The Many Places He Stood

If you could read Guy Ngan’s Habitation series, you might uncover a lexicon akin to the complexity of Chinese characters. Together, these sculptures reveal an idiosyncratic humanism gleaned from Confucianism, modern architectural forms that privilege functionality over ornamentation and the fragmented, classical archways of Roman ruins.  Yet they also express the artist’s fascination with rock pool formations shaped over thousands of years by the ocean currents of Aotearoa New Zealand’s coastlines.

Throughout his lifetime, Ngan crafted over 200 Habitation sculptures. A fervent maker, he didn’t feel the need to justify his varied practice, or position it within the art world, even if, particularly in the 1970s, he received several opportunities to do so. After seeing the artist’s work at the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts in 1973, Elva Bett wrote how “enraptured” she was with it and that she believed Ngan deserved more recognition than the Academy could give him.[1] She invited him to exhibit at her Cuba Street gallery, but this did not eventuate. Two years later, Tina Hos of New Vision Gallery wrote to the artist acknowledging his “reluctance to show at a gallery”, but managed to secure one of the few solo shows of his career.[2] Though Ngan was most well-known for his public sculpture, he exhibited screen prints and paintings alongside domestic scale bronze and aluminium works, documented in a catalogue he designed himself.[3]

This suppleness of approach is highlighted by Doreen Blumhardt and Brian Brake in their influential 1981 publication Craft New Zealand. Here the authors listed artists by the materials they used — wood, clay, fibre and so on — with the exception of one contrary chapter titled Four Artists, which included Ngan. These makers, they wrote, were “so diverse in their interests, in their approach to forms, techniques and materials, that they do not belong in any category”.[4] Fast forward to the twenty-first century, and Ngan had not launched a solo show since 1979, until, in 2006, City Gallery Wellington’s Senior Curator Heather Galbraith approached him about an exhibition.[5] In her accompanying catalogue essay, Galbraith observed:

…how tricky we find it to classify practitioners working across disciplines, but also how short our individual and civic memories can be. Forever ready to embrace the new, we do ourselves out of a treat in looking more closely at the ‘just-gone’.[6]

Over those intervening thirty years, the way the art world situates Ngan has changed, partly because of the different ways modernism continues to be reinterpreted and questioned. For anyone trained in Western art history, it feels intuitive to place Ngan’s art within the discourse of modernist abstraction. However, rather than being a strict disciple of European modernism, I’d like to propose that Ngan used it as a mechanism to express a rich cultural diversity. The artist himself once said, “You can’t help becoming all the things you’ve been through”.[7] And Helene Wong, a relative of Ngan and author on Chinese identity, has expressed a similar sentiment:

Like all migrants, he spent his life trying to figure out who he was. Influenced by the visual culture and history of Asia, Europe and the Pacific, he was comfortable exploring and reflecting this in his practice. Today, having multiple identities has become more acceptable, but in the 1970s and 80s this made him ahead of his time.[8]

Hybridity has become the norm in the twenty-first century, and a growing number of artists like Ngan who participated on the peripheries of modernism are now re-emerging from what Professor in History of Art and African American Studies at Yale University, Kobena Mercer, refers to as “blind spots in our inherited understanding of abstract art”.[9] As a Pākehā curator working within this system, researching Ngan’s life’s work has made me realise the complexity of contextualising artists who do not fold comfortably into art history’s often hierarchical categories. As I grew to understand the conditions he worked within, the exhibition Guy Ngan: Habitation at The Dowse Art Museum began to reveal how together, his time in Aotearoa New Zealand, China, England and Italy all influenced his non-linear, visual language. Expanding on these elements, this essay accepts Galbraith’s challenge “of looking more closely at the just gone”, and delves into how the same conditions that make Ngan hard to place leave a new space for him to be considered.

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Between 1942 and 1946, Ngan studied at Wellington Technical College’s night school, where he was taught by Alex Fraser, an ex-patriate British sculptor who fostered Ngan’s skills and suggested he travel to London to further his education. Unable to secure government support, Ngan saved his fare through wood carving and furniture making, and sold a block of shops in Tawa he’d built and worked out of. In 1951, he left for London, armed with a box of carving chisels and a reference letter from sculptor Frederick George Gurnsey, a Welsh ex-patriate based in Christchurch.[10] Describing the trip and arrival in London, Ngan reflected:

It was strange. All the other people on the ship were talking about ‘going home’. But England wasn’t my home. And yet, when I got to London it felt like home; like Canton, it was an old city where people had been living, and would go on living for a long time.[11]

Once settled, Ngan was introduced to modern British sculptor John Skeaping by Jim Allen, a friend of Ngan’s from Wellington.[12] Recognising his skill, Skeaping employed him to assist in carving eighty-four oak panels for the United Nations building in New York, and suggested Ngan go to Goldsmiths College of Art.[13] Here, he began to learn about Western art history, and took practical classes in drawing, clay modelling and sculpture in preparation for the Royal College of Art’s entrance exams.[14] Focussing on design, sculpture and architectural drafting at the Royal College, Ngan was exposed to the assurance modernism had to offer post-war British society. Emphasis was placed on practical and emotionally responsive forms, working with the inherent qualities of materials and drawing from nature and “social cultures other than Classical and Western” not already “established in the convention of history”.[15] While he maintained his love of wood, he was introduced to the versatility of carving in polystyrene and then casting it in industrial materials like aluminium, which became an important part of his sculptural practice. Ngan would have regularly attended lectures similar to those that are recorded in his copy of The Anatomy of Design, published by the Royal College in 1951, which expounded “an organic connexion between the branches of art and design”; “the existence of some essential aesthetic root from which all must stem”; and modern architecture’s “contribution to humanism”.[16]

While overseas, Ngan lived in Rome for three months, where he immersed himself in classical Italian architecture and took countless photographs for his visual diaries. Kingsley Baird, Professor of Fine Arts at Massey University, who apprenticed with Ngan, says of Ngan’s time abroad:

He found himself in the company of giants such as Moore, Hepworth, and Epstein. The European experience at an impressionable age and stage in his artistic development was important, particularly in relation to modernism. You can see the influence of Moore in his life drawings and early sculptures from his London period. However, he did say on a number of occasions that he tried to avoid being drawn into their circle. He could see others orbiting around these ‘masses’ and how people were influenced to follow the styles of these luminaries, and he didn't want to be sucked into that.[17]

Post World War II, the British Empire was beginning to lose sovereignty of its colonies and dominions including India, Canada, countries in Africa and islands across Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa—a result of growing nationalism and desire for self-governance. Essentially a political manoeuvre, the establishment of the modern Commonwealth of Nations (formally enacted by the London Declaration in 1949) acted as a way to maintain international ties and cement new allies. Within the art world, the movement New Commonwealth Internationalism represented a gathering of artists from Commonwealth nations, who were encouraged to study in London in the 1950s and ’60s to ensure cultural coalitions were sustained. Following political trends, many of these artists adapted tenants of modernism as a model to articulate their developing notions of nationhood and culture. Art historian Damian Skinner explores the dominant narratives of this movement within a local context, writing that “Settler societies like Aotearoa have two distinct trajectories of decolonisation in the twentieth century: the Pākehā desire to articulate an identity that is independent of Britain; and the Māori desire to assert cultural claims on the national future”.[18]  

Ngan’s time in London during the post-war period was critical in his development, and his travel and study was similar to other New Zealand artists of his generation, such as Jim Allen, Don Peebles, Ralph Hotere and Billy Apple. However, Ngan does not clearly slot into either of the definitions Skinner articulates above. As a second generation Chinese New Zealander born in the 1920s, he was technically part of New Zealand’s settler culture, but viewed and treated as a migrant minority with unequal rights. Like indigenous artists, he countered modernism’s penchant for appropriation by using customary aspects of his non-Western heritage. Unlike indigenous artists, however, he had no cultural capital via indigeneity in the country he was born.

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Yiyan Wang, Professor of Chinese in the School of Languages and Cultures at Victoria University of Wellington, has written thoughtfully on Ngan’s heritage:

Chinese people do not necessarily identify with indigeneity. They are not labelled as such either by the European colonisers. Being indigenous may imply being colonised by Western nations. They tend to more readily compare and contrast themselves to Europeans because of the similarities in the long and complicated histories and civilizational achievements.[19]

In 1928, Ngan’s father, Ngan Gee Choy 顏梓材, having been denied his pension despite his British naturalisation and worn down from being treated like a second-class citizen, moved his wife and two sons from Newtown, Wellington, back to one of his family homes in Guangzhou, China. Ngan Gee Choy valued Confucianism and Chinese tradition, but often spoke highly of Paris and Britain.[20] The boys attended classical Chinese school where they learnt Chinese history and literature, how to read and write Chinese characters and practice calligraphy. Ngan’s parents were supportive of his creative interests, which was unusual given the economic and political struggles in the country. Ngan Gee also bought him books on Chinese art, as well as materials to draw and paint with.[21]

With the invasion of Guangdong during the second Sino-Japanese War, his parents sent twelve-year-old Ngan and his brother back to New Zealand in 1938. Regardless of his age, Ngan’s time in China cemented two important components of his practice: his pride in his cultural heritage and his curiosity about Western civilisation.

Though the modernist abstraction that had such an impact on Ngan’s painting  did not gain credence in China until the late 1970s — well after his return to Aotearoa New Zealand —Ngan’s practice still reflected the broader tendencies of contemporary Chinese artists. For example, his screen prints are saturated with rich colour, but also infused with the gestural brush work of guóhuà (classical Chinese painting), which is traditionally more figurative, and painted with a limited pallet. Renowned scholar of contemporary Chinese art Wu Hung describes this type of approach as “internalizing tradition”, where artists “clearly [reveal] their debt to China’s rich, artistic heritage by way of translation, transformation, appropriation and refiguration…instead of modernizing an indigenous art tradition to extend its longevity, these artists merge traditional forms, ideas, and technologies into the broader realm of global, contemporary art.”[22] In comparison, paintings like Celebration (2008) from Ngan’s Middle Kingdom 中國 series, where he uses specific Chinese characters, signal the contemporary relevance of this form of communication and promote its ongoing use. This is a methodology often employed by indigenous artists and likely something he was exposed to in the work of Māori modernists.[23]

On the other hand, Ngan did not have the same deep connection with the whenua of Aotearoa New Zealand through whakapapa as experienced and expressed by Māori. Like many Pākehā do, he appreciated local landscapes and coastlines for their inherent beauty. Mt Taranaki and its surrounding area—a regular destination of family vacations—directly influenced the Waoku series.[24] Walking through native bush also informed the large-scale public mural Forest in the Sun (1976), a collaborative textile he created with weaver Joan Calvert, commissioned for the Beehive, while his Kahikatea sculptures were named after the trees they were made from. Ngan also engaged with Primitivism, through his studies under Alex Fraser in Wellington,[25] and then later in London through collections such as those held by the British Museum.[26] The influence of Primitivism is evident in Ngan’s thesis, which he completed to achieve his qualification of Designer of the Royal College of Arts. Entitled Woodcarving, the text and accompanying images explored the customary, spiritual, utilitarian and decorative applications of this artform from cultures in Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa. As Ngan’s practice matured, his Tiki Hands paintings and Anchor Stone sculptures also appropriated Māori visual culture. In his 2006 City Gallery Wellington exhibition, Galbraith considers these two bodies of work as being concerned with establishing connections across the Asia-Pacific region, which suggests they could also have been a gentle reaction to the prejudice Ngan experienced over his lifetime.[27] Kingsley Baird also reflects that Ngan was “intensely interested in humanity, including the migrations of peoples across the globe throughout history and, primarily, what links them, culturally and genetically”.[28]

Having made so many places his home, it is no surprise that Ngan believed that “buildings should reflect our feelings”, and that modern architecture and its ability to connect people with their surroundings was a significant influence on him[29]. This can be seen most clearly in Ngan’s Habitation sculptures, which he photographed and populated with tiny people as if they were maquettes for brutalist buildings. These sculptures are also testament to his philosophy that sculpture “should not be isolated, but take part in life”, a belief that informed his public works across the country and his reluctance to exhibit in galleries.[30] In two of the handful of solo exhibitions he had, his sculptures were described by reviewers as relating “too closely to the buildings they adorn”[31], or acting as “pleasing shapes that might grace the desk in the offices of a very smart firm.”[32] Considering the rich sources Ngan drew from, such statements misunderstand his cultural inheritance and artistic intentions. 

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Despite the artist’s continuous production of art that responded to living in Aotearoa New Zealand (such as the Habitation, Anchor Stone, Tiki Hands, Waoku and Kahikatea series), in 2002, Michael Dunn suggested that artists like Ngan, who he compared to Tanya Ashken, were too internationally focussed, lacked engagement with New Zealand as a Pacific nation and did not meet postmodernism’s call for more diverse practices.[33] Writing about Ashken, Damian Skinner takes this argument a step further, reflecting that:

The specific cultural context of this work means that in some ways, it escapes the logic of originality that governs art history; where who did what first matters a great deal…The fact that Selwyn Muru’s sculpture, Homage to Henry Moore was carved in 1989, and is therefore a good five or six decades after artists in New Zealand first began creating works in conversation with this British artist, doesn’t necessarily render it late and provincial, because it is about constructing a different whakapapa or genealogy for modern art in Aotearoa. In contrast, Ashken’s sculpture from the 1960s, drawing on very similar precedents, can be judged as somewhat belated and perhaps even old fashioned by art history, because it is a part of a Pākehā history of making art and therefore continues what has been made before.[34]

While searching for works when developing the exhibition Guy Ngan: Habitation, I had to piece together the artist’s practice with auction records. It became clear his output was prolific, but also that the vast majority of his work landed in private collections, not public ones. While New Zealanders have been connecting with Ngan’s work for seven decades, his contribution to art history in this country has been largely dismissed because he was measured against Pākehā-centric criteria. 

Thinking globally, Ngan was not just emulating artists such as Moore and Hepworth. The influence on his practice of the places he lived reflects Canadian art historian Ruth B. Phillips’ assertion that modernism can have “endless permutations, repeatedly reinvented and renewed in the encounter with local traditions and conditions of production”.[35] In their contribution to a publication exploring global modernism, Director of the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum, Melissa Chiu, and art critic Benjamin Genocchio reinforce the similar point that:

In the past two decades, scholars in Asia as elsewhere have questioned the privilege common in standard art historical accounts that represent Europe and the United States as the originating centre of modernism, and the rest of the world as the derivative, inauthentic periphery. With this questioning has come a realization of the need for new theoretical models that can accommodate other discourses that modernism elsewhere has engendered.[36]

While it may seem necessary to place Ngan’s artistic development in a certain time and place, his inability to neatly fit into the modernisms appended to the places he lived, demonstrates how he drew from them all. Regardless, Ngan was a New Zealander, and if an artist has something to say about who we are as a nation, but cannot be contextualised in the ways we traditionally define ourselves, then we need to change these definitions. By considering Ngan as a globally-influenced modernist, who incorporated his Chinese heritage into a practice situated in Aotearoa New Zealand, there is an opportunity to reassess his work. What can Ngan’s practice tell us about the complexities of Asian diaspora in the twentieth century, or how Chinese New Zealanders see and express themselves?

Ngan’s sculpture No 33 (1988)  is a rare interpretation by the artist of the Chinese landscape, consisting of three abstracted peak-like forms that reference the dramatic limestone karst hills of Guilin in Southern China. In the exhibition Guy Ngan: Habitation, it sits alongside one of his well-known Anchor Stone pieces that represents the migration of Polynesian people from Asia to Aotearoa New  Zealand. As a pair, these works show the dual sense of belonging Ngan cultivated in his life and practice. Like many of his sculptures, each can also be visualised as a large-scale public work that could sit comfortably in a park or on an inner-city sidewalk; testament to the artist’s belief that art needs to be a part of the experiences of everyday New Zealanders. The fact that most of his work rests in both private collections and public outdoor spaces is evidence of the connection he made with so many people, and demonstrates the validity of taking a highly personal, culturally-inflected position outside of mainstream Pākehā culture. Ngan’s unique experiences and influences as a Pacific Chinese person—a term he adopted to acknowledge his heritage and home—manifest in his art practice and present a new perspective on Aotearoa New Zealand’s diversity, then and now.

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The Many Places He Stood was originally written in 2019 for the publication Guy Ngan, edited by me, that accompanied the exhibitions “Guy: Ngan Habitation” at The Dowse Art Museum and “Guy Ngan: Either Possible or Neccessary” at Artspace Aotearoa.

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[1] Elva Bett, letter to Guy Ngan, April 4, 1973.

[2] Tina Hos, letter to Guy Ngan, June 18, 1975.

[3] Letters from Hos to Ngan, Te Papa, June 17, 1976.

[4] Doreen Blumhardt and Brian Brake, Craft New Zealand  (Wellington, Sydney: A.H. & A.W Reed Ltd, 1981), 85.

[5] This exhibition was called Journey—Aluminium Panel, Tiki Hands & Anchor Stones.  It was accompanied by a catalogue of the same name.

[6] Heather Galbraith and Stella Brennan, Guy Ngan: Journey—Aluminium Panel, Tiki Hands & Anchor Stones (Wellington: City Gallery Wellington, 2006), 5.

[7] Peter Cape “Guy Ngan: Sculpture for a Living,” NZ Listener, June 26 (1972): 10­–11. 

[8] Helene Wong in email to author, March 3, 2019.

[9] Kobena Mercer, ed, Discrepant Abstraction (London: Institute of International Visual Arts and MIT Press, 2006), 9.

[10] Oral history interview with Pip Oldman, Take 9. July 8, 2011

[11] Peter Cape “Guy Ngan—Sculpture for a Living,” NZ Listener, June 26 (1972): 10–11. 

[12] Liz Ngan in conversation with the author, March 19, 2019

[13] Liz Ngan, submission on Heritage New Zealand Wellington Teachers’ Training College proposal (List No.9797, Category 9 (2018), 1.

[14] Keith McCook, “From Hutt Valley to Train in UK, Young Chinese Sculptor Has a Bright Future”, Evening Post, 9 November, 1952.

[15] Basil Ward and Robin Darwin et al., The Anatomy of Design published by the Royal College (London: The Royal College of Art, 1951), 101, 8.

[16] Darwin and Ward et al., op. cit., 8, 100.

[17] Kingsley Baird, email to author, March 8, 2019.

[18] Damian Skinner, London Calling: Artistic Decolonisation and New Commonwealth Internationalism (Wellington: Art History, Victoria University of Wellington, 2017), 29.

[19] Yiyan Wang, email to author, March 2, 2019.

[20] Oral history interview with Pip Oldman, Take 12. July 15, 2011.

[21] Oral history interview with Pip Oldman, Take 9. July 8, 2011.

[22] Wu Hung, Contemporary Chinese Art: A History 1970s–2000s (United Kingdom: Thames and Hudson, 2014), 331.

[23] Māori modernism developed in the 1950s and 60s, and included artist such as Selwyn Wilson, Ralph Hotere and Katerina Mataira. Māori modernists combined customary Māori arts with the aesthetics of modernism. Often, their work asserted a political perspective on the indigenous rights of Māori as tangata whenua of Aotearoa New Zealand.

[24] Athol McCredie, email to author, March 15, 2019. This information came from a phone conversation between McCredie and the artist for Te Papa’s database.

[25] Liz Ngan in conversation with author, March 19, 2019.

[26] Penelope Curtis et al., Modern British Sculpture (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2011), 53.

[27] Oral history interview with Pip Oldman, Take 15. August 1, 2011.

[28] Kingsley Baird in email to author, March 8, 2019.

[29] Keith McCook, “From Hutt Valley to Train in UK, Young Chinese Sculptor Has a Bright Future,” Evening Post, 9 November, 1952.

[30] Un-authored article, “The Right to be There,” Designscape 39/5 (1972).

[31] Peter Cape “Designer?” NZ Listener, February 23 (1974).

[32] T.J McNamara, “Bronze best of show,” NZ Herald, 27 July, 1976.

[33] Michael Dunn, NZ Sculpture: A History (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2002), 117.

[34] Cameron Drawbridge, ed., Tanya Ashken Jeweller Silversmith Sculptor (Wellington: Cameron Drawbridge Publication, 2016), 32.

[35] Ruth B. Phillips “Aesthetic Primitivism revisited: The global diaspora of ‘primitive art’ and the rise of Indigenous modernisms”, Journal of Historiography Number 12 June (2015), 5.

[36] Melissa Chu and Benjamin Genocchio, et al., Multicultural/ Multimodernsim in Modern Art of Africa, Asia and Latin America: An introduction to Global Modernisms (United Kingdom: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 108.