A major new exhibition at the National Gallery Singapore is shedding light on a largely forgotten chapter of art history, revealing how Asian artists played a crucial role in making interwar Paris the beating heart of the Western art world. "City of Others: Asian Artists in Paris, 1920s-1940s" presents more than 220 artworks and 200 pieces of archival material that tell the remarkable stories of artists from across Asia who helped define what we now know as the golden age of art.
The exhibition takes visitors back to the "années folles" – the crazy years of 1920s Paris – when the cafés of Montparnasse buzzed with an international community of artists, writers, and intellectuals. Among them were painters like Foujita Tsuguharu, the eccentric Japanese-French artist famous for his still-lifes, nudes, and cat portraits, who appears in century-old black and white footage projected on the gallery walls. This immersive approach helps transport viewers into a world where East met West in unprecedented ways.
Curators Phoebe Scott, Lisa Horikawa, Teo Hui Min, Roy Ng, and Cai Heng have organized the massive exhibition into seven thematic sections that explore different aspects of the Asian artistic experience in Paris. The title "City of Others" reflects a crucial reframing – rather than viewing these artists as outsiders in a Western city, the exhibition presents interwar Paris itself as fundamentally a city of foreigners, with nearly 10 percent of its population born abroad.
The first section, "Workshop to the World," examines how decorative arts and design influenced the broader art world, particularly through lacquer work. A quarter of the Indochinese workers living in Paris in the 1910s were employed lacquering propellers for World War I, leading to innovative hybrid art forms. Artists like Sougawara Seizo and Hamanaka Katsu collaborated with French designers while creating their own distinctive works – some of Hamanaka's pieces may be seen together for the first time since much of his work was lost during World War II.
"Theater of the Colonies" explores Paris as both the center of the French empire and a site of anti-colonial resistance. A standout piece comes from Nguyễn Ái Quốc, who would later become known as Ho Chi Minh, the revolutionary leader of Vietnam. His anti-imperialism cartoons include one showing a French passenger commanding an Indochinese rickshaw puller, with the wheel's spokes labeled "exploitation," "oppression," and "assimilation."
The "Spectacle and Stage" section focuses on dance, showing how Asian performance styles became popular in Paris venues through World and Colonial Expositions, sometimes in caricatured form but also providing spaces for authentic innovation. "Sites of Exhibition" traces where these artists displayed their work, from prestigious salons to commercial galleries, while "Studio and Street" delves into their daily lives through paintings of workspaces, cityscapes, and social gatherings.
Several artists appear throughout the exhibition like recurring characters in an epic story. Mai Trung Thứ's "Self Portrait with Cigarette" from 1940 shows him as a confident young dandy, eyebrow arched coyly. A decade later, another self-portrait reveals a more mature, contemplative figure gazing wistfully into the distance. Xu Beihong, known today as one of the four pioneers of Chinese art, appears first as "Ju Péon," a scholarship student photographed in the courtyard of the National School of Fine Arts, then later through his 1925 realist painting of his wife Jiang Biwei in European dress, and finally in a 1932 ink work that resembles traditional Chinese painting.
The exhibition skillfully demonstrates that artistic influence flowed in multiple directions, not just from Europe to Asia. Foujita painted nudes of white women because he considered it a strictly European tradition, but his precise, calligraphic brushwork created something entirely new. His "Reclining Nude" (1931) borrows a dramatic pose from Henry Fuseli's "The Nightmare" but renders it with sumi ink techniques that created distinctive white halos where oil paint pulled away from the water-based medium.
Cuban artist Wifredo Lam's encounter with Picasso's primitivism led him to declare his irritation that "African masks and idols were sold like jewelry" in Paris, prompting him to reclaim and re-embed Afro-Caribbean traditions within modernist visual language. Vietnamese painter Nguyễn Phan Chánh created some of the exhibition's most beautiful works on silk – traditionally a Chinese medium that he felt represented Vietnamese character. Ironically, when a French official suggested his work would be better received if it were "less monotonous in tone," the opposite proved true as Paris critics embraced his serene approach during the "return to order" movement following World War I.
The exhibition reveals complex networks of influence that defied simple geographical boundaries. Japan had annexed both Taiwan and Korea, so artists from all three nations mingled in Paris. Xu Beihong studied in Tokyo before coming to Singapore to establish a Chinese painting society and raise money for China's war against Japan – the same country he had once called home. Indian painter Umrao Singh Sher-Gil Majithia appeared in various self-portraits wearing different costumes, from loincloths to scholarly spectacles, embodying the self-fashioning common among expatriate artists.
His daughter, Hungarian-Indian painter Amrita Sher-Gil, captured this phenomenon perfectly in a quote featured in the exhibition: "Our long stay in Europe has aided me to discover, as it were, India. It seems paradoxical but I know for certain that had we not come away to Europe I should perhaps never have realized that a fresco from Ajanta or a small piece of sculpture in the Musée Guimet is worth more than the whole Renaissance!"
The exhibition doesn't shy away from the contradictions of this period, showing how France could simultaneously commit atrocities abroad while acquiring works by artists from those same regions. Contemporary art historian Jeannine Auboyer described painter Vũ Cao Đàm as "lost in the Parisian jungle," turning colonial language back on the imperial center. The Surrealists, including André Breton, organized a counter-exhibition called "The Truth About the Colonies" to protest the official Colonial Exposition, though it attracted only 4,000 visitors compared to the main exhibition's 8 million.
Innovative curatorial interventions bring the historical period to life without compromising the archival materials. A 1933 photograph of visitors to the Exhibition of Chinese Painting at Musée du Jeu de Paume has been enlarged to life-size, with a real vitrine containing an original catalog from that exhibition, complete with handwritten notes by Xu Beihong, taking the place of the display case in the photograph.
Many artists featured in the exhibition don't have clear trajectories, as their names and works have been lost due to war, displacement, or historical neglect. The show acknowledges these gaps with genuine mourning – some Vietnamese artisans' names are known only because the French government kept surveillance files on them. This sense of loss adds poignancy to the recovered stories and artworks that did survive.
The final section, "Aftermaths," chronicles the end of this golden age through the rise of fascism, the outbreak of World War II, and the dispersal of the international artistic community under nationalist violence. This sobering conclusion serves as a reminder that vibrant, pluralistic artistic communities are fragile and can be destroyed by political upheaval.
Running through August 17, the exhibition ultimately argues that the greatness of interwar Paris lay in its otherness – its openness to foreign influence and international exchange. As the current art world grapples with questions of inclusion and representation, this historical example offers both inspiration and warning about the conditions necessary for artistic innovation to flourish across cultural boundaries.
