Art as a Reflection of Society (Q1)

Most of the art history I've come across in class is very Euro-centric, which I suppose is fair since the syllabus is set by a British university. But when it comes to local artwork, I hadn't realised how out of touch I was until I finally visited the National Visual Arts Gallery on June 10th. 

One exhibit being shown was "As We See It - History Through Visual Design". The exhibit focuses on graphic design in Malaysia from 1850 colonial Malaya to the post-1957 independence era. It features a range of carefully curated pieces of graphic design, from matchboxes to movie posters. 

The one piece of exhibited artwork I'd like to talk about today is this photograph of a woman of Indian descent, featured on a postcard. 

"A Tamil Beauty" Penang, 1910

Description of "A Tamil Beauty"

"One of the earliest depictions of women as adornment for the idea of "Malaya" on printed matter. It is also rare for Tamil women to feature prominently as a subject matter in that period. Generally, representation of the Indian community in Malaya was of men as coolies"

The Indian community currently makes up approximately 7% of the Malaysian population, having migrated here since pre-colonial times (Sadasivan, 2001). However, even in modern day, the majority of advertisements for common products do not usually feature or include them at all. It was interesting to note that this had been going on since pre-independence days. This reflects an ongoing bias against people of dark skin that exists not only in Malaysian media, but globally as well. 

The fact that Indians in media are still  rare is something of note. Have we not made any progress since then? It seems so, according to the kinds of responses that people have made defending the very controversial blackface in the Watsons Hari Raya advertisement of 2017. Whether consciously or not, we as a culture still associate ideals of beauty and purity with fair skin. 

It is also interesting to note that the curators of the exhibit pointed out the rarity of Indian depictions as well, as it shows that they wanted to highlight the lack of representation that the approximately 2,000,000 Indian still face now. They could have very well just described it as "A Tamil Woman in a postcard", but they didn't, and it reflects their curatorial goals, which seems to be to bring up new information for viewers to consider. 

References:

Bakar, A. and Reporters, F. (2017). Watsons defends 'blackface' video, says it's based on legend. [online] Free Malaysia Today. Available at: http://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/nation/2017/06/07/watsons-defends-blackface-video-says-it-is-based-on-legend/ [Accessed 5 Jul. 2017].

Phoenix, A. (2014). colourism and the politics of beauty. Feminist Review, 108(1), pp.97-105.

Sadasivan, B. (2011). The dancing girl. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.