OUTLIERS SINGAPURA

"City of Others," ongoing at the National Gallery Singapore till August, is the Filipino painter Macario Vitalis' "Houses in Puteaux" (1937), one of hundreds of artworks by Asian artists in Paris from 1920s to the 1940s, roughly spanning peacetime between the two world wars.

- JUANIYO ARCELLANA

Vitalis is from Ilocos Sur, part of a generation of manongs who sought the proverbial greener pastures abroad in his country's fledgling years as an American colony. In France he lived on second-floor accommodations of an establishment in the Parisian suburb of Puteaux that housed a restaurant on the ground floor, where the museum guide said the painter had his meals.

"Likely painted on-site, 'Houses in Puteaux' reimagines a familiar streetscape as a dynamic yet harmonious composition," a notecard beside the painting says. "Vitalis cultivated a style that infused geometric rigor with a keen sensitivity to the lyrical interplay of forms within space."

Also part of the show are "Trees and Personage" by Xu Beihong, ink and color on paper, and a series of spot cartoons for newspaper by the future revolutionary Ho Chi Minh, as well as works by other artists like Georgette Chen, Le Pho and Liu Kang, each reflecting the French style of Impressionism and Modernism in their respective works, however maintaining a distinct Asian flavor.

What comes to mind when you speak of Paris between wars, the elderly guide asks a motley group of journalists from Southeast Asia visiting on opening weekend of the Singapore International Festival of Arts. One ventured Hemingway, another Virginia Woolf; no mention of Gertrude Stein and her love for Alice B. Toklas and her rose by any other name still a rose.