Miss Pleasurable's company
WALKING into an art gallery is much like entering a peep show theatre in London or Amsterdam. There is always the prospect of seeing naked bodies either hanging on the wall or hanging about in a glass cubicle.
But looking at naked bodies in art is quite unlike looking at them on, say, a porn Web site. There is no need to be furtive about nudes in oil, acrylic or watercolour. In the name of artistic appreciation, you and I -- dirty old men and randy young men alike -- can oggle as long as we wish, over lifesized Miss Pleasurable and other unclad beauties in all their painted glory. You just make sure your erection is not obvious through the folds of your trousers.
One evening, after work, while waiting at a bus stand in front of the somewhat domineering Singapore Ministry of Information and the Art (MITA) building, I suddenly recalled that the interior of this former British colonial police station now houses several art galleries. As the evening was still bright, and I knew there would be naked ladies on display, I decided to walk in and feast on some art.
If a gallery has Balinese oil paintings, I can enjoy tan beauties in floral sarong and elaborate hairdo, showing off their piece de resistance: perky, well-rounded breasts with cherry-dark nipples. I haven't been to Bali yet, but I don't suppose the women there walk around in public with exposed cherries. Neither would they be bathing and frolicking unclothed in a crystalline stream by a waterfall, as depicted in those 1950s oils that currently sell for anything from $10,000.
If I were to have $10,000 to throw away, I might as well spend it on a gaggle of warm bodies who would probably charge me no more than $150 an hour of pleasure (in Bangkok, I was told, $100 could get you two hours of body massage and sex with a partner that you could pick from a room-sized glass tank of beauties).
Singapore's best-known artist Liu Kang and some of his contemporaries spent years living and painting in Bali and the happy result is a display of countless nudes doing their hair, bathing in a stream or putting on a sarong skirt. I am dead sure the artists -- all dead now -- had also taken their fill of the warm bodies posing as models.
Inside the MITA building was a courtyard, covered by a transparent sunroof to keep in the airconditioning and keep out Singapore's creativity-sapping heat and humidity. Facing the courtyard are the galleries but most have already closed for the day, except Gajah, a name that sounded familiar. Years ago, as a self-designated, pretentious art reviewer for the Straits Times newspaper, I had visited a gallery of the same name but it was then at Newton Circus, next to the cluster of greasy fried Hokkien mee food stalls.
In the new gallery, a tall, skinny, flat-chested girl called Karen assured me this was indeed the same Gajah re-located from Newton Circus. Inside were Balinese paintings by a Paramartha, but the female forms were dreamscape figures in gold, red and yellow. They look fuzzy and very unerotic. There could be no posibility of a dirty old man buying one of the paintings to hang in his bedroom for inspiration while masturbating or mounting his wife.
In another part of the gallery were huge lacquer-on-wood paintings by a Vietnamese artist Ho Huu Thu. I was struck by a bigger-than-life vertical panel entitled "the Buddha", showing a slender, feminine-like figure pushing apart two dark patches, probably representing basic ignorance or the folds of a vagina. Other lacquer paintings showed women in various langourous poses. The shimmering patches on the paintings were actually gold leaf rubbings, said Karen.
Ho's paintings glowed under the spotlight but even when Karen switched off the lamps, they were still luminious in the dim shadows. The dreamline figures seem to come from the dream portal that is opened in sleep. Other than such decorative but gimmicky impressions, I couldn't figure out what Ho was trying to express.
As I walked out of the building, I turned back and noticed in the falling darkness a naked woman under the spotlight behind the glass door of Gajah Gallery. According to details from the gallery's Web site, the piece of art was entitled "Miss Pleasurable", by a Singaporean, Aaron Teo. Standing in the gathering shadow of the porch, I pulled out my digital camera from my bag and took a parting shot of Miss Pleasurable, in her inviting pose.
--Francis Chin, August 24, 2004
Miss Pleasurable in Gajah Gallery, acrylic on canvas, 2004 by Singapore artist Aaron Teo.
