Bali 1952: Through the Lens of Liu Kang
- Description
- About the Author
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In 1953, four China-born artists who had made their home in Singapore held an exhibition titled Bali. It was a sensation. The works were inspired by their sketching trip to Java and Bali in June and July the previous year. While the exhibition is recognised as a major milestone in Singapore's art history, few details of the trip have ever been revealed. Thanks to the discovery of over 1,000 photographs taken by Liu Kang during the seven-week adventure, the chronicle of their travels can now be told. With over 250 black-and-white photographs, fleshed out by Liu Kang's private diary, letters to his wife and other archival sources, this book tells the story of an inspiring journey that left a lasting legacy on Singapore's art history. With an artist's eye, Liu Kang focused his lens on landscapes, architecture and scenes of daily life that preserve a moment in time, and captured the dignity of individuals in portraits. The painterly photographs are a time capsule of Indonesian history.
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Gretchen Liu is a writer and an independent scholar with an interest in visual culture and heritage. A former journalist, she commissioned and edited one of the first books on Singapore's visual heritage, A Vision of the Past: A History of Early Photography in Singapore and Malaya: The Photographs of G R Lambert & Co., 1880–1910 by John Falconer (1987). She has written Pastel Portraits: Singapore's Architectural Heritage (1984); In Granite and Chunam: The National Monuments of Singapore (1996); From the Family Album: Photographs from the Lee Brothers Studio, Singapore 1910–1925 (1995) and Singapore: A Pictorial History 1819–2000 (1999). She was involved in the restoration of Raffles Hotel in the early 1990s as the in-house historian and penned several books on its history. Most recently, she has been researching the early life of her father-in-law Liu Kang, a journey that has taken her deep into early 20th-century Chinese art history. In 2018, she collaborated with the Liu Haisu Art Museum in Shanghai on an exhibition of photographs, Art with Audacity 艺气风发, documenting the 60-plus years of friendship between Liu Kang and the Chinese artist Liu Haisu.
Cover Type: Hardcover
Page Count: 312
Year Published: 2025
Language: English