SINGAPORE — It was the good ol’ days — années folles, the “crazy years,” a moveable feast. In good weather, amid the crowd of tables at the Dome Cafe or on the streets of Montparnasse, that stomping ground of the School of Paris, one was likely to run into friends, colleagues, lovers, models, enemies — that whole teeming mass of artworld humanity. At the Horde’s Ball, an annual event held to raise artists’ funds — and a damn good party — a figure with a bowl cut and round, black-rimmed glasses, his hand on a flapper’s upper back, meets your gaze for just a second, grinning. There’s a jolt of familiarity, and then a flood of warmth — kinship found in an unexpected place. That’s how I felt, at least, when I locked eyes for the briefest moment with Foujita Tsuguharu, that zany Japanese-French artist iconic for still-lifes, nudes, and self-portraits that often feature friendly or inquisitive cats. I looked at him from a celadon-painted room in the National Gallery of Singapore this past April; he looked at me from a black and white video filmed a century ago, projected onto the wall. Such exchanges are just one of the manifold ways that City of Others: Asian Artists in Paris, 1920s–1940s transports viewers into interwar Paris, the beating red heart of the Western art world. Shimizu Toshi, “Paris At Night” (1926), oil on canvasThat heart, it is crucial to note, would have failed if not for the fresh blood constantly pumping into it in the form of foreign students, artisans, and emigrés. The School of Paris, which gave us Picasso, Chagall, Modigliani, Mondrian, and countless others, is now known to have anchored a golden age of art. But in the 1930s, those whipped into a nationalist fervor wielded the term as a pejorative precisely for its strong association with foreigners. Those foreigners weren’t just Europeans and Americans, but also Asians from all across the continent. Artisans from what was then French Indochina were brought in to lacquer propellers, prompting innovative decorative and hybrid art forms; dancers from India and Japan honed their craft at popular and experimental venues; students from all over entered academies and formed artist groups, offering their knowledge to the melting pot of Paris before some returned to their homelands, their influence rippling out through history. Though the exhibition focuses on these artists, the title City of Others doesn’t refer just to those “othered” in historical Western discourse as a subsection of a city of “insiders.” Rather, it remaps interwar Paris itself — this metropolis with nearly a 10% foreign-born population — as a city of others. This intervention feels particularly urgent as I write from New York City — the current capital of the art world — in what some of us have forgotten has always been a country of others. City of Others is a behemoth of labor: More than 220 artworks sourced from 50 lenders, accompanied by more than 200 pieces of archival material, including photographs, catalogs, and films. Given this overwhelming mass of material, curators Phoebe Scott, Lisa Horikawa, Teo Hui Min, and Roy Ng have done a fantastic job preparing an exhibition that effectively imparts general points to a broad audience while simultaneously rewarding viewers who take the time to dig deeper. Lê Phổ, “Tonkinese Landscape” (c. 1930), lacquer on wood, 5 hinged panel screen; mounted on wooden panel with gold leaf design (likely later)On a structural level, it does so with clear section titles that group disparate works and ephemera. The first section, “Workshop to the World,” details the impact of decorative arts and design on the art world — Art Deco had just made its way onto the international stage via the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris — with lacquer as a particular focus. Indeed, a quarter of the workers from Indochina (present-day Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, then colonized by France) living in Paris in the 1910s lacquered propellers for World War I. The section focuses on artists who collaborated with French designers while creating their own works, such as Sougawara Seizo and Hamanaka Katsu — importantly, this exhibition may be the first time multiple pieces by the latter are seen together, as much of his work was lost in World War II. The second section, “Theater of the Colonies,” examines Paris as both the colonial center of the French empire and a site of anti-colonial protest — one highlight here is the art of Nguyễn Ái Quốc, who would become better known as Ho Chi Minh, the rebel leader of Vietnam. He contributes a series of anti-imperialism cartoons, including one in which a lazing French passenger barks at an Indochinese rickshaw puller, the spokes of the wheel reading “exploitation,” “oppression,” “assimilation,” and more. The third section, “Spectacle and Stage,” centers dance: Imported via the World and Colonial Expositions, Asian styles became popular (occasionally in caricatured form) in certain venues, including some where artists were given free rein to innovate new styles. Next, “Sites of Exhibitions,” traces the places where these artists showed their work, from salons to museums to commercial galleries, while “Studio and Street” delves into their lived experience, with works depicting studios, streetscapes, and social scenes. It ends with “Aftermaths,” in which the art world grappled with the trauma of war, and Paris gradually lost its title as the capital of the art world. Left: Mai Trung Thứ, “Self Portrait with Cigarette” (1940); right: Mai Trung Thứ, “Self-Portrait with Glasses” (c. 1950), oil on canvasCity of Others also creates order out of such a complicated history by emphasizing networks, such as artist societies grouped by nationality. And it seeds reoccurring characters throughout: A few protagonists pop up throughout the show like old friends, among them Foujita, Georgette Chen, Liu Kang, and Lê Phổ. Mai Trung Thứ’s “Self Portrait with Cigarette” (1940), for instance, in which he arcs his eyebrow coyly, fancying himself a dandy, appears at the start of the show; another self-portrait with a cigarette from around a decade later sees him wizened, looking off into the distance almost wistfully rather than meeting the viewer’s gaze. (Mai would later also record Ho Chi Minh’s visit to France.) And Xu Beihong, known today as one of the four pioneers of Chinese art but then as “Ju Péon,” a 20-something-year-old scholarship student, appears in a photograph at the very beginning of the exhibition, posing in the courtyard of the National School of Fine Arts. Midway through, he reappears, at age 30, in the form of a realist painting he made of his wife, Jiang Biwei, from 1925, who wears a European-style 1920s-era day dress. Again we see him, seven years later, represented by an ink piece that looks pretty similar to a classic Chinese ink painting to my eye. Such a progression indicates that this was not a matter of an Asian artist subsuming European features into his art across time, but rather the nonlinear story of an artist combining all kinds of influences to forge a unique career. Still, many of these artists don’t have the benefit of a clear trajectory, as their names or work have been lost for myriad reasons, including travel, war, or historical accident. The show marks these historic lacunae, and they land with a sense of real loss. The names of Vietnamese artisans listed on a wall label, for example, are known only because the French government kept espionage files on them.Installation view of City of Others, featuring a reproduction of a 1933 archival photograph of visitors to the Exhibition of Chinese Painting at Musée du Jeu de Paume and a vitrine containing a catalog signed by Xu BeihongInnovative curatorial interventions also pull the viewer into the historical period without cheapening the archival materials, enlivening what could be a simultaneously dry and overwhelming experience into something more felt. For instance, a 1933 archival photograph of visitors to the Exhibition of Chinese Painting at Musée du Jeu de Paume, an institution that exhibited and collected art from foreign schools, is blown up to greater than life-sized. In the original photograph, two Asian women in qipaos gaze down at artworks housed in a vitrine. Here, a real-life vitrine takes its place, which includes an original catalog for that very exhibition, with a handwritten note by Xu. City of Others draws out the expected direction of influence, demonstrating how French culture permeated the work of these artists. Foujita, for instance, almost exclusively painted nudes of White women because he felt it was a strictly European tradition, according to the wall text. The pale-toned oil-on-canvas painting “Reclining Nude” (1931) borrows the figure’s dramatic, swept-over pose from Henry Fuseli’s “The Nightmare” (1781), but Foujita’s linework is distinctly calligraphic. Using an extremely precise brush loaded with sumi ink, he carefully renders each line of her twisted body as well as each fold of the crumpled fabric underneath her; look closely, and you’ll see how the oil pulled away from the water-based ink to create those odd white haloes around each line. And the Japanese painter Sakata Kazuo forged a strong bond with his teacher Fernand Léger, and was influenced by his style — both of their work are bold, bright, and inflected by cubism. Importantly, however, this influence didn’t always take the form of an artist borrowing elements from European traditions: Wifredo Lam encountered the primitivism of Picasso in Paris and declared, “It irritated me that in Paris African masks and idols were sold like jewelry”; he would go on to reclaim and re-embed Afro-Caribbean and diasporic traditions within the visual language of Modernist art. Foujita Tsuguhara, “Reclining Nude” (1931), oil on canvas Indeed, the exhibition is particularly skillful in teasing out the tangled, rather than unidirectional, paths of influence dispersed throughout these artistic legacies as time passed, artists moved, borders shifted, and tastes changed. It underscores the lack of a clear center and periphery: At the time, for instance, Japan had annexed both Taiwan and Korea, and artists from all three nations mixed in Paris. And Xu, who also moved to Tokyo to study art, would come to Singapore to set up a Chinese painting society, where he would raise money for the nation’s war against Japan, which he had called home mere decades earlier. Elsewhere, it shows how artists self-othered by looking at themselves through the European gaze — and sometimes found themselves in the process. Indian painter Umrao Singh Sher-Gil Majithia evidences his self-fashioning by dressing himself in various guises — in one work, he wears just a loincloth; in another, he holds a book and spectacles in his lap. “Our long stay in Europe has aided me to discover, as it were, India,” his daughter, the Hungarian-Indian painter Amrita Sher-Gil wrote, as quoted in the exhibition text. “It seems paradoxical but I know for certain that had we not come away to Europe I should perhaps never have realised that a fresco from Ajanta or a small piece of sculpture in the Musée Guimet is worth more than the whole Renaissance!” Left: Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, “Amrita Sher-Gil Looking into the Mirror, Simla, India” (c. 1932); right: Self-portrait by Umrao Singh Sher-GilOne of my favorite examples of the ways that influence is misdirected or complicated is an anecdote the wall texts relay about Vietnamese painter Nguyễn Phan Chánh, who contributes some of the most beautiful works in this show, which is saying a lot. He painted on silk — traditionally a Chinese medium, but one that he felt represented the Vietnamese character. In a letter, the director of the Indochina Economic Agency gently suggested that his paintings would be “much more appreciated by the French public if they were a bit less monotonous in tone.” Ironically, the reverse was likely true, if his critical reception was any indication. After the turmoil of World War I, nostalgia for the realism, balance, and harmony of the Greco-Roman tradition animated the Paris art world via the “rappel à l’ordre” or “return to order” movement, aligning with his and certain other Asian artists’ serene figurative approach. As a whole, the exhibition upends the typical ways we think about history, influence, and progress. It asserts that France, an active imperial power, could commit atrocities abroad at the same time that the French state was acquiring works by artists from those regions, suggesting the worth of the very culture it was destroying. It crucially emphasizes that imperialism was deeply contested by many within the imperial core — I was struck in particular by the description contemporaneous art historian Jeannine Auboyer applied to painter Vũ Cao Đàm as being “lost in the Parisian jungle,” casting the French city in a term often used to savage Southeast Asia. A small section is also dedicated to the Surrealists, including André Breton, who called for a boycott of the Exposition Coloniale, which showcased the “civilizing mission” of the French empire. They launched a counter-exhibition called The Truth About the Colonies. Approximately 8 million visitors attended the former; just a little over 4,000 visited the latter. But it happened, and that matters. It is evidence of refusal from within the heart of the art world, an archival fact that resists erasure. And someday, history will tell of today’s struggle for justice — as well as those who were complacent, or complicit, or culpable — just as starkly. This period has taken on a certain nostalgic sheen, as the final hurrah of an art world that fell from grace. The exhibition’s closing section, “Aftermaths,” tells of this art world’s downfall via the rise of fascism, outbreak of war, and dissipation of the international artistic ferment under the weight of nationalist violence. It’s a sobering end, a reminder that vibrant, pluralistic artistic communities are fragile. City of Others recovers a largely lost chapter of art history, but it also asks us to consider the threatened conditions of our present. The greatness of interwar Paris lay in its otherness; ours might too. Itakulla Kanae, “Portrait of an Artist” (1928), oil on canvasItakulla Sumiko, “Afternoon, Belle Honolulu 12” (c. 1927–28), oil on canvasLê Văn Đệ, “The Family Interior in Tonkin” (1933), oil on canvasLeft: members of the Association of Chinese Artists in France who were schoolmates at the National School of Fine Arts, Paris; right: Georgette Chen, “Self-Portrait” (c. 1934), oil on canvasXu Beihong, “Trees and Personage” (1932), ink and color on paper Left: Foujita Tsuguharu, “Self-Portrait with Cat” (1926), oil on canvas; right: Sakata Kazuo, “Composition” (c. 1926), oil on canvasNguyễn Ái Quốc, “Cartoon of a Rickshaw Puller” (1922/2025)City of Others: Asian Artists in Paris, 1920s-1940s continues at the National Gallery Singapore (1 Saint Andrew’s Road, Singapore) through August 17. The exhibition was curated by Phoebe Scott, Lisa Horikawa, Teo Hui Min, and Roy Ng.Editor’s note: The writer’s travel and accomodations were paid for by the National Gallery Singapore.