Passion is Volcanic: Desire in Southeast Asian Art

Lavender Chang, Dissolving into the Same Breath #3, 2024. Fine art archival print on rice paper, 90 × 73 cm. Collection of the artist. Image courtesy of the artist.

 

 

Annabel Chong became a millennial icon for the 1995 film The World’s Biggest Gangbang, setting a record for having sex with 251 men in ten hours. According to this group exhibition about desire, the body, and sexuality in Southeast Asia, she wasn’t making porn, but art. We learn that Chong was a persona of the artist Grace Quek, and that both the sexual feat and the media appearances for publicity were parts of an extended performance. On display, here, are paraphernalia from the event, such as merch caps and T-shirts (“I was one of the 300!”).

 

Seeing Quek/Chong receive this institutional recognition gives me mixed feelings. On one level, it is gratifying to see female libido acknowledged as part of the spectrum of sexual self-expression. On another level, the lack of nuanced framing gives me pause. Desire, here, is framed as liberatory and its satisfaction inherently progressive: the show does not address how desire is structured by power. (The actual film is not included. Perhaps it would tell a less cheerful story.) Chong is a complicated figure: she embodies both agency and abjection. Although she is part of this panoramic and sex-positive exhibition, the exhibition smooths over the contradictions in her public image, and leaves little room for ambiguity.   

 

“Passion is Volcanic” is a celebratory catalog of, in its words, “how desire has been expressed, contested, and reimagined across different cultural and historical contexts.” Across seventy artworks from antiquity to the present, erotic desire is portrayed as a restless current running below, or explicitly powering, creative production in the region. It hides in metaphor, such as in Ahmad Zakii Anwar’s “Sixtynine” (2000), photorealistic paintings featuring suggestive arrangements of bananas. It is unleashed in libidinous dream languages in I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih’s Aku Disedot (I’m Being Sucked) (2000), where the limbs of a sinuous female morph into animals, while a bird’s beak drinks from her vagina.

 

This landmark show will be recognized for widening the space for what the Singaporean government calls “alternative lifestyles”—or non-heterosexual identities—to be represented in a national institution. The exhibition is divided into three parts. “Asian Mythos and Ritual” explores how the erotic has always been intertwined with the spiritual, while “Conventions of the Erotic” showcases the changing ways bodies and sensuality have been depicted in art, from classical nudes to abstracted figures.

 

The last, “Public Arenas/Private Interiors,” is the most inclusive, focusing on the increasing visibility of feminist and LGBTQ+ identities. Works in this section include a series of male nudes by Tan Peng, Singapore’s first publicly exhibited, openly gay artist, who came out in 1993, as well as Tiger Lily (2020) by transgender artist Marla Bendini, depicting the naked back of a woman who is transforming into a tiger. The section performs a delicate, conciliatory dance. It positively portrays artists as conversation-starters in conservative societies (“Artists navigated diverse sexual identifications and practices by bringing explicit imagery into public spaces for social awareness as well as political critique”), without making explicit mention of the repressive social regimes and environments that have persecuted sexual minorities.

 

The exhibition’s ambition and historical breadth is undeniable, but the story it tells about desire feels too pat, and sublimates its darker aspects. It wants to appear sexually progressive while avoiding harder questions around power and ideology. And when it tries to be titillating or shocking, it is at the expense of female bodies. In the first work of the show, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s video I’m Living (2002), the corpse of a young woman in a slip has been laid on the floor. Rasdjarmrearnsook places a dress over the body, tucking it in at the waist, smoothing the skirt out over the legs, as one might do with a doll, except that this body used to be a living person. Nothing is said about the woman’s identity or cause of death in the wall text, which describes the piece as a “sensuous engagement with the dead . . . drawing attention to the female body as a previously living being, brimming with potential and desire, and not just as a passive object for us to project our desires upon.” But does the performance do any better? It is recruiting a female body which is anonymous, vulnerable, and—most crucially in a show about desire—beyond consent.

 

The wider issue with the show is that desire is framed as a natural, universal force, an essentialist view that is not balanced by the analysis of desire as a construct produced and policed by power. Disturbingly, the exhibition title is drawn from Liu Kang’s 1953 essay “Trip to Bali,” in which the pioneering Chinese-born Singapore artist waxes lyrical about the Indonesian island and its topless women, and likens the passion of Balinese women to volcanoes. Liu was a key figure of the Nanyang school, a modern art movement that strove to depict Southeast Asian subject matter using painting idioms from both East and West. That 1952 trip to Bali, taken by a group of male artists, generated many paintings of local scenes which have since been criticized for their exoticization and objectification of Indigenous women. On view here is Liu’s Scene in Bali (1953), featuring naked women bathing in a river amid a green landscape with a temple and rice terraces in the background.

 

“Passion is Volcanic” is ultimately undecided on whether it wants to center or decenter patriarchal perspectives. It says yes to the male gaze, but also yes to the desire to decolonize that gaze. In a symptom of its indecision, the exhibition’s final artwork regresses to the infantile desire for the breast. Pinaree Sanpitak’s Noon-Nom (2016) is an installation featuring beanbag-sized cushions in the shape of breasts, closely packed together; one feels tempted to dive in like a kid into a ball pit. Sanpitak often casts the breast as a source of sustenance and maternal love. After evading the tensions of power and gender, the exhibition ends by returning desire to something soft, naturalized, and beyond politics: as if desire could flow as innocently as mother’s milk.