Every artist knows that turmoil fuels creativity. And for the past four months, nothing has caused more turmoil in Asia than severe acute respiratory syndrome. Now, from Shanghai to Singapore, the drama of living with SARS is producing an artistic movement of sorts. Through a wide range of new paintings, photographs, plays, films and songs, Asia’s artists are expressing the diverse emotions–fear, anger and even hope–triggered by the disease.
Some artists are simply determined to make a record of this atypical period. “Artists are more sensitive than ordinary people,” says Singaporean painter Goh Beng Kwan. Goh says his abstract work “A Year to Remember,” made with oil, batik, sand and rice paper on canvas, has no special message but was inspired by the complex feelings that emerged while he listened to the daily news of the war in Iraq and the progress of the disease.
Others intend their art to provoke discussion. Singaporean playwright and actress Li Xie wrote the interactive Mandarin-language play “SARS” after witnessing negative reactions–like the ostracization of medical workers–in the early days of the outbreak. Li’s drama, which requires audience participation, has been playing to positive reviews. Canadian photographer Marcus Oleniuk, who has lived in Hong Kong for 11 years, assembled more than 80 portraits for a book and exhibit that he sees as a public forum. Since early April he has been taking Polaroids of random, mostly masked people and asking them to scribble on the image how they feel about SARS.
Ordinary citizens, too, have felt compelled to create. When the Hong Kong Arts Center announced the creation of a SARS-inspired exhibit called “A Time Like This,” it was flooded with entries from the general public. Students, forced to stay home after school was suspended, contributed more than 80 poems, cartoons and drawings–many about the extreme boredom they felt while in isolation.
The challenge of displaying SARS art is that even now, no one wants to enter a closed space to look at it. That’s why Beijing’s “Blue Sky Exposure,” which runs until June 14, has been such a hit; it takes place in a huge, airy converted factory. “The feeling was that if we’re the most progressive group of people, we should stay open,” says Huang Rei, artist and owner of the Beijing Tokyo Art Projects, one of the exhibition’s venues. The show tackles the subject of SARS through a wide variety of media, from a huge hemp-weaved pair of lungs to 180 flying face masks to condoms cut out of origami paper. One photograph in a series by Gao Feng, an artist from northeastern China, shows him wrapped in a face mask nearly the size of a duvet, standing at a bus stop in Beijing while curious onlookers gawk.
Other artists are disseminating their art virtually. The Shanghai Museum of Art is holding an online exhibit and sale of calligraphic art inspired by SARS–the proceeds of which will go to SARS research. Zhao Bandi, a Beijing artist known for photographs featuring himself and his stuffed-panda sidekick, Xiong Maomi, submitted to a popular Web site an image of the pair fighting against SARS. Several Beijing newspapers picked up the picture–including the Jiefang Daily, which is often seen as a mouthpiece for the government.
At least seven SARS movies are rumored to be in the works–including one that will tell the story of a Chinese nurse, modeled after Florence Nightingale, but set in modern SARS-crisis days. “The City of SARS” director Steve Cheng is hopeful that his flick will capture a momentous time in history. “No other event like this may pass my way again,” he says.²But with scientists worried that the outbreak will resume this fall, SARS may become as much a fixture in Asian art as it is in Asian life.
