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Guy Ngan died two years ago and his work is now having a moment. Last week, I saw curator Sian van Dyk’s exhibition, Guy Ngan: Habitation, at the Dowse Art Museum in Lower Hutt, and there’s another Ngan show, Either Possible or Necessary, on concurrently at Artspace, Auckland. Emma Ng just published a long piece in The Spinoff , ‘Guy Ngan, An Artist Ignored but not Forgotten’, and Anna Knox followed up days later with an interview with Van Dyk, again in The Spinoff, ‘His Work Hangs in the Beehive, but Galleries Ignored Guy Ngan, Until Now’. Both pieces were funded by the Dowse. Plus, I hear, a new monograph is in the wings.

Ngan lived in Lower Hutt. For the Dowse, he’s a local artist and his work fits neatly within their applied-arts mandate. Doing Habitation makes perfect sense for them. I enjoyed the show. Indeed, I think it should have been bigger, with more works and certainly more space around them. Nevertheless, I find the emerging argument—of Ngan as a neglected figure only now getting his just due—spurious and amnesiac. In the art scene, it is routinely claimed that artists have been marginalised or neglected, but without ever benchmarking or justifying what appropriate recognition would look like.

Ngan did not operate in what we would now think of as the New Zealand art mainstream—showing in galleries and museums and being reviewed in Art New Zealand. He was principally a public artist, in his heyday perhaps New Zealand’s most successful one, with steady patronage. When many now-canonical New Zealand artists were doing it tough, struggling to professionalise their practice, Ngan was on a salary working for the Ministry of Works or in private architectural practice. An establishment figure, an insider, he went on to direct the conservative New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts for a decade (1976–86) and was awarded an OBE in 1983. It’s illogical to consider him a neglected artist in his time. He was entirely successful, in the area he elected to work in.

It’s true, he wasn’t a big fish for the mainstream art scene. But that scene celebrates innovation, and Ngan wasn’t particularly innovative. He was a style artist, not an inquiry artist. He had chops and versatility, but ultimately he aspired to produce attractive, unchallenging works. In 1983, he wrote, tellingly: The office ‘is where we come into contact with other people on an average of eight hours a day on at least five days of the week. To have an appropriate work in your office is more important than to have a great work of art.’ Ngan’s appropriate ‘brooches on buildings’ kept clients happy rather than pressing their buttons. Which is why—despite his professional success and ubiquity—he failed to make a dent in the discussion.

Destined for facades and foyers, Ngan’s works were modern looking, but not avantgarde. As Stella Brennan wrote: ‘In a period of expansionist “think big” government spending, his work was caught up in a bureaucratisation of modernist precepts and forms.’ Habitation has the feel of a tasteful mid-century-modern design store. Ngan’s buffed-metal and varnished-wood sculptures, his almost-abstract paintings, and his big wall rugs are likeable, exemplifying a familiar, now-groovy, retro-modern style. But his period-piece modernism was always belated, diluted, and provincial, which is why Julian Dashper part-affectionately, part-mockingly namechecked him in his tongue-in-cheek 1987 painting Guy Ngan Mural, Bledisloe State Building, Auckland City in the Auckland Art Gallery collection.

Given all this, and perhaps against the odds, I think Ngan’s work has enjoyed surprising, perhaps undue recognition in recent years—and not just with Habitation. In the 1990s, Dashper’s perverse interest kept Ngan’s name in play. Then, in 1999, Ngan’s 1973 Newton Post Office Mural became the unlikely star of Stella Brennan’s Artspace show Nostalgia for the Future, where it shared the stage with current figures, including Dashper, Jim Speers, and Mikala Dwyer. In 2004, Auckland Art Gallery acquired the Mural (on my recommendation) and, in 2005, put it on display. In 2006, City Gallery Wellington presented a major Ngan survey show, and, in 2010, Ron Sang published a big book. None of this really screams neglect.

Actually, where Ngan is neglected is in the Habitation show itself, which makes little case for his art as art. Instead, making much of the Chinese and Māori references in some of his works, it pivots on current identity politics. As a Chinese New Zealander who used Māori imagery, Ngan is recast as an ancestor figure for our newly multicultural biculturalism; in the process, his Māori appropriations go unquestioned. Right now, there’s a pressing desire to entwine Asia-Pacific–tauiwi and Māori identities, so Ngan is coopted as a precedent. Thus, at the Dowse, the artist who once typified generic corporate-foyer internationalism—‘the bureaucratisation of modernist precepts and forms’—now dances to a brand new tune: uniqueness, place, diversity. This wilful reinvention of Ngan to meet our current needs is masked as making amends for his past neglect. All this must raise flags about how we are rewriting or ignoring art history to service current political fashion—albeit worthy.
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