Chinese Head

A smooth, serene face. Pupil-less eyes. This is Chinese Head by Dora Gordine. Not a portrait, but an ethnic type. It follows the same approach seen in Gordine’s series of bronze heads representing the main ethnic groups in colonial Singapore.

Born in Latvia and self-taught as a sculptor, Gordine arrived in Malaya in the early 1930s, drawn by the promise of work and the allure of the so-called exotic. Already, she’d made a name for herself in London, hailed by the Evening Standard as a “girl sculpture genius.” At just 22, she held her first solo show, remarkable for a woman working in a male-dominated field.

As Gordine travelled across the region, she created sculptures based on people she met. But like the photographs by G.R. Lambert & Co., also on view in this Gallery, her works often cast her subjects into visual types, made legible to their intended audiences. Chinese Head is a byproduct of the social and political forces of its time; when facial features and even head shapes were measured, sorted and reduced to categories. So what are we looking at now? A person, or the idea of one?