desire could flow as innocently as mother's milk
In Singapore, a landmark exhibition of seventy works spanning antiquity to the present has opened a rare institutional door to desire, sexuality, and the body as subjects of serious artistic inquiry — a meaningful threshold for a conservative city-state. Yet the very diplomacy required to cross that threshold may have cost the show its philosophical honesty: by framing desire as universal and liberatory, the exhibition risks naturalizing the very power structures it gestures toward dismantling. The human body, as both subject and object, has always been a site where freedom and coercion are difficult to tell apart, and an exhibition that cannot hold that tension may ultimately serve the status quo it seeks to challenge.
- A Singapore institution has granted rare public legitimacy to LGBTQ+ identities, female sexuality, and transgressive performance art — a genuine cultural rupture in one of Asia's most socially conservative contexts.
- The inclusion of Grace Quek's Annabel Chong materials without the actual film, and without interrogating the power dynamics of her 1995 performance, leaves a conspicuous silence at the heart of the show's boldest claim.
- An opening video displays the corpse of an unnamed, unconsenting young woman as an aesthetic object of desire — the very objectification the exhibition elsewhere frames as a harm worth examining.
- The exhibition's title descends from a 1953 essay that exoticized Balinese women's bodies, and one of those objectifying paintings hangs in the show itself, unexamined and unremarked.
- Rather than sustaining its critical momentum, the exhibition closes with an invitation to nestle into breast-shaped beanbags — retreating from complexity into a soft, depoliticized vision of desire as natural and benign.
A major Singapore exhibition titled "Passion is Volcanic" has opened with seventy artworks tracing desire and sexuality across Southeast Asian art from ancient times to the present. For a city-state where sexual expression has long been policed and marginalized, the show represents a genuine institutional breakthrough — granting serious cultural space to LGBTQ+ identities, female libido, and transgressive performance. But the cost of that acceptance may be a certain philosophical timidity: the exhibition consistently frames desire as a natural, universal force rather than something shaped and distributed by power.
The show's most prominent gesture is the inclusion of materials from Grace Quek's 1995 performance as Annabel Chong, in which she engaged in sex with 251 men over ten hours. Presented as performance art rather than pornography, the display feels overdue to some — an acknowledgment of female sexual agency in an institutional setting. Yet the actual film is absent, and the exhibition offers no sustained reckoning with the gap between agency and abjection that Quek's work so forcefully embodies.
Organized into three sections — from erotic mythology and classical depictions of the body to feminist and LGBTQ+ visibility — the show introduces Singapore's first publicly exhibited openly gay artist and a transgender artist whose work imagines bodily transformation. These inclusions feel genuinely significant, even as the exhibition avoids naming the political regimes that have persecuted the very identities it now celebrates.
The ethical fault lines run deepest in the treatment of female bodies. The opening work displays the arranged corpse of an unnamed young woman, framed in the wall text as a "sensuous engagement" with death. She cannot consent to her display, and her vulnerability is recruited for aesthetic purposes — precisely the kind of objectification the show claims to interrogate. Meanwhile, the exhibition's own title derives from a 1953 essay that described Balinese women's passion in exoticizing terms, and one of the paintings from that colonial gaze hangs in the gallery, unremarked.
The show closes with an installation of breast-shaped beanbags, inviting visitors to sink in as if returning to childhood comfort. After circling the tensions of power, consent, and the colonial gaze, the final gesture dissolves desire into something soft and apolitical — as though the exhibition, having opened so many difficult doors, ultimately chose not to walk through them.
A major exhibition in Singapore has opened its doors to seventy artworks exploring desire, sexuality, and the body across Southeast Asian art from ancient times to now. The show, titled "Passion is Volcanic," marks a watershed moment for a conservative city-state: it grants institutional legitimacy to sexual expression, LGBTQ+ identities, and female libido as subjects worthy of serious artistic consideration. Yet the exhibition's very success in gaining that institutional acceptance may come at a cost—by smoothing over the contradictions and darker dimensions of desire itself.
The exhibition's most visible symbol is the inclusion of materials from Grace Quek's 1995 performance as Annabel Chong, a persona under which she set a record by engaging in sex with 251 men over ten hours, documented in a film. The show presents this not as pornography but as performance art, displaying merchandise from the event alongside wall text that frames it as a legitimate artistic gesture. For some viewers, this recognition feels overdue: an acknowledgment that female sexual agency exists and deserves space in institutional settings. But the framing raises uncomfortable questions. The exhibition does not interrogate how desire itself is shaped by power, nor does it grapple with the gap between agency and abjection that Quek's performance embodies. The actual film is absent from the show—a conspicuous omission that may protect the narrative from complications.
The exhibition is organized into three sections. The first, "Asian Mythos and Ritual," traces the historical entanglement of the erotic with the spiritual. The second, "Conventions of the Erotic," documents how bodies and sensuality have been depicted across time, from classical nudes to abstracted forms. Works here include Ahmad Zakii Anwar's photorealistic paintings of suggestively arranged bananas and I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih's dreamlike image of a woman's limbs morphing into animals. The third section, "Public Arenas/Private Interiors," focuses on feminist and LGBTQ+ visibility, featuring Singapore's first publicly exhibited openly gay artist, Tan Peng, and transgender artist Marla Bendini's image of a woman transforming into a tiger. This final section performs what might be called a conciliatory gesture: it celebrates artists as agents of social change in repressive environments without directly naming the regimes that have persecuted sexual minorities.
The exhibition's central problem is philosophical. It treats desire as a natural, universal force—an essentialist view that leaves little room for understanding desire as something constructed, policed, and distributed unequally by power. This becomes especially troubling when the exhibition's own title derives from a 1953 essay by Liu Kang, a pioneering Chinese-born Singapore artist, in which he describes Balinese women's passion as volcanic and their bodies as objects of aesthetic fascination. Liu was part of the Nanyang school, a movement that blended Eastern and Western painting traditions to depict Southeast Asian subjects. A 1952 trip to Bali by a group of male artists generated paintings that have since been recognized as exoticizing and objectifying Indigenous women. One of Liu's works from that trip, "Scene in Bali," hangs in the exhibition—naked women bathing in a river, framed by landscape and temple.
The exhibition's treatment of female bodies raises sharper ethical concerns. The opening work is a video by Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook titled "I'm Living," which documents the artist arranging the corpse of a young woman in a slip, smoothing her dress as one might dress a doll. The wall text describes this as a "sensuous engagement" with the dead, celebrating the female body as "brimming with potential and desire." But the woman is unnamed, her cause of death unmentioned, and—most critically in an exhibition about desire—she cannot consent to being displayed. The piece recruits her vulnerability for its own aesthetic purposes, which is precisely the kind of objectification the exhibition claims to be interrogating elsewhere.
Throughout, the show remains caught between competing impulses. It wants to appear sexually progressive while avoiding harder questions about consent, ideology, and the colonial gaze. It says yes to the male perspective on female bodies while also claiming to decolonize that perspective. This indecision culminates in the final artwork: Pinaree Sanpitak's "Noon-Nom," an installation of breast-shaped beanbags packed closely together, inviting viewers to sink into them like children in a ball pit. Sanpitak frames the breast as maternal sustenance and love. After skirting the tensions of power and gender throughout the exhibition, the final gesture returns desire to something soft, naturalized, and apolitical—as if desire could ever flow as innocently as milk.
Citações Notáveis
The exhibition does not address how desire is structured by power.— Exhibition critic
Artists navigated diverse sexual identifications and practices by bringing explicit imagery into public spaces for social awareness as well as political critique.— Exhibition wall text
A Conversa do Hearth Outra perspectiva sobre a história
Why does an exhibition celebrating sexual expression in a conservative place feel like it's avoiding something?
Because liberation and power aren't opposites. You can celebrate desire while also asking who benefits from it being framed a certain way. This show wants to be progressive without doing the harder work of asking: whose desire? Under what conditions? With whose consent?
The Annabel Chong material seems like the obvious test case. Isn't including it a win?
It's complicated. Yes, it's institutional recognition of female sexuality. But the exhibition doesn't ask whether that particular performance was freely chosen or shaped by economic desperation, media hunger, or the male gaze itself. It just says: desire, therefore liberation. That's too simple.
What about the video with the dead woman's body?
That's where the exhibition's logic breaks down entirely. You can't celebrate desire as liberatory and then display an unnamed corpse without consent. The wall text calls it sensuous, but sensuality requires a living subject who can feel and refuse. She's just an object being arranged.
Is the problem the exhibition itself, or the art it's showing?
Both. Some of the art is genuinely exploring these tensions. But the exhibition's framing—treating desire as natural and universal—prevents us from seeing how colonial perspectives, male artists, and power structures have shaped what we're looking at. Liu Kang's paintings of Balinese women aren't just historical artifacts. They're still doing the work of exoticization.
So what would a better version look like?
One that doesn't flinch. Name the repression. Name the objectification. Show the film. Identify the dead woman. Let the contradictions sit uncomfortably. Desire isn't innocent, and neither is art about desire.