When Artists Travelled: On the Archival Traces of the Ten Men Group’s Sojourns

In the field of modern and contemporary art history, travel is often written into the margins of narratives—national or biographical, for instance—because of its transient and social nature. This short text forms part of my larger inquiry into how mid-twentieth-century modern art in East and Southeast Asia intersected. In particular, I explore how we might consider travels as moments of sociality generated with intent, which can enrich our understanding of the cultural milieu that artists immersed themselves in. While we often focus on studying artworks as the main result of artists’ travels, this text focuses on the photographic and documents traces that artists created during and in the wake of their travels. These documentations often occupy the margins of art historical writing as visual evidence that bolster the importance of artworks; but here, I suggest that they offer valuable entry points into the social worlds of the artists, where issues of self-presentation, class and gender can be examined with nuance.

Artists who were active in mid-twentieth-century Southeast Asia often organised themselves into groups to travel across the region under specific social and professional conditions.

One of the most chronicled episodes of travels undertaken by Southeast Asian artists in the twentieth century is undeniably the 1952 trip to Bali by Liu Kang, Chen Wen Hsi, Chen Chong Swee and Cheong Soo Pieng. This trip not only defined these artists’ careers but also established the Nanyang style as an exploration of local subject matter and the quality of light in the tropics, reinforced by the exhibition Untold Stories: Four Singapore Artists’ Quest for Inspiration in Bali at the Singapore National Library in 2025.¹ Apart from artworks, Untold Stories featured photographs Liu Kang took of the Bali trip. First discovered by his family in 2016, these photographs were examined in detail four years later during the COVID lockdown.² Meanwhile, scholar Yvonne Low’s 2024 study critically engages with Liu Kang’s paintings of Balinese nudes, a subject matter Liu began depicting as a result of his trip to Bali, from a feminist perspective. Low’s work puts pressure on the tension between Liu’s pursuit of a kind of artistic modernism that emulated subject matter and iconography employed by European modernist painters and the internalised gender and racial hierarchy that was playing out in late colonial Singapore.³

A decade later, another artist who followed this model of extensive travel within Southeast Asia was Yeh Chi Wei. Born in 1913 in Fuzhou, China, Yeh spent his childhood years from 1921 to 1925 in Sarawak with his mother, working on rubber tree plantations. By 1925, he was sent back to China as his family’s finances improved; and from 1933 to 1936, he trained at the Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts, one of the art schools in the Republic of China where the modernist artist Liu Haisu taught.⁴ At the onset of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, Yeh left again for Singapore; he stayed on for subsequent decades as the territory went through multiple episodes of defining itself as a nation. In between his day job as a high school art teacher, Yeh often travelled to Southeast Asia in the summer with his fellow artist friends. In 1978, Yeh finally returned to Sarawak, which was by then part of Malaysia, and passed away there in 1981. Much of Yeh’s life and work resurfaced in the exhibition The Story of Yeh Chi Wei, organised by Singapore Art Museum in 2010. National Gallery Singapore’s 2023 exhibition Familiar Others: Emiria Sunassa, Eduardo Masferré and Yeh Chi Wei, 1940s–1970s put Yeh’s works—often representing the peoples of Sarawak and Sabah in an archaic visual language—in conversation with Emiria Sunassa’s paintings and Eduardo Masferré’s photographs, collectively considering how the gaze towards an Other can be directed from within a nation and region.⁵ Curator and scholar Phoebe Scott further read Yeh’s purposefully archaic visual language against the grain of his personal biography, which was intricately entangled with the development of Singapore as a nation, and Southeast Asia as a region.⁶

The artists with whom Yeh travelled formed what came to be known as the Ten Men Group, described by scholars as artists with a regionalist purview. Scholar Vera Mey proposes that the Ten Men Group’s travel could be interpreted as “looking outwards,” a way of locating oneself as ethnically Chinese subjects of a newly formed multi-ethnic nation that is Singapore.⁷ The group’s travels across Malaya, Indonesia, Thailand and beyond demonstrate the scale of their regional engagement. Together, the Ten Men visited the east coast of Malaya (1961), Bali (1962), Thailand and Cambodia (1963), Sarawak (1965), Sabah, Brunei and Miri Baran River (1968). When the Ten Men Group formalised themselves into the Southeast Asian Art Association in 1970, they went to Medan (1970), India, Nepal, Burma and Thailand (1971), Vietnam, Taiwan and Hong Kong (1974), and the Philippines (1976).⁸

Yeh Chi Wei documented his travels with the Ten Men Group through photography, and organised these snapshots into albums now digitised as part of National Gallery Singapore Library & Archive’s collection. In 1965, the Group travelled to East Malaysia, Sarawak. The photographs Yeh took and organised recorded an array of activities, including visits to traditional houses and the coast.

In the dedicated album that Yeh put together was a photo of six artists, all male, standing on the beach with a large rock behind them (Fig. 1). It was known that artists of the Ten Men Group would carry sketchbooks with them and draw en plein air as they travelled. The possession of sketchbooks, and being seen carrying them, could be read as one of the ways in which these men identified themselves as artists. In this photograph, we also see two individuals carrying cameras. One of them had a sketchbook in hand and a camera hung on his neck. A third camera was also present, used to capture this very photograph. These photographs open up a space of imagination to consider these occasions of outdoor sketching not merely as moments of quiet focus, but simultaneously as convivial marvel and discussion on the awesomeness of nature. The camera here—both as apparatus of documentation and accessory of a self-aware modern subject—becomes key to the self-presentation of the Ten Men Group as artists.

On another page of the 1965 album, a photograph of four artists drawing is pasted next to another of a bare-chested woman weaving with a loom on her lap (Fig. 2). The juxtaposition of these two photographs draws our attention to how the photographed subjects were engaged with their hands in different ways. The artists sketched; the woman of East Malaysia wove. It was possible that the placement, in adjacency to one another, was to highlight such a difference. The juxtaposition may suggest that the artists were observing or depicting the woman, but this cannot be confirmed from the photograph alone. Whether this was a staged scene specifically to enable the artists to capture images they wished was also up for debate. This photograph complicates the assumption that the Ten Men Group was exclusively male, as it foregrounds female artists associated with the group by being present on the trip. It also raises the more important question. What kind of affordances were present to enable these women to travel then? One of the most prominent female members of the Ten Men Group was Chen Cheng Mei, known not only to have initiated the first trips that eventually became annual events, but also to have suggested that Yeh Chi Wei lead the trips in her stead. That Chen would propose to have Yeh Chi Wei lead the trips in her stead, and Yeh’s acceptance of it, demonstrates how male-dominated social protocols, both perceived and enforced, were at work in the art world of mid-twentieth-century Southeast Asia. Given Chen’s importance to the Ten Men Group, one might assume that one of the two female artists featured in this photograph would be her. However, it remains unclear, to the date when this text was written, who exactly these two female artists were.⁹

The ways in which the Ten Men Group presented themselves as artists found an interesting moment of crystallisation on the cover image of their 1970 exhibition catalogue, titled Ten Men Art Exhibition: Exhibition on Life in North Sumatra by Ten Artists. A row of ten dark-blue silhouetted human figures lined the bottom of the catalogue’s earthy, reddish-brown cover. Although it may not be possible to identify and match each figure to the artists themselves, we could say that each figure represented one of the ten members of the Ten Men Group. Each figure, too, was engaged in some kind of creative act. Eight out of the ten silhouetted figures were represented alongside a surface on which they drew or painted: some of them were sketching on smaller pieces of paper whilst holding a writing or drawing instrument in their hands; some of them painted with a brush. One of the figures was clearly holding a Chinese brush, crouching down and writing on a piece of paper. Of the two figures who were not engaged in the act of drawing, painting and writing, one of them seemed to be observing something on the ground while a camera hung on his neck; the other looked through the lens of the camera that he held in his hands. To commemorate the ten years of shared travelling, the Group plotted their travel destinations on a map (Figs. 3 & 4), offering a visualisation of the extent of their travels. Together with the photographic documentation discussed earlier, these representations offer a richer picture of the Ten Men Group as not only artists, but artists who travelled.

Notes

1. National Library Singapore, “About,” Untold Stories, accessed 8 October 2026, https://exhibitions.nlb.gov.sg/untoldstories/about/

2. Gretchen Liu, “Forgotten Photographs of the 1952 Trip to Bali,” Biblioasia 21, no. 1 (April–June 2025), https://biblioasia.nlb.gov.sg/all-sections/vol-21-issue-1-apr-jun-2025-liu-kang-forgotten-photographs-bali/

3. Yvonne Low, “In search of the uncontroversial nude: Liu Kang’s modernist pursuit in Nanyang,” World Art, 14, no. 2 (2024): 181–208.

4. Low Sze Wee et al., The Story of Yeh Chi Wei, exh. cat. (National Gallery Singapore, 2010).

5. Phoebe Scott, ed., Familiar Others: Emiria Sunassa, Eduardo Masferré and Yeh Chi Wei, 1940s–1970s, exh. cat. (National Gallery Singapore, 2022).

6. Phoebe Scott, “Primitivism and affiliation: Yeh Chi Wei’s Borneo images,” World Art 14, no. 2 (2024): 229–256.

7. Vera Mey, “Imaging and imagining critical regionalism in Southeast Asian modern art during and beyond the Bandung Spirit” (PhD diss., SOAS, 2023).

8. The second volume of the 2010 Yeh Chi Wei exhibition catalogue brings together exhibition publications associated with the Ten Men Group’s travels, providing a valuable resource for art history writing and curatorial research.

9. For a discussion on Chen Chengmei’s role in Ten Men Group, see Roger Nelson, “‘My World is Modern’: Deprovincialising Chen Cheng Mei and You Khin, Artists from Southeast Asia Who Traversed the Global South,” Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia 5, no. 1 (2021): 205–249. In this essay, Nelson also cites Yvonne Low’s doctoral dissertation, “Women Artists: Becoming Professional in Singapore, Malaya and Indonesia" (PhD diss., 2015).