Gao Yi Yuan. What is this?
Tony Godfrey. It is a website of interviews with artists in the Philippines – and beyond.
Over the past few years, and especially when researching my most recent book The Story of Contemporary Art (published 2020 Thames and Hudson/MIT) which was an attempt at a global perspective, I had become aware of how few interviews there are on the web with Asian artists, whereas there are so many for artists in the West. Google, for example, Kiki Smith or Sophie Calle and you can find several interviews with each. But do the same for their equivalents in South-east Asia and you are unlikely to find anything. Artists from this region are strangely voiceless. I want to do something about that.
GYY. Why a website? I associate you with books and essays printed in traditional paper catalogues or in magazines.
TG. Books, websites and email do different things. My books take years to research and write. Even when I have finished the publisher will take over a year to prepare, design and print it. With my series of email “letters” Tuesday in the Tropics (2014-2020), I wanted to send informal up-to-date reports of what I saw. With a website it is out there quickly, accessible to all interested and free. Something to hopefully interest people who know little of what goes on in this area – and a resource for future researchers.
Also, with a website I can be more generous with words and images than any book or magazine. How often do you read an interview longer than 1,500 words?
GYY. Rarely! These interviews are long and also retrospective, not just about an artist’s recent work!
TG. In the UK, where I come from all these artists would have been given retrospectives, or survey exhibitions in public galleries. We would know something about their past, the development of their work. But the museums and galleries that do that in the UK don’t exist in the Philippines and elsewhere. So their work remains desperately under-documented.
GYY. You live in The Philippines now, but you used to live in Singapore. Do you plan to interview artists there too?
TG. I hope so, when travelling get easier and if someone will cover my air fare! And hopefully also to Indonesia and Malaysia where I used to visit regularly– Maritime South-east Asia. There is fantastic art being made in all those countries.
GYY. These first six interviews were all done by email or messenger in 2021. Would you normally interview people live and record it?
TG. Of course, in their studio, but with Covid-19 at its height “talking” remotely was advisable. Also, they were all people I had worked with just before the pandemic. That made it easier to “chat” in a relaxed way.
GYY. One thing, before you go the first six interviews were published by Mizuma gallery in Singapore where the five artists were shown in an exhibition you curated in late 2021. Can you say something about the exhibition? You called it “After the Storm”?
TG. Yes, it is, but it turned out to be a poor choice of titles. It would have been better to call it “News from an occupied country”. From 1940 to 1944 if you were a person in Britain or the USA and one interested in art that was what you were desperate for: news from Paris, then the acknowledged centre for advanced art, and under Nazi occupation. What were Picasso, Matisse and the other great masters doing? And, of course, if you knew people in either Singapore or the Philippines both then occupied by the Japanese army you were desperate for news from them too. In 1944 the first destination for many people on entering liberated Paris was the studio of Picasso. One of the first exhibitions mounted in London when peace finally came was of Picasso and Matisse – we wanted to catch up.
Cut off, save by the Internet, from the rest of the world since March last year by COVID the Philippines has felt like an occupied country.
Alas, my title for this exhibition, “After the Storm” chosen a year ago in April, proved to be unduly optimistic! The storm, that is to say the pandemic, has never blown stronger in the Philippines than when this exhibition opened. By August Manila had gone back into lockdown. Throughout the summer the Delta variant spread inexorably. The hospitals were, and are, overflowing, the medical staff exhausted and disillusioned. Despite almost everyone wearing masks in public plus face-shields in shops and enclosed spaces, the scarcity of vaccines has left the population vulnerable. With the developing nations hogging the vaccines, it has taken painful months to get more than twenty per cent of adult Filipinos vaccinated. Many artists were taken ill, several seriously. There has, I am glad to say been no equivalent surge for Omicron.
However, this wasn’t an exhibition about Covid-19, but about how artists survived the pandemic. Since April last year I asked the five artists these questions: “What work will we make now for after the pandemic? Has the pandemic just meant a nice quiet time in the studio or some angst? Will we just carry on as we did before, or is there some change that the events of the last year and the current situation will make us take?”
Their unspoken response was to make new work for this exhibition. The artists have never stopped working: some found they could spend longer in the studio, as suddenly there were no distractions or social obligations they had to attend. Others could not get to their studio and had to work in their kitchen. Not surprisingly all but one of the artists included drawings or paper works in this show. Perhaps, above all, work made in the pandemic is marked by intimacy and thoughtfulness.
GYY. Thanks Tony. Good luck with this project. I hope to see you soon.
(Gao Yi Yuan is a writer based in Singapore.)