he National Gallery Singapore (NGS)’s latest survey on Chua Mia Tee, “Directing the Real,” and its 2020–21 Georgette Chen retrospective, “At Home in the World,” form a pair of counterpoints. The two exhibitions, of mid-20thcentury figures who loom large in Singapore’s established art-historical narrative, presented starkly divergent visions of the country in the pivotal years that led up to, and followed, its independence: Chua’s laboring bodies and palimpsestic urban textures contrast Chen’s academically inflected still-lifes and idyllic landscapes; his sensitivity to the subaltern condition and sociopolitical change, informed by a realist idiom, differs from her celebration of the tropical and the traditional, articulated through a picturesque visual language; his works possess an ideological heft, hers reflect formalist concerns. The work of one has aged better
