Haliya Bathing / Agnes Arellano
The National Gallery Singapore's Passion Is Volcanic: Desire in Southeast Asian Art was the least erotic erotic art exhibition I'd ever been to.
It was very abstract, intellectual & indirect.
Dissolving into the Same Breath #2 / Lavender Chang
A lot of was abstract modern art where the writeup (if any) didn't make any link to eroticism and/or was related to love, which is not the same as eroticism.
Pinaree Sanpitak's 'Noon-Nom'
Presumably, the beanbags are supposed to be breasts. You are invited to remove your shoes and step on them.
Even seemingly erotic items weren't always well-presented.
Yab-Yums look erotic, and this one was probably the closest the exhibition came to depicting sex, but are not supposed to be erotic (at least in some interpretations). This theme wasn't explored: in fact, I think the Yab-Yum was not even labelled (certainly, it's not mentioned in the exhibition content material online), but other sources name it as "Vajradhara and Prajnaparamita".
Nudity is also featured, but nudity isn't necessarily erotic (think medical textbooks, mortuary photographs or an old woman being stripped by a hospital attendant). A prime example of this was a video from Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook: I’m Living:
This involved dressing a young girl's corpse in various clothes. I didn't watch the full 24 min 59 sec, but there didn't seem to be any nudity, let alone an erotic aspect to the video.
Lim Chong Keat's Jack is only there because the artist flippantly called it erotic and might have been referring to the colour palette's lack of restraint. What a reach.
The "best" example of all this is Jason Wee's 16 pixels from the bangs of Miranda Hobbes, where Dr Ronny Shapiro's cum landed, after his wife performed tantric masturbation on his root chakra, as part of her demonstration for a sex class:
Which turns out as repetitive monochrome squares. Like Mondrian but without the colour or variety in geometry.
For some reason, photography & video filming were strictly banned, unlike in the rest of the establishment. Probably to avoid incremental controversy from prudish quarters. Not that there was much that was controversial; maybe the gay paintings, which didn't even show gay sex - but gay people existing isn't erotic:
According to the exhibition, all of these were gay-themed, but one of the figures in the top left work seems to be a woman. In any event, 1/3 of the remaining works isn't even clearly gay, and none of them show or allude to the act of sodomy.
In contrast, the Annabel Chong section of the exhibition was a relief. While it didn't seem to cohere with the rest of the exhibition, at least it was clearly erotic.
IIRC, the exhibition said this was the dress she wore for the gangbang. I am unable to confirm this from the images I can find of the event (I am not going to spend 98 minutes of my life watching it to more rigorously verify this)
More photos of works from the exhibition are available on the e-flux review, the ArtAsiaPacific review (which has bananas in a suggestive pose) and probably the most at Bakchormeeboy's review.
