80-year-old famed Singaporean artist Tang Da Wu on curiosity and being real with audiences as his latest solo exhibition opens | South China Morning Post
2023-08-14 15:30

In a corner of Singapore’s ShanghART Gallery, 80-year old artist Tang Da Wu crouches down gingerly and smears orange earth onto the gallery walls using his fingers. Dressed in a torn shirt and frayed army trousers, he cuts an unassuming figure.

As the Singaporean works quietly, a crowd swells around him. Eventually a raw sketch of a snake strangling a boat emerges into view.

The performance is part of his solo exhibition titled “3, 4, 5, I Don’t Like Fine Art”.

“There’s no pre-drawing. I’m taking a risk. I like to embarrass myself,” he says, grinning.

One of Singapore’s most prominent artists, Tang has been holding audiences rapt since the 1970s with his spontaneous street performances and sprawling installations addressing urgent social and environmental issues.

“Tang Da Wu is important for many reasons. He introduced fresh art forms and movements to the Singaporean and regional audience,” says Goh Chun Aik, director of ShanghART Singapore. He was also the driving force behind The Artists Village (TAV), an experimental collective and artists’ colony which emerged in Sembawang, in Singapore’s North Region, in 1988.

At a time when the local art scene was relatively conservative and most artists were focused on modernist, abstract painting and sculpture, Tang created a radically different environment where artists were free to question traditional forms of artmaking.

Tang has fond memories of the village, which was located in a forested enclave filled with durian trees, farm animals and snakes – the latter of which inspired his recent performance.

“There was a snake in my unconscious,” he explains. “I used to see them every day in the artist village and in my dreams too.”

The instinctive wall painting – made from earth he dug from various places, including Sembawang – sets the tone for the rest of the works in the exhibition, which have a raw aesthetic.

“We often think about fine art as making a finished object but Tang Da Wu’s entire career has been about resisting that. He is unconventional,” says Bridget Tracy Tan, director for the Institute of Southeast Asian Arts and Art Galleries at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts.

Tan has worked with Tang for several years. “His work is genuine and down-to-earth. It can connect with everyone.”

The exhibition opens with a life-size humanoid body roughly rendered in wire and plaster, holding on to what looks like a giant metal feather. The figure represents Tang doing a tai chi pose called “grasp the bird’s tail”.

“I borrowed this idea to share what I embrace since the early days until now, which is innocence and curiosity – like a child,” he says.

“This show is not about art theory or anything so clever. It’s about my own growth and how I see the world in my own simple way.”

The feather is meant to look like the tail of a grey spotted bird that Tang often encountered at night in the ’80s while living in TAV.

A poignant metal sculpture of the bird’s head with its beak open sits nearby on the floor, surrounded by a cluster of mirrored polyhedrons symbolising tears. The head is emerging from a cluster of thick wooden trunks woven together in a cage of sorts that appear to trap it.

“I made this story when we left The Artist Village that the bird is crying and asking ‘where are my children?’” he says. He explains that the piece laments the forced closure of the village by the government, who repossessed the land just two years later.

Tang set up TAV after spending almost 20 years in the UK, where he was exposed to various experimental art practices.

Besides studying sculpture at the Birmingham Polytechnic (now part of Birmingham City University’s faculty of arts, design and media) and Saint Martin’s School of Art (now Central Saint Martins), he took courses at eight other schools, immersing himself in various forms of art making, including bronze casting, lithography, sound art and dance.

To make ends meet, he worked as a cleaner, waiter, baker and teacher.

Over time, he naturally gravitated towards performance art as he wanted to engage with people directly.

“When I perform, I have the audience there immediately … Even if they throw rotten eggs. It happens there. That’s a beautiful, immediate response,” he says.

“I might say something wrong or do something silly in front of my audience, but you cannot change it. That is so precious for an artist. That is so real.”

Upon returning to Singapore in 1979, he was something of a black sheep in the city’s conservative art scene.

When he exhibited Gully Curtains (1979) at the National Museum Art Gallery in 1980, it was shut down after three days. A form of land art, the installation was made by dipping fabric into the deep gullies that formed near his home due to soil erosion – a statement against rapid urbanisation in the city.

“I didn’t get appreciated,” he says. “The director said earth and lumps of clay shouldn’t be in the museum.”

But Tang was undeterred. He later founded TAV, where he continued to experiment freely creating ephemeral works – often drawing from nature – amid like-minded artists including Chng Seok Tin, Jailani Kuning, Vincent Leow and Tang Mun Kit.

He recalls holding a 24-hour group exhibition called “The Time Show” on New Year’s Eve at TAV in 1989.

“I started at 8am [doing] so-called ‘dancing’ on the pond, which was impossible – there were a few plants I could stand on, but of course I fell into the water,” he laughs.

His later performances were protests of sorts against environmental damage and animal endangerment.

For Tiger’s Whip (1991), he dragged a life-size papier-mâché tiger sculpture around Singapore’s Chinatown to protest the killing of the animals for their penises, used in traditional Chinese medicine as an aphrodisiac.

Later, when he was shocked to discover that whale gelatin was used to make film cellulose for photography, he created Sorry Whale, I Didn’t Know That You Were in My Camera (1994) at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, in Japan.

For the piece, he collected thousands of film canisters and put them on the floor surrounding an 18-metre-long (59-foot) wire sculpture of a whale torso.

“I put a note outside the gallery saying if you want to cooperate, knowing the poor whale suffered and died for our photography, pick up a film capsule, tape it to the body and say ‘sorry’ to the whale.”

Over the years he has continued to involve audiences in visceral performances and workshops.

In 2017, he started the performance art group Stichen Haus da Opera (now called La Tristesse Opera), working with some 60 art educators, students and artists.

He also continues to teach, something he has done since the ’70s.

“Teaching goes together with making. It’s important to me. [Working with students] is always very stimulating, new and fresh.”

The same can be said for his practice as he constantly pushes himself to experiment.

His influence and approach in Singapore’s art scene are encapsulated by one of the works in the new show: a pair of giant mud-stained paper legs that appear to pierce through the gallery walls.

Tang explains it is his take on the Greek philosopher Heraclitus’ statement that “no one ever steps in the same river twice” – because it is not the same river and not the same person.

“I must always do things that I never did before,” he says, gesturing around him. “Risk and failure are always coming, but I like that. It’s very real. I don’t like anything familiar and smooth going. No, that doesn’t excite me.”



“Tang Da Wu: 3, 4, 5, I Don’t Like Fine Art”, ShanghART Gallery, 9 Lock Road, #02-22, Gillman Barracks, Singapore, Wed-Sun, 12pm-6pm. Until Oct 1.

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