The Misunderstood Trip That Led to the 1953 Landmark Art Exhibition

Gretchen
They were all working as schoolteachers. They taught art in the Chinese schools. So, you know, there’s one quote in Liu Kang’s oral history where he laments that, you know, they have to make a living as art teachers, so nobody really thinks of them as proper artists. And I think this Bali trip actually was some kind of affirmation that the public reaction and the interest in everything, I think for them as artists, it was probably a great personal affirmation for their own particular artistic practices.

[Music playing]

Jimmy
You’re listening to BiblioAsia+, a podcast produced by the National Library of Singapore. At BiblioAsia, we tell stories about Singapore’s past. Some familiar, others forgotten, all fascinating.

In 1952, four friends decided to go on a trip to Indonesia, to Java, and to Bali. This wasn’t a holiday though. The four men were artists, and they were looking to be inspired by the landscape, the culture, and the people there, especially in Bali. The trip was everything they had hoped for and more. The next year, the four men, Liu Kang, Chen Chong Swee, Chong Soo Pieng and Chen Wen Hsi, held an exhibition.

This exhibition has since been hailed as a landmark in the history of art in Singapore. The four go on to become famous and the trip eventually recedes into the distance, its details only hazily remembered. Fast forward some six decades and writer Gretchen Liu stumbles on an old shoebox in the study of Liu Kang, her late father-in-law.

In the box, she discovers about 1,000 photographs that he had taken during that trip. The discovery of that time capsule is the basis of a new book, accompanying the exhibition about that trip to Bali and Java. Today in the studio, we have with us the writer of that book, Gretchen Liu. A former journalist and independent scholar, she’s also written several books related to different aspects of Singapore’s visual history and heritage.

So welcome to the studio, Gretchen. How are you?

Gretchen
Thank you, Jimmy. I’m fine, thank you. Glad that the project is over.

Jimmy
It’s been a very long journey.

Gretchen
Yeah, intense, intense, yes.

Jimmy
Okay, before we start, pretend I’m not very bright and I don’t know a lot. Why should anyone be interested in this 1953 exhibition that the four artists put up?

Gretchen
Okay, well, you know, Singapore has a relatively short art history. And over the last couple of decades, scholars have begun to sort of unravel what happened, you know, during the colonial era and then coming into independence and so forth.

A lot of scholars have, you know, been very interested in this 1953 exhibition because at the time that it was held, it was a sensation. It had a lot of publicity. It was actually four artists who were living here. They weren’t white expats from elsewhere. And the kind of art that they produced was something that the local audiences had never seen.

Although the exhibition was relatively short, just over a week, it was very well attended and very widely covered in the press. As I said, many art historians refer to this as a milestone in Singapore art history.

All this art was produced after the seven-week trip to Java and Bali the previous year, and some scholars have said, “Oh, they were in Bali for three months.” Somebody wrote that they were there for six months. Nobody really knows very much about the trip itself.

Jimmy
And the reason for that is because it’s all just been overshadowed just by the exhibition. And so the trip was just seen as...

Gretchen
These four artists, you know, by the 1980s were being referred to as Singapore pioneering artists.

Jimmy
That’s right.

Gretchen
And, you know, they slowly passed away and so their era kind of became, you know, more distant and more historical. And so it just kind of faded from memory. In fact, you know, in a way, the irony is that the exhibition was called Bali. And that very few people, I think even scholars realised actually that they had spent a considerable amount of time in Java. So, you know, whatever archives the four artists had, everything just kind of sat there and including in Liu Kang’s study.

Jimmy
So basically no one had thought to look into this?

Gretchen
I think if they thought to, they wouldn’t find very much information. And that’s because so much of it was in Liu Kang’s study.

Jimmy
Right.

Gretchen
But, you know, I have to say that during the trip, you know, the four artists, three of them did carry cameras. So it wasn’t just Liu Kang. Chen Chong Swee, who was also a very avid photographer, carried a Leica, and Cheong Soo Pieng carried a camera as well. Now Cheong Soo Pieng – we don’t know what camera he had. But Chen Chong Swee, many of his photos have survived, and in the course of researching this book, I’ve been able to sort of work with his family and see what has survived and some things are included in the book and exhibition.

But the thing about Liu Kang’s photographs is that we actually have the original negatives. And the day before departure, Liu Kang actually bought a brand new Rolleiflex camera, an expensive one.

Jimmy
Right.

Gretchen
And as he went along, he developed the film during the trip. But it’s really the quality of these negatives, which is so extraordinary, and enables us to reproduce them.

You can reproduce the photo, you know, to fill a whole wall if you want, because the quality of the image is so, so strong. And so that makes them a very kind of special encapsulation of, you know, of the trip.

Jimmy
Okay, I’ve seen some of these photos and they’re really amazing, but how did you stumble on these photographs, this whole shoebox thing, which sounds like a cliche, right? It’s a shoebox.

Gretchen
Well, you know, of course, my father-in-law. I knew the trajectory of his life and so on, but rather superficially. He passed away in 2004. He actually was the last of the four artists to pass away, outliving them by quite a few years. But it was only really in 2011 that I started to get interested in the trajectory of his early life.

And that was because I started to go to China often, especially to Shanghai. And I knew he had studied art in Shanghai in like the ’20s and ’30s, but I didn’t know very much. But I was so intrigued by Shanghai, and I thought, “Oh my gosh, my father-in-law was here when all of these interesting things were happening. I really have to find out more.”

And then in 2011, there was a major retrospective of his artwork at the then Singapore Art Museum, and they produced a book, Colourful Modernist. And then at that time, I still wasn’t involved, but the curators had gone to the family home and kind of scrolled through some materials and produced some archival photos that I had never seen, and that also triggered my interest.

So at first I was really focused on Liu Kang’s life in Shanghai, and especially I found out he had these amazing friendships with two individuals. who are, you know, important cultural figures in early 20th century China. So I did a lot of work with, you know, kind of researching that and trying to kind of understand more deeply, connecting with the families of these two individuals and, you know, kind of going very deeply into also the art education he had. Because not only did he study in Shanghai, but he, after his time in France, went back to Shanghai and taught at the Singapore Art Academy.

And then in 2016, it was when the family started to think about, “Oh, what are we going to do with all this material in the study?” It’s been sitting there since his passing. And my sister-in-law was living in the house, and I said I would help her and we had to think about what to do with the material. I went a couple of times to just kind of do some preliminary investigation, and it was on one of those visits that I opened the cupboard and you know, it’s literally at the back of a cupboard and it’s an old Bata shoebox and quite, you know, fragile and, and I lifted it out and then I opened it and there are all these little envelopes, and it turns out that the brown envelopes held the negatives and then the pink envelopes held like the contact prints. And the Rolleiflex negative is 6-by-6 cm.

Jimmy
It’s very distinctive.

Gretchen
Yeah, very distinctive. And. I’m a little bit overwhelmed, so I put the cover back on and I took everything home. And it was only kind of during COVID that I took the box out. And by then we had found some other boxes, small boxes of yet more photographs that I started to kind of go through them. And, I started to think, “Wow, this is really quite amazing.” And finally, because I’ve done books related to visual history, I thought, well, I can do something with this. I should do something and I should figure out how to present this and get it out there. So that was sort of started me on this journey.

Jimmy
What makes these photos special?

Gretchen
Well, I would say the first thing is that the quantity. There’s actually over 1,000.

Jimmy
Wow, that’s a lot.

Gretchen
It’s kind of difficult to do a complete count, because I had to match the negatives and the contact print. So sometimes there’ll be a negative, but no contact print. And then sometimes there are some prints that have no negatives.

Those pictures might not have even been taken by Liu Kang, but by someone else and he has the image. Basically they’re over 1,000. And of those 1,000, I had about 700 scanned at high resolution. Then the second thing is that, you know, it’s really a buried treasure, because nobody has ever seen these photographs before, and they are literally a visual diary of the trip.

Fortunately Liu Kang captioned. [He] put the envelopes that he kept the negatives in and some, he had like specific place names. There’s Jakarta or Bandung or whatever. But then he also had envelopes that had a generic temple. So it took a lot of effort to kind of figure out what’s what.

But I think the other thing is, you know, it’s the quality of the images. Now, although they’d sat there for 70 years and, you know, in a relatively humid environment, the images are intact and, you know, there’s some kind of loss or there’s some staining or whatever. But this doesn’t really detract from the images themselves.

So as I said, you know, they really are very, very sharp. And so for the book, for example, we did not crop anything. And in a way at the beginning, I thought, well, let’s treat these photographs like artwork. So each photo is like a composition. So you really are seeing, you know, Java and Bali through the lens of Liu Kang. So it’s definitely like his perspective, his point of view.

Jimmy
There are two things, right? So, I mean, these photos are one capturing, you know, what eventually turns out to be an important part of Singapore’s art history, but it’s also a time capsule of what Java and Bali looked like in 1958.

Gretchen
Exactly, exactly. Well, that’s another reason why they’re of interest. I did make a trip to Bali that was in September 2023, and I had made some like photocopies and organised them in an album. And I was able to meet several Balinese who are very interested in their history and so on. And they appeared to be quite fascinated by the photos.

I mean, I could see by the way that they were looking at them, it’s a very particular era in the history of Bali and Java. So I could tell. And then, you know, I met a series of people and sort of at one point while they’d be looking through [the photos and], they’d say, “Oh, we should have an exhibition of these photos in Bali.”

So I knew that, that they were of interest to people. I mean, that was very key to know that they found them interesting. And then subsequently, I was lucky to meet some Balinese scholars who are very deeply into their visual heritage. And they were able to help me like identify places and so on. So, that was very important to me that there was interest from Balinese.

Jimmy
So in the book, you write about the four artists and their trip through Bali and Java. Why is that important?

Gretchen
Okay, so the thing is, another extraordinary discovery. So it turns out that Liu Kang kept a diary for roughly the first half of the trip. So he bought like a steno notebook, and he bought it in Jakarta, the day of arrival, he even mentions that on like the first day they go to this bookshop and, and so then he’s recording.

And he recorded the people he met, where they went, in extraordinary detail. So that’s from like the 9th of June, they left Singapore on the 8th of June, 1952. So from the 9th until the 29th of June, he records their journey.

And then after that, the diary’s empty. So that diary remains with the family, but I had to translate it into English and quote from it. And then there were the letters home. Not only Liu Kang’s letters, but also Chen Chong Swee’s. And these letters also offer a lot of interesting information about the journey and you know, there’s descriptions or references and so on.

So this made it possible to really reconstruct in enormous detail the trip because through these letters and we learn. You know, and then putting the letters and the photographs and everything, piecing the whole trip together. For example, one of the very new facts that’s revealed in the book and the exhibition is that they had two kind of artists-in-residence period. Once they got to Bali, they were able to arrange to go somewhere for one week in a kind of village on the outskirts of Denpasar, where there was a woman, a famous dancer in fact who helped them to hire, like, probably neighbourhood girls to model so that they could do life drawing.

And then later in July, they actually spent a week in Ubud and they had made arrangements with Tjokorda, the head of the sort of ruling Ubud family to stay there. And that’s where they sort of imbibed the Balinese countryside because the area around there has the terraced rice fields and the kind of classic Bali landscape and whatever.

So that is a hitherto unknown fact, that they actually were able to kind of, you know, have these two sessions, where they focused specifically on art. And between that, then, they did a lot of travelling around the island.

Jimmy
So it really sounds like, you know, the book and the exhibition is very valuable because in addition to seeing all these photographs, you have details that people never knew at all. I’m sure the artists, in fact, probably forgot about.

Gretchen
I think they did. You know, we’re able to reproduce quite a detailed itinerary, and I think one of the things that really surprised me was, they arrived in Jakarta on a Sunday evening, and they didn’t have a plan in place.

They were kind of relying on people to help them, and they had contacts in Jakarta. There was a lot of spontaneity to the trip. And the thing that is so amazing is like, is the kindness of strangers that in the places they met, the places they went, they met people who, you know, who helped them to make arrangements and transport, you know, giving them advice about how to organise themselves and where to go, who to meet and whatever.

So really, the kindness of strangers and this whole spontaneous quality, I think that hopefully will come out very much in the text that I wrote to accompany the photographs.

Jimmy
In fact, I think I remember reading that even when they arrived in Jakarta, they had to rely on the kindness of a stranger, right?

Gretchen
Well, because they knew they had two contacts in Jakarta who had both been members of the Society of Chinese Artists in Singapore in the ’30s and ended up post-war living in Jakarta. We know that from the letters and so forth that Liu Kang had actually sent them like a registered letter. The whole trip came together very last minute. They were stateless. They had to apply.

Jimmy
All four of them were stateless?

Gretchen
Yeah, they were stateless. You know, they had to apply for the paper to travel from the British authorities. But they also had to get a re-entry permit and they’re dated like June 4th, so that’s how quickly the trip came. And Liu Kang bought his camera on the 7th of June, just the day before they left.

But anyway, so Liu Kang posted a letter to these two men who were actually publishing a periodical called Nanyang Post that was an illustrated periodical in Chinese and Bahasa, and it had quite a wide distribution in Southeast Asia. But these two people failed to show up, so they were bereft, but a stranger on the plane kind of gave them a tip on where to go to stay, brought them to a hotel, treated them to dinner, and even loaned them money.

Jimmy
Wow. Okay.

Gretchen
And then the next day, and then the next day, they made a beeline to the office of this Nanyang Post. And, you know, Liu Kang says that these two men, Yang Yongkui and Xu Junlian, were just shocked to see them. Shocked. And then as it turned out, the registered letter arrived later that day.

Jimmy
Wow. Okay.

Gretchen
So, I mean, that was like the beginning of the trip.

Jimmy
But this is great, right? This is why, when you have the details, it really brings these things to life. It’s not just, they went to Bali for, for seven weeks.

Gretchen
No, there’re a lot of wonderful stories. Little, little anecdotes, I mean, about how, you know, they had one plan and then they changed it or, how did they actually get from Java to Bali, you know. So there’s a lot of little details that have been, you know, we’ve been able to sort of like bring to life.

Jimmy
Okay. I’m very glad that you’ve done that. You also, in the book, place the trip, in the larger context of the artists’ lives and times? Can you elaborate a little bit about that?

Gretchen
Okay, these four artists went to Bali, and we have the details of the trip, but actually, how did it come about and, you know, why? So these are the threads that really started to kind of like fascinate me.

So, you know, I write about the four China-born artists and their own personal stories and how they ended up in Singapore. You know, the oldest was Chen Wen Hsi.

Jimmy
How old was he?

Gretchen
He was born, I can’t remember off the top of my head. But he was the oldest, 1906, maybe? The youngest was Cheong Soo Pieng. He was born in 1917.

But Chen Wen Hsi only arrived in Singapore in 1949. So he was the newest to Nanyang and kind of Southeast Asian culture. Whereas Chen Chong Swee had been in Singapore from like the early ’30s and Liu Kang had spent time as a child in Muar where his family had settled then gone abroad. And then after World War II returned to Singapore and Cheong Soo Pieng came to Singapore just after World War II.

So each one had his own story and in 1949 of course, the People’s Republic of China was founded and, you know, overseas Chinese found themselves sort of more or less cut off, right? So, there was no opportunity for them to do like a sketching trip to their motherland. Then you have their art education. So this whole notion of life drawing and sort of outdoor sketching, that in China kind of originates in these Western-oriented art academies that opened during the Republican era in the 1920s and so on.

So, all four artists had studied in Shanghai. Three of them had graduated from the Xin Hua Art Academy, the fourth, the youngest, Cheong Soo Pieng, had gone to study in Shanghai from Fujian, in the Art Academy, but unfortunately he was there in 1937 when the Japanese bombed Shanghai and the Japanese bombs actually destroyed the campus of the Xin Hua Art Academy. So he ended up going back to Fujian, and then ultimately, doing other things there. So each of them have their own, you know, aesthetic sensibility and their own kind of approach to art.

But, very interestingly in 1951, they held a joint exhibition in Singapore. Now there’s the Society of Chinese Artists, which was formed in the ’30s. But in the late ’40s, the Singapore Art Society, a multiracial kind of art society was formed. They were the sponsors of this four-man exhibition. So right from then, in the public eye, somehow these four artists are sort of associated as sort of a group.

So, you know, like you might have in France, you’ve got the Surrealists or the Impressionists or whatever. But somehow these four artists somehow became kind of connected in the public mind. And that was reinforced then by this trip. And eventually then they became known as, you know, it’s not like an official term or anything, but we now refer to them as this pioneering generation of artists.

So that’s one thread, but the other thread is what’s happening in Southeast Asia because, you know, you have the Malayan emergency starting in the late ’40s when the Malayan Communist Party is fighting against the British colonialists, and there’s a lot of violence. And so for the overseas Chinese community in Singapore, there’s some restrictions on travelling.

So you’re cut off from like Malaya, you can’t go on a sketching trip to Malaya anymore so easily. The artists are stateless; they have to apply for paperwork [to travel]. Well, I think by, by the early ’50s, when things are settling down, they’re just kind of so keen to have some new inspiration. Now, Indonesia, of course, it had its own decade of troubles with, you know, it was occupied by the Japanese during World War II.

And then subsequently, you know, the Indonesian fight for independence from the Dutch. And that ended in 1949. They were all working as schoolteachers. They taught art in the Chinese schools. So, you know, there’s one quote in Liu Kang’s oral history where he laments that, you know, they have to make a living as art teachers, so nobody really thinks of them as proper artists.

And I think this Bali trip actually was some kind of affirmation that the public reaction and the interest and everything, I think for them as artists, it was probably a great personal affirmation for their own particular artistic practices.

So then how was Bali easy to get to? And what was Bali like in the early ’50s? Well, we have this notion of Bali but at that time, Bali was very poor, it was very difficult to get to Bali, there was no direct flights, and I had to sort of look into the whole kind of trajectory of how did Bali become Bali to artists and to, you know, people that were interested in these exotic, if I may use the word, cultures.

So that’s another, like, part of the story is the whole trajectory of Bali’s fame as a tourist destination so to speak. So you can see there’s lots of threads. And then, the final thread is really this kind of looking at, well, was anything happening vis-a-vis Bali in Singapore around the time that the artist took their trip?

Did anything happen that kind of triggered this desire at that particular moment in time? And well, lo and behold, there were a few things that happened. But people can read about that in my book.

Jimmy
Yes, don’t give too much away. You know, we were talking a bit about, you know, you went to Bali, I mean, part of it was research, wasn’t it?

Gretchen
Right. Well, as I said, you know, I really thought, “Oh my God, Gretchen, you can’t just do this without, you know, talking to people.”

So the first trip was, you know, as I said, talking, meeting these people and talking, getting this feedback. But then of course it became, as I got deeper into the photos, it became more and more apparent that I really should go and see some of the places that they wrote about or that they saw and try to understand more deeply.

And then by then I had met, you know, some people who were helping me, and I wanted to kind of do some [photo] identification with them. So yes, I did make a second trip and that was in September 2024. And I visited the temples that the artists would have visited, like, their first day in Bali. That was really quite fun because Liu Kang was a very enthusiastic photographer.

So, on his first day in Bali, when they visited these temples, he took a lot of photos of them, of those particular temples. Later on, I think he got, you know, more used to the Balinese architecture and so forth. So, yeah, I made a day trip and I went up and I was able to sort of, it was really nice to see. And I got my driver to take some photos of me, you know, standing in the same place where the artists were standing.

Jimmy
How different does it look?

Gretchen
Oh, it looks the same. The thing is the two temples are very quiet. But he took some photos. He was fascinated by these, you know, these split gateways, the candi bentar. And they line the main road. They must have stopped the vehicles they were in, and then he got out of the car and just like one candi bentar, he took like five or six photos, another one, he took five or six photos, and of course, there’s maybe a line of electricity wire, kind of in front of the temple. There are no cars on the road. But now when I went back, of course, there’re multiple lines in front of the temple, and of course, there’re cars and vans and trucks all over the place.

Jimmy
So, the particular structures haven’t changed, but the surroundings have.

Gretchen
Yeah, yeah. Well, on those that line the main street, yes. But those off the beaten are very quiet. It was really, really very quiet.

Jimmy
Okay. You know, in the book, you managed to, to not just have the photographs, but you’ve got some of the sketches and then you’ve also got some of the paintings that are obviously inspired by these photographs and sketches. You know, what were you trying to do by doing that?

Gretchen
Well, the idea of including artwork came very late in the game. So the original intention was not, wasn’t really to include artwork. Okay, it was just to do like the album of photographs and the texts and so forth. But the more I got into the story last year, I became more and more curious to see. And so I started to look more closely at the sort of Bali artwork by these four artists.

And I was very lucky that the National Gallery Singapore was very helpful. I mean, for example, they have a large collection of Cheong Soo Pieng’s sketches and drawings. But they have a good collection of Bali-related [artwork].

And then I also looked through my father-in-law’s sketches, which we still have at home. And then Chen Chong Swee’s son, Chen Chi Sing, was extremely helpful also looking through his family archive and kind of sharing sketches and drawings that his father had done.

So the idea was to include samples, and the idea is that people who read the book can, like, look for themselves and see what’s what. It’s like to entice people and interest them in the trip and so on. I’m not an art historian, but art historians can kind of discuss the connection between photography and artwork and all of this.

That’s not what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to present, you know, present everything in such a way that people can engage with the material and explore the material and, you know, think about all of these connections.

Jimmy
But did you see anything like, you know, this is a photograph, this is a painting. Any major differences that you noticed?

Gretchen
Well, there’s two entirely different things. Photography is photography, and, you know, art is art. There are cases where, you can see a direct correlation, but there’s many times where, where you can see inspiration. You know, so for example, when they were doing this like artist-in-residence and had these, you know, like neighbourhood girls posing for them. One of the models was pounding rice. Now how the artists interpreted pounding rice, everyone has their own style, but all of them painted some scene where women were pounding rice.

Because in the early ’50s, that was still very common. I mean, it wasn’t just that they would have seen it, it happened all the time. Women were still pounding rice on a daily basis.

But the interesting thing is these photographs have helped to identify a lot of sketches that have hitherto been unidentified.

Jimmy
Oh, okay, so that’s the other value of that.

Gretchen
Yes, so there’s a lot of like, whether they’re specific places or even people, we can now identify based on this research, you know, and so on. We identify a particular dancer or a particular place or a particular rice field, so that gives a little bit more depth and understanding to material that was just hitherto kind of like...

Jimmy
This is a sketch of a girl, or whatever.

Gretchen
Yeah. So that was very nice to collaborate with the National Gallery [Singapore] on that. And as I said, they were very, very helpful in working all this out.

Jimmy
What do you think was the hardest thing about, you know, researching this book?

Gretchen
Well, I would say that I think the hardest thing in a way was to kind of like figure out the outline. What does the story have to say to make it complete, but not too difficult. So working out like the outline of how to tell it and put the photos in context. The other thing was identifying things. Because as I mentioned earlier, Liu Kang had some envelopes that had generic labels so identifying things was...

Jimmy
Was that hard? I mean, how did you manage to fix that?

Gretchen
I mean, on the one hand, you can Google a lot now, but on the other hand, I had help. I asked, and there were people who were willing to assist. They could identify it immediately.

But I think I didn’t have a deep understanding of Bali. So I also had to kind of read deeply, you know, about what’s happening, you know, Bali in the last, from 1900, you know, when it became under Dutch rule and how tourism started and who were the key people. And then, you know, sometimes it connects with Singapore history because there were artists who were active in Bali and then held exhibitions in Singapore.

So I had a very steep learning curve. Yeah, so I’d say that those were some of the more difficult aspects of doing the book.

Jimmy
Okay. Okay. You’ve written quite a few books. We won’t go through all of them because that would take a whole day. Yeah. But there’s definitely an emphasis on, you know, Singapore’s visual history.

Gretchen
Yes. Yes, there is.

Jimmy
So why is that?

Gretchen
Well, you know, I’ve always been interested in history and biography. I was a big reader as a child. And then when I was about 15 and a half, and I had a summer job working in a library in my little community, and my job was to shelve books. You know, in those days, you, you know, there’d be like a trolley and people returned the books and then, you know, and then you come in and then your job was to kind of put them back on the shelf.

And, when I recall that summer, I remember that I would spend a lot of time in the illustrated book section. I was, you know, pulling out the books and looking and so on. So I think from an early age, I already had that interest. But when I came to Singapore, in the mid-’70s, the focus was on building a nation. And heritage and history weren’t really topics that were on the top of the list. I met a couple of people who were very keen collectors of Singapore memorabilia. It kind of started because in 84, I did a book called Pastel Portraits, and in that, Singapore’s architectural heritage. And in that book, you know, I said to the designer, “Let’s try to get some images of the way things were.”

So that led me to like a very serious collector of postcards, and Andrew Tan. And then I met Lee Kip Lin and Koh Seow Chuan. And they were all kind of big collectors of  memorabilia, early collectors of memorabilia. And so, kind of one thing led to another. So, it was just like a natural kind of connection where my own interest, living in Singapore and it just kind of coalesced and at that time in the early ’80s, when I commissioned and then edited this book on G. R. Lambert and Co., very few people were interested in the subject of early photography, just not really photography in Singapore, but early photography in Asia. But, you know, in the ’80s and ’90s and the 2000s now, the study of photographic history, the study of images, visual culture, you know, the whole [field], that’s exploded.

Jimmy
Definitely. In part, thanks to you, right? Because I mean, once you have these books and you put them in the library, and of course in bookstores where people can buy them, you know, then people get interested, they see this and they become interested.

Gretchen
Yeah, well, now, I mean, when I was doing these books, you know, this was pre-digitisation. It was a very different era. Now there’s just an explosion of images.

Jimmy
So you’ve written a whole bunch of books. Obviously, your latest book is the one you’re most proud of. Because, you know, it’s your latest book, right?

Gretchen
Sure.

Jimmy
If you take that aside, what book are you proudest of?

Gretchen
Well, I mean, look, you know, each book has a story behind it. Each book, it takes time to put together and you’re working, you know, it’s ultimately it’s a group effort, okay? I mean, you’re working, especially with books like this, you’re working with other people, graphic designers, editors, and, you know, sometimes photo editors or whatever. But I would say that the book that probably sticks out the most is Singapore: A Pictorial History, which was published in 1999.

And maybe unbeknownst to you, I actually played a significant role in the acquisition, the archives acquiring the Lee Brothers collection.

Jimmy
Oh, unbeknownst.

Gretchen
Yeah, because in the mid-90s, I was very keen to do a book on portraits, but I think I was ahead of my time, and the publisher had said, “Oh, Gretchen, there’s no market for a book like this.” But I was a bit persistent, and so I was asking my friends, now, did you have any family member who was involved, that ran a photo studio?

And so I had this friend and she said, “Well, talk to my mother.” Because her family did have something with the photo studio. So I met my friend’s mother, and then she said, “Oh, you should meet my...”, I can’t remember now if it’s an uncle or brother or cousin or whatever, who was like maybe the older member of that generation.

Now this is in the mid-90s. And I can still remember meeting him and then saying, I’m interested in this and whatever. And lo and behold, when I went to visit him in his home, he opened his cupboards and there were all of these photos that were studio photos that were taken in the early 1900s.

Jimmy
Early 1900s?

Gretchen
Yeah. Up until, up until World War II. And then it turns out that his family, the Lee brothers, the extended family had many photo studios and everything. But I did a little book with the archives when that collection was donated and I’m particularly proud of that because that is a very, I think, significant collection of images contributing to Singapore’s visual heritage.

Jimmy
Other people have mentioned this to me that, you know, that that’s one of the books that they really, really liked.

Gretchen
It’s a very small book, and it’s long been out of print. But that was public. I can’t remember why. So anyway, eventually I did get to do a book of portraits, but it was the Lee Brothers’ portraits.

Jimmy
Okay. In addition to the many things that you have achieved in your life, you were also the in-house historian for the Raffles Hotel. I didn’t know hotels had in-house historians. What does that mean?

Gretchen
I think it was a very particular set of circumstances. So in 1989, it was announced that Raffles Hotel would close and for restoration and redevelopment and a new company was established to do that. And in recognition of the historic aspect of the hotel and its global fame as a hotel, they decided to hire an in-house historian.

So, you know, I was approached, and I said, “Okay, I’ll do it.” And so that started off, my first job was to go to the warehouse where everything had been taken out of the hotel, kind of sift through it to see whether there was any material worth keeping, okay? And then eventually, they approved a budget to acquire memorabilia and things so that we could display it. The intention was to have a little museum. And then we launched an international heritage search through publicity saying, if you have anything related to the hotel, stories, photographs, whatever, you know, please contact us, we’d love to hear from you.

So there were multiple efforts to kind of like, make sure that the heritage of the hotel was kind of respected as it entered this new phase. So that restoration, it was completed in 1992, and when the hotel opened, there was a small museum. And I think it was in existence and maybe until the early 2000s.

And then eventually, of course, Raffles was sold, so yeah, and then I did several books on the history of the hotel. And again I took the hotel as the starting point, you know, the history of Raffles Hotel is part of the greater story of the history of travel and tourism in the Far East. And that’s a whole another story that involves technology. You know, steamships, for example, it involves economics because, you know, the wealth of tin and rubber, what it did to Singapore. It involves politics, you know, colonial society. It involves so many threads, and how Singapore became a crossroads, you know, it was a coaling station. So all these steamships would pause here and load up coal for their onward journey.

So that meant that a lot of people that were on trips to Australia or to Hong Kong or the Philippines or whatever stopped in Singapore briefly. And then it was only really in the early 1900s at this notion of travelling for pleasure on a cruise ship, as it were, started.

And, and I remember we found some really remarkable photos of, of like an early tour group visiting Raffles. And I think the photos are dated between 1909 and 1912. Anyway, so all kinds of stuff, you know, detective work, collecting all kinds of anecdotes and materials and stuff, and then using that to tell the story of the hotel.

Jimmy
But the most important question I want to know is, were you able to stay in a suite at the Raffles Hotel during this period?

Gretchen
I’ve stayed in it. Of course I did. I have to experience it. I mean, not for very long. But believe me, I spent a lot of time in the suites because I also was involved in buying the antiques and artwork for the hotel.

Jimmy
Oh, okay. Oh, nice. Very nice job.

Gretchen
You know, so then, yeah. I knew the rooms well.

Jimmy
By the time this podcast is out, the exhibition will be up. The book will be out on the shelves, in bookstores everywhere. What is next for Gretchen?

Gretchen
Well, I think being a little bit lazy. Catching up.

Jimmy
Not writing every day.

Gretchen
Catching up with things that I had sort of just put aside that need kind of some attention. Practical things and so forth.

Jimmy
Do you have another book inside you?

Gretchen
Well, I have a small project, but it’s with a Chinese publisher.

Jimmy
Oh, you mean, when you say Chinese publisher, you mean in China?

Gretchen
China, in Mainland China. Yeah. They’ve expressed an interest in doing something with Liu Kang’s photographs.

Jimmy
Okay.

Gretchen
So that will be my next project.

Jimmy
Okay, cool.

Gretchen
But it’s like a monograph. As part of a series.

Jimmy
Complete the sentence. Family history is...

Gretchen
Endlessly fascinating.

Jimmy
Is it really? I mean, how do you negotiate all the politics of the family?

Gretchen
There are no politics. I think everybody in the family is just amazed that I’ve been able to and they’re appreciative. I mean, I’m a daughter-in-law, right? I’m married to my husband, Thai Ker, but my own personal interest kind of aligns with what’s happened.

So, I mean, Liu Kang in a sense is kind of lucky. Because other people, you know, might’ve thrown things away, but I recognise the value. And Liu Kang was a pack rat. So when we cleared the study, I mean, you know, we made the big donation to National Library, but I hung on to a lot of things that are not specifically related to Singapore.

So we were just lucky that he seems to have had maybe a sense of history. And that fed into my own sense of history and interest in history. So I think it’s kind of a happy coincidence because I approached this book, as someone who is not a family member, but as someone who is more interested in, you know, kind of visual culture in Asia and what this can contribute to that larger kind of platform.

Jimmy
Okay, well, I mean, Gretchen, thank you very much for coming to BiblioAsia+. You know, the book Bali 1952: Through the Lens of Liu Kang is now available in bookstores but also available, obviously, to be borrowed or referred to at the library.

Gretchen
Yes.

Jimmy
And I do want to thank you, Gretchen, for coming down.

Gretchen
My pleasure, my pleasure.

Jimmy
And, oh, I forgot to mention that actually on the BiblioAsia website, there are a few articles, essays about the exhibition related to Liu Kang and related to the exhibition. So if you go down to the BiblioAsia website, you’ll be able to read these essays, one of which is the preface. So if you cannot afford to buy the book, at least read the preface and, you know, hopefully that will persuade you to buy or borrow that book.

Gretchen, once again, thank you very much.

Gretchen
Thank you, Jimmy.

Jimmy
If you’ve enjoyed this episode, subscribe to this podcast and the BiblioAsia newsletter. Thanks for joining us on BiblioAsia+.

Gretchen Liu, Bali 1952: Through the Lens of Liu Kang (Singapore: National Library Board and World Scientific, 2025). (From National Library Singapore, call no. SING 779.995986 LIU)

Gretchen Liu, “Forgotten Photographs of the 1952 Trip to Bali,” BiblioAsia 21, no. 1.

Liu Kang, oral history interview by Tan Beng Luan, 13 January 1983,  transcript and MP3 Audio, Reel/Disc 39 of 74, National Archives of Singapore (accession no. 000171), 364. English version translated and annotated by Tay Jun Hao and Alina Soh.

Jeffrey Say and Yu Jin Seng, “The Modern and Its Histories in Singapore Art,” in Intersections, Innovations, Institutions: A Reader in Singapore Modern Art (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., 2023), 26. (From National Library Singapore, call no. RSING 709.595709034 INT) 

Yeo Wei Wei, ed., Liu Kang: Colourful Modernist (Singapore: The National Art Gallery Singapore, 2011). (From National Library Singapore, call no. RSING 759.95957 LIU)

This episode of BiblioAsia Podcast was hosted by Jimmy Yap and produced by Soh Gek Han. Sound engineering was done by Doppler Soundlab. The background music “Di Tanjong Katong” was composed by Ahmad Patek and performed by Chords Haven. Special thanks to Gretchen for coming on the show.

The BiblioAsia Podcast by the National Library Singapore tells stories about Singapore history.