Raden Saleh and Juan Luna
The recent wonderful art exhibition at the National Gallery Singapore Between Worlds: Raden Saleh and Juan Luna, put together with great energy and thought by a team of curators there, led by Australian Russell Storer, made me ask three questions.
First: why have so few Australians heard of Saleh or Luna? They are two nineteenth century artists from Southeast Asia who achieved the most renown in the then centres of art power EVER for anyone from this part of the world, Australia included. They did this in Javanese Saleh’s colonial centre of the Netherlands and then Germany and France, and for the Filipino Luna, in Spain and to a degree also in France.
The only challengers for this statement would be post 1960 artists like Nam June Paik and Yoko Ono, and more recently Ai Wei Wei.
The answer is too obvious: we are still shockingly ignorant of the cultural history of our neighbours and no-one it seems wants to change this. I cannot imagine any museum in Australia being proactive enough in this area to put on this exhibition, and it is a shameful reality that no Australian collection was in the position to contribute to the Singapore showing (which draws from both public and private collections in Spain, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, the UK and the USA). One of the Gallery’s information panels shows the curatorial travel to borrow works from around the world—it highlights the truly global nature of these artists in their day.
Second: what does their experience teach us about our own? I don’t mean that we Australians know so little about our neighbours, rather, how they addressed what José Rizal, Luna’s