The Second World War and the Vietnam War cut through Southeast Asia with particular force, bringing occupation, colonial violence, proxy conflicts, and the ruin of vast tracts of land. The art that emerged from and in response to those conflicts has never been brought together in a single major exhibition until now. In “After the Monsoon,” the National Gallery Singapore examines how artists across the region used their practices to make sense of famine, death, and destruction during those terrible years. Kusama Affandi’s wartime watercolors from Indonesia, for example, hang alongside Fernando Amorsolo’s paintings from the Philippines. A line from the poet Chinua Achebe comes to mind: “Art is man’s constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.” —Elena Clavarino