Tropical: Stories from Southeast Asia and Latin America

Tropical: Stories from Southeast Asia and Latin America brings together more than 200 artworks and primary documents by over 100 artists across the 20th century, tracing the cultural and conceptual conditions under which claims of vanguardism first emerged in the Global South. By attending to the manners in which words and images are organised on canvas, paper, film and wood, to sensations artists presented vis-à-vis histories of colonial subjugation, this exhibition catalogue offers insights into how even the most restrictive of conditions may experience the simultaneity of magic and realism, revolution and subversion. The so-called Tropical is a geographically expansive term that has always resisted precise definitions; its ability to entangle with all sorts of political and cultural desires has made it permanently plural and contradictory. The polyphonic nature of “stories” is adopted to enable both fiction and non-fiction, as well as philosophical, technological and mythical narratives. Beyond clime, this richly illustrated book ventures the tropical as a palpable, material, strategic, relational and radical space.

Publication Date: 14/11/2023
Audience: Adult
Imprint: National Gallery Singapore
Keywords: Latin American art, muralism, Southeast Asian art, contemporary art 
Author Biography: Shabbir Hussain Mustafa is Senior Curator at the National Gallery Singapore and Singapore Art Museum (SAM), where he builds links between the art of Southeast Asia and the world. From 2016 to 2022, he led the curatorium overseeing Between Declarations and Dreams, a multi-year exhibition at the National Gallery Singapore surveying Southeast Asian perspectives spanning the 20th century. At SAM, he heads the International Residencies and Learning programmes. In 2017, Mustafa received the DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Award for his curatorial work. Among numerous exhibitions, he also curated SEA STATE: Charles Lim Yi Yong for the Singapore Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale and The Sunwise Turn - A Meditation on Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy at the Dhaka Art Summit in 2018. He co-curated Latiff Mohidin: Pago Pago (1960–1969), an exhibition that was first held at the Centre Pompidou in 2018, and later at the Ilham Gallery and the National Gallery Singapore, and most recently Ho Tzu Nyen: Time and the Tiger, a mid-career survey for one of Singapore’s leading contemporary artists, which premiered at SAM in 2023. He writes often and is a member of the International Association of Art Critics.