Tang Da Wu

Biography

In 1980, dishes of earth, lumps of soil and pieces of linen stained with mud and water marks appeared at the National Museum Art Gallery in Singapore. Tang Da Wu had hung the cloth in the gullies of Ang Mo Kio, a construction site soon to become a public housing estate, and left it out in the sun and rain. The 2016 exhibition at the National Gallery Singapore, where the work was re-staged, is described as the first recorded instance of land art in the country.

He was born in Singapore in 1943 as Thang Kian Hiong, the eldest of four sons. His father was a journalist at the Chinese daily Sin Chew Jit Poh. The boy attended a Chinese-medium school, disliked English and mathematics, and liked to draw; his confidence grew when his school paintings were accepted for art competitions. He learned Malay and Chinese from the neighbourhood children.

In 1968 Tang was awarded a diploma in youth and community work by the National Youth Leadership Institute. In 1970, with the support of the Singapore Art Society, his first solo exhibition of drawings and paintings was held at the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry. He then went to the United Kingdom to study, choosing sculpture, and in 1974 graduated from Birmingham Polytechnic with a Bachelor of Fine Arts with first class honours. During those years he changed his name to Da Wu, which in Chinese means “big mist”. Later he returned to England and took advanced courses at Saint Martins School of Art; in 1985 he received a Master of Fine Arts from Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, and in 1988 a doctorate.

He returned to Singapore in 1979 and took up performance art.

In 1988 Tang founded The Artists Village in the rural district of Ulu Sembawang in the north of the island, at 61B Lorong Gambas. It was the first art colony in Singapore, conceived as a place for experimental art where artists could mature at their own pace. Amanda Heng, Zai Kuning, Juliana Yasin, Ahmad Mashadi and others moved there; many of them were among the first in the country to practise installation and performance art. Tang told the younger artists about developments in art outside Singapore, organised exhibitions and symposia, and arranged collaborations with the National Museum Art Gallery and with the 1992 Singapore Festival of the Arts. The art historian Sabapathy called the Village a beacon and Tang a catalyst and mentor. The colony lost its original site in 1990 to land development; in February 1992 it was registered as a non-profit society and now stages events in various public spaces.

His work deals with the environment, society and identity. “They Poach the Rhino, Chop Off His Horn and Make This Drink” dates from 1989. “Tiger’s Whip”, also known as “I Want My Penis Back” (1991), was first shown in Singapore’s Chinatown: ten life-sized tigers made of wire mesh covered with white linen. Among them Tang, in a sleeveless white garment, played the poacher, the tiger and the man consuming the tiger’s penis. At a sculpture seminar he organised that same year, the project became an installation with a single tiger pouncing on a rocking chair, trailing red fabric like a stream of blood. In February 1995 the Singapore Art Museum chose “Tiger’s Whip” to represent Singapore at the Africus International Biennale in Johannesburg. Another of his works in the museum’s collection, “Axe” (1991), is an axe with a plant growing out of its handle.

Tang also took up identity directly. In “I Was Born Japanese” (1995) he recalls that he was born during the Japanese Occupation and issued a Japanese birth certificate, later became a British national, a citizen of Malaysia after 1963 and a Singaporean after 1965.

In January 1994 the National Arts Council, Singapore’s state arts funding body, stopped funding unscripted performance art after a controversial performance by the artist Josef Ng. Tang and other performance artists began to work mostly abroad, and in Singapore some of their pieces were presented as dance or theatre. In August 1995, at Singapore Art ’95, an exhibition and sale of local artists’ work, he appeared in a black jacket with “Don’t give money to the arts” in yellow on the back and handed President Ong Teng Cheong a note: “I am an artist. I am important.” An aide-de-camp prevented him from speaking to the President. In 1999 he won the Arts and Culture Prize at the 10th Fukuoka Asian Culture Prizes, among other things for his originality and influence on performance art in Southeast Asia. The council reversed its funding ban in September 2003.

In 2007 Tang was one of four artists representing Singapore at the Venice Biennale. His installation “Untitled” included two beds standing upright, trunks of plantain trees, a portable ancestral altar, and a handmade album of drawings and photographs; drawings of faces were strapped to the beds and wrapped around the trunks. The sounds recorded in Venice over a single day were prepared by his son, Zai Tang. That same year the Queensland Art Gallery acquired for its Gallery of Modern Art a work of ink paintings around a well, about the erosion of village communities by urban development. His work is also in the collection of the Guggenheim Museum. In 2017 Tang founded the performance group Station House Da Opera, which brought together more than sixty art educators, students and local artists.