A society's acceptance of the nude often signals its maturity
On April 24, the National Gallery Singapore opens 'Passion Is Volcanic: Desire In Southeast Asian Art,' the institution's first exhibition explicitly devoted to erotic art — a milestone years in the making, shaped by careful negotiation with regulators and a region that had long been waiting. Across seventy works spanning centuries and borders, the show asks what it means for a society to look honestly at desire, and what it has cost, in silence and erasure, not to. The question is not merely aesthetic; it is a reckoning with who has been seen, who has been hidden, and what a public institution owes to the full range of human experience.
- Singapore's most prominent cultural institution is about to do something it has never done before — open its doors to erotic art, rated R18, with ID checks and a no-photography rule enforced at the entrance.
- The exhibition took years of regulatory negotiation to reach opening day, with curators describing the process as an 'extended pregnancy' — a sign of how charged the territory remains even as the show prepares to welcome its first visitors.
- Seventy works surface voices long absent from institutional walls: Singapore's first publicly gay artist, Southeast Asia's earliest known female nude painter, and a reframing of a 1995 performance that once made headlines for very different reasons.
- The curators have deliberately shaped the space — dimmer lighting, carpeted floors, sensual furniture — to slow visitors down and force a more intimate, unmediated encounter with art that cannot be photographed and carried away.
- The show lands as both a cultural signal and an open question: whether Singapore is ready, as one Indonesian painter once argued, to measure its maturity by its willingness to accept the nude as a serious subject of human inquiry.
Singapore has long kept an uneasy distance from the nude in art. Warning signs preceded bare bodies in galleries, even as the founding figures of the country's modern art movement built their reputations on Balinese nudes — a fact accepted quietly, without much public examination. That quiet is about to be broken.
On April 24, the National Gallery Singapore opens 'Passion Is Volcanic: Desire In Southeast Asian Art,' its first exhibition explicitly devoted to erotic art and desire in the region. The show carries an R18 rating and has been years in development, requiring sustained negotiation with regulators and institutional leadership. When curators traveled Southeast Asia seeking loans, they were met with a recurring question from artists and colleagues: 'You are doing this in Singapore? What took you so long?'
The seventy works on display draw heavily from the Gallery's own collection, with many pieces making their public debut. Among them are paintings by Tan Peng, Singapore's first artist to publicly identify as gay; a recently acquired sketch by sculptor Ng Eng Teng; and a fourteenth or fifteenth-century sculpture of two Buddhas kissing, on loan from the Asian Civilisations Museum. Vietnamese artist Nguyen Thi Thanh Mai contributes works that place gynecological specula beside vessels of veneration — a pairing that acknowledges, as co-curator Adele Tan notes, that eroticism often arrives entangled with pain.
The exhibition also restores visibility to figures long absent from institutional walls: Vietnam's first openly gay artist, Truong Tan; Indonesian painter Emiria Sunassa, whose 1940s nude may be among the earliest by a Southeast Asian woman; and Singaporean Grace Quek, known professionally as Annabel Chong, whose 1995 film appearance is here reframed as gender-challenging performance art.
The curators have shaped the gallery itself with intention — dimmer lighting, carpet laid for the first time in the institution's history, no photography permitted. Visitors must sketch or remember what moves them. The admission fee is modest, the ID check firm. Sensationalism, co-curator Kathleen Ditzig insists, was never the point. The goal was intellectual seriousness, applied to subjects Singapore's institutions have long left unexamined.
Whether the public is ready remains an open question. But the fact that the National Gallery has chosen to ask it — with this much care, this much deliberation — suggests something has already changed.
Singapore has long maintained a peculiar relationship with the nude in art. Walk through any Western museum and you encounter bodies everywhere—mostly women's, mostly unadorned, mostly unremarked upon. In Singapore's galleries, nudes have traditionally been cordoned off, clustered on a wall or two, preceded by warning signs as though the viewer needed protection from desire itself. This despite the fact that the foundational figures of Singapore's modern art movement—Cheong Soo Pieng, Chen Wen Hsi, Chen Chong Swee, and Liu Kang—built their reputations partly on paintings of Balinese nudes, a fact long accepted without much public acknowledgment or discomfort.
On April 24, the National Gallery Singapore will open its first exhibition explicitly devoted to erotic art and desire in the region. The show, titled "Passion Is Volcanic: Desire In Southeast Asian Art," carries an R18 rating and represents the culmination of a project that has been in development since before the pandemic. Getting here required what co-curator Adele Tan describes, with some humor, as an "extended pregnancy and now parturition"—years of careful negotiation with regulators and institutional leadership to convince them that a serious museum could examine sexuality and longing as legitimate subjects of artistic inquiry. When the curators traveled through Southeast Asia seeking loans, they encountered surprise and relief. "You are doing this in Singapore? What took you so long?" artists and colleagues asked. The region, it seemed, had been waiting for the island to catch up.
The exhibition draws seventy works, with roughly seventy percent coming from the National Gallery's own collection. Many are making their public debut. Three pieces by Tan Peng, Singapore's first artist to publicly identify as gay, in 1993, will be shown. There are works by Teng Nee Cheong, a late Singaporean painter known for sensual, tradition-inflected nudes, and a recently acquired sketch by Ng Eng Teng, the sculptor whose monumental "Mother and Child" faces the Padang. The show also includes pieces by Vietnamese artist Nguyen Thi Thanh Mai, who decorates gynecological specula with beads, placing them beside vessels of veneration—a work that acknowledges, as Tan puts it, that eroticism often arrives tangled with pain and the threat of violence. There is a fourteenth or fifteenth-century sculpture of two Buddhas kissing, borrowed from the Asian Civilisations Museum, positioned near contemporary works by Filipino artist Agnes Arellano and Chinese painter Ding Yanyong.
The curators have been deliberate about the space itself. The fourth-floor gallery will be dimmer than usual, carpeted for the first time in the institution's history, furnished with sensual accent chairs. There will be ID checks at the door. Admission costs five dollars for Singaporeans and permanent residents, eight for foreigners. And there will be no photography allowed—a restriction that forces visitors into a more deliberate, less mediated encounter with the work. Favorite pieces cannot be captured and posted; they must be sketched or held in memory.
Sensationalism was never the intent. Co-curator Kathleen Ditzig notes that even Thai artist Pinaree Sanpitak's interactive breast cushions—titled "Noon-nom," meaning milk support—are walled off from public view, despite extending beyond the gallery proper. The curators have applied what Tan calls "legal guidelines that demarcate the pornographic," managing imagery they deemed too difficult for a first exhibition of this kind in Singapore. The result, she suggests, is more intellectually fertile than shock value would allow. Malaysian artist Ahmad Zakii Anwar's "Sixtynine" features bananas positioned with delicate suggestiveness. Wong Keen's monumental nude dissolves into an abstracted landscape, with a hippo drinking from a blue dreamscape lake below. The show moves from heterosexual romance into queer identity, from pre-modern Buddhist sculpture to 1995 performance art, from classical female nudes to the unsaid interior lives of artists long marginalized from institutional view.
Tan emphasizes that the exhibition reflects serious curatorial work grounded in both intellectual rigor and what she calls "parental care." The show excavates forgotten or underrepresented voices—Vietnam's first openly gay artist, Truong Tan; Indonesian artist Emiria Sunassa's "Moonlight Bathing" from the 1940s, likely among the earliest nudes by a Southeast Asian artist; Singaporean Grace Quek, known professionally as Annabel Chong, whose participation in a 1995 film is here reframed as gender-challenging performance art. The exhibition also restores attention to the sexual histories of Singapore and the region, histories that have been present but unspoken.
As the show awaits its first visitors, Ditzig invokes the Indonesian painter Basoeki Abdullah, who once told his critics that the nude is among art history's oldest subjects, and that a society's willingness to accept it often signals its maturity. Whether Singapore is ready to grow up in this particular way remains to be seen. But the fact that the National Gallery has decided to ask the question—and to do so with such care, such seriousness, such deliberation—suggests something has already shifted.
Citas Notables
When we went around the region to borrow artworks, they said, 'Wow, you are doing this in Singapore? What took you so long?' Everyone's ready for us to grow up.— Co-curator Adele Tan
The nude is one of the oldest subjects in art history, and whether a society can accept that is often an indicator of its modernity.— Indonesian painter Basoeki Abdullah, paraphrased by co-curator Kathleen Ditzig
La Conversación del Hearth Otra perspectiva de la historia
Why did it take Singapore so long to mount an exhibition like this? The Nanyang artists were painting nudes decades ago.
Because there's a difference between artists making work and institutions displaying it. Those Balinese nudes were accepted as canon without anyone really examining why, or what that acceptance meant. The taboo wasn't about the art itself—it was about naming desire openly, about making it a subject worthy of serious public conversation.
The no-photography rule seems almost punitive. Why not let people document what they see?
It's actually the opposite. Photography lets you consume and move on. This rule forces you to sit with the work, to really look. In a world where everything gets flattened into an Instagram post, there's something radical about insisting on presence, on memory, on the analog act of seeing.
The curators kept talking about "parental care." That's an odd phrase for an adult exhibition.
It's not condescending. It's acknowledging that Singapore has real cultural sensitivities, real histories. You can be intellectually rigorous and still be respectful of where people are. The curators aren't trying to shock—they're trying to open a conversation that's been closed.
What does it mean that they had to negotiate with regulators for years?
It means the state still has a say in what counts as acceptable speech, even in art. The fact that they eventually said yes matters. But the fact that it took so long, that it required convincing—that tells you something about how much work remains.
The show includes a 14th-century sculpture of two Buddhas kissing. Why start so far back?
Because desire isn't modern. It's not Western. It's not new. By reaching back centuries, the curators are saying: this has always been part of human experience, part of Asian experience. You can't dismiss it as a contemporary import or a Western corruption. It's rooted here.