the ‘ordinary’ art of Tang Da Wu Wee, C. J. Wan‑Ling 2018 Wee, C. J. W.‑L. (2018). Body and communication : the ‘ordinary’ artof Tang Da Wu. Theatre Research International, 42(3), 286‑306. doi:10.1017/S0307883317000591 https://hdl.handle.net/10356/144518 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0307883317000591 © 2018 International Federation for Theatre Research. All rights reserved. This paper was published by Cambridge University Press in Theatre Research International and is made available with permission of International Federation for Theatre Research. Downloaded on 27 Sep 2021 10:02:22 SGT Accepted and finalized version of: Wee, C. J. W.-L. (2018). ‘Body and communication: The “Ordinary” Art of Tang Da Wu’. Theatre Research International, 42(3), 286-306. C. J. W.-L. Wee [email protected] Body and Communication: The ‘Ordinary’ Art of Tang Da Wu Abstract What might the contemporary performing body look like when it seeks to communicate and to cultivate the need to live well within the natural environment, whether the context of that living well is framed and set upon either by longstanding cultural traditions or by diverse modernizing forces over some time? The Singapore performance and visual artist Tang Da Wu has engaged with a present and a region fractured by the predations of unacceptable cultural norms – the consequences of colonial modernity or the modern nation-state taking on imperial pretensions – and the subsumption of Singapore society under capitalist modernization. Tang’s performing body both refuses the diminution of time to the present, as is the wont of the forces he engages with, and undertakes interventions by sometimes elusive and ironic means – unlike some overdetermined contemporary performance art – that reject the image of the modernist ‘artist as hero’. Part of the cause for this distinctive art committed to historicity and a deliberate ordinariness is that artistic communication to him means provoking self-reflexive thought rather than immediate action. Over the years this has resulted in collaborative artistic workshops, in which he has imaginatively transferred art- making from his body to the realm of ordinary people. These workshops become his particular extension of the neo-avant-garde’s breaching of art’s infrastructures. 1 Body and Communication: The ‘Ordinary’ Art of Tang Da Wu1 The following words were found scribbled onto a postcard produced by the Art Base Gallery to advertise the 1989 exhibition, Home Documentation, by the Singaporean artist, Tang Da Wu (b. 1943): 1) obsession with carreer [sic] – success spontaneity poetry anti-consumerism2 These words are understated, even as they counterpoint the materialistic world that is Singapore’s post-independence economic success against a spontaneous art and poetry. The careless misspelling of career implies that perhaps art need not be virtuosic and even can be ordinary, though it engages with the larger forces of change. Tang’s text gives some indication of contemporary art’s valences amidst a collectivist state’s capitalist modernization drive that, until the 1990s, was based on generally ‘pragmatic’ and philistine values.3 Tang’s own career – unusual for an artist of his generation in its embrace of experimental art forms – runs in opposition to the thrust of the Singapore state’s developmentalist direction. Though he works in a number of media, he is best known for his performance art and installations. Tang was born into a Chinese-speaking home, educated in Chinese-medium schools, and his father was a journalist with a Chinese-medium newspaper, Sin Chew Jit Poh (in Mandarin: Xingzhou Ribao).4 In a multilingual society with four official languages (English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil), where English is the lingua franca, this background testifies to a groundedness in Chinese cultural traditions and art, which Tang 2 brings to bear in his contemporary work. Tang proceeded to the Birmingham Polytechnic School of Fine Art (now the Birmingham School of Art in Birmingham City University), where he took a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1974; then in 1974-75 to the St. Martin’s School of Art, London (now Central St. Martin’s), where he studied sculpture; and finally to Goldsmiths College, London, where in 1985 he gained a Master of Fine Arts. When living in England, Tang won the Visual Arts Award in 1978, given by the then-Arts Council of Great Britain, and the Artist Award of 1983, given by the then-Greater London Arts Council. He also participated in a number of performance festivals or gave solo performances in England and Portugal in the early to mid-1980s.5 In 1999, Tang gained regional recognition by winning the 10th Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize (Arts and Culture).6 After living in England for some twenty years, Tang finally returned to Singapore in 1987. He was the major figure in and is regarded as the initiator of an artists’ community started in 1988 called the Artists Village, in what was then a rural part of the island-state called Sembawang. The Village became a centre of vigorous cultural re-invention and artistic alterity.7 Tang’s influence helped disrupt abstract-modernist art practices in Singapore: apart from his pioneering of performance art, there was a return to figuration in painting, and the figures he depicted oftentimes had a relation to nature, generally in the form of animals: a persistent occupation with culture and ecology marks his work. There are also elements of the surreal and the spontaneous, which serve to enhance Tang’s communicative mode.8 This brief sketch establishes the context for the questions pursued in this article: what might the contemporary performing body look like when it seeks to communicate and to cultivate the need to live well within the natural environment, whether the context of that living well is framed and set upon either by longstanding cultural traditions or by diverse modernizing forces over a period of time? Tang has engaged with a present and a region fractured by the predations of unacceptable cultural norms, by the consequences of colonial 3 modernity or the modern nation-state taking on imperial pretensions, and by the subsumption of Singapore society under capitalist modernization. We have in Tang a body that refuses the diminution of time to the present, as is the wont of the forces he engages with. Tang also undertakes interventions by sometimes elusive, humorous, ironic or (ambiguously) disingenuous means – unlike some overdetermined contemporary performance art – that reject the (continuing) presence of the modernist ‘artist as hero’.9 Not for him the heroic icon of the artist as healer or saviour. Part of the cause for this is that communication is a central concern for Tang, provoking self-reflexive thought rather than immediate action; and over the years this has resulted in collaborative artistic workshops, in which he has imaginatively transferred art-making from his body to the realm of ordinary people. These workshops become his particular extension of the neo-avant-garde’s breaching of art’s infrastructures.10 In order to explore the implications of this practice at a crucial historical juncture, this article proceeds by situating the emergence of contemporary art in Singapore within Southeast Asia – essential for seeing why modernization is a crucial issue for contemporary artists – and continues with the examination of continuity within the development of Tang’s art from the 1980s to the late 1990s. Becoming contemporary and contemporary art in Singapore Can the contemporary body actually resist not only the impact of current forces but also the consequences of historical forces, and even facilitate communicative processes that could possibly lead to a new or renewed means of thinking community? Is the body in the present up to such challenges, given that we occupy a moment in which, the cultural critic Fredric Jameson argues, there is ‘not so much of the abolition of time altogether, … [but of] its shrinkage to the present’ – which he also describes as ‘the reduction to the present or the 4 reduction to the body’.11 As Jameson contended in an earlier essay, if there is ‘nothing left but your temporal present, it follows that you also have nothing left but your own [reduced sense of the] body’:12 The problem with the body [taken] as a positive slogan is that the body itself, as a unified entity, is an Imaginary concept (in Lacan’s sense); it is what Deleuze calls a ‘body without organs’, an empty totality that organizes the world without participating in it. We experience the body through our experience of the world and of other people, so that it is perhaps a misnomer to speak of the body at all as a substantive with a definite article, unless we have in mind the bodies of others, rather than our own phenomenological referent.13 The above passage helps brings to light key qualities of Tang’s art in the 1980s-90s. The first is that other people’s bodies and the world, in Tang’s self-conception of his work, are vital for his body, which he asserts is his medium for art. He can and will provoke his audience (sometimes in a direct or alternatively ironic or humorous but usually restrained manner) into self-reflexive thought, or he can take them into a collaborative activity that attempts suturing history to the fractured present. Though Tang’s work is varied, his specific emphasis on communication is consistent: without it, there is no art for him. As one curator notes, ‘For [Tang] Da Wu, “communication” is a process of self-knowledge and the recuperation of history, albeit traumatic and painful, empowering his participants with the ability to mediate their own histories and predicaments to contemporary needs’.14 The second quality relates to how communication should occur through the body, and the body’s relation to time, and therefore to historicity.

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