And so, a mural Edades painted with Galo B. Ocampo and Carlos “Botong” Francisco—Mother Nature’s Bounty (1935)—opens “Tropical: Stories from Southeast Asia and Latin America” at the National Gallery Singapore. The show surveys shared formal and political sensibilities in art from the two tropical regions, all made in the 20th century. This trio painted the Philippine revolution, borrowing motifs from the Mexican muralists with whom they share a colonizer: Spain. Both groups painted scenes packed with workers, whose bodies are rendered sturdy and statuesque, forming all-over compositions.

This mural hangs near Pobre Pescador (Poor Fisherman), 1896, by Paul Gauguin—the notorious French painter of Tahitian scenes. Gauguin, “Tropical” argues, planted stereotypical images of the tropics in the minds of many—images of a peaceful paradise, endless summer, lazy natives, and free love. That last one, “free love,” is a grating contortion, coming from a man whose muse was his child bride. But instead of canceling Gauguin fully, “Tropical” positions his work as the problem so many tropical artists were working against. Eat Pray Love, the best-selling memoir Elizabeth Gilbert wrote about finding herself in Bali in the wake of a divorce, is included for similar reasons in a library of tropical literature presented as part of the show.

Many paintings here contend with the way pastoral imagery was entwined with various projects of colonialism, which used images of verdant land brimming with untapped resources as justifications for occupation. A group of these landscapes is hung on apparatuses designed by the Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, an icon of tropical modernism who, for a museum she designed in São Paulo, placed paintings on clear vertical planks stuck in blocks of concrete. She wanted to arrange works not linearly, but in what she called “a marvelous entanglement.” On these devices, labels are placed behind the paintings rather than next to them, so walking about, you’re forced to delay categorizing the mixture of works into their respective regions. Instead, you’re left attending to their affinities—chief among them their jewel-toned palettes, with rusty oranges and royal blues extending from verdant emeralds.

Mostly, these works refute ideas of untouched lands full of lazy natives with scenes showing workers, bustling streetscapes, and active human beings. Vibrant street scenes by S. Sudjojono, a founder of Indonesian modernism, stand out: he insisted on the political power of painting, always reminding people that the medium was no master’s tool, since it began not in Europe, but rather Egypt.

The most provocative pastoral riff is by Semsar Siahaan, whose 9-foot version of Manet’s Olympia shows a nude blonde woman lounging in sunglasses and heels, sipping from a coconut decorated with flowers. In Siahaan’s rendition from 1987, dozens of locals surround her, flocking from the surrounding land to dote, point, or stare. A brown foot extends from under her bed, right next to her suitcase, as if the man who carried her luggage also offered himself as an ottoman. Another work by Siahaan is a suite of sculptures the Indonesian artist burned: they were first made by his teacher at the Bandung Art Academy, fusing traditional techniques with European ones. Siahaan protested this effort to “modernize” Indonesian art by setting the wooden works ablaze.

In addition to subversions of stereotypes, there’s a section dedicated to self-portraiture. Here and throughout, art historical icons are paired with under-recognized artists. An especially striking pairing includes a 1945 picture of Frida Kahlo in which the Mexican artist is embraced by a monkey: the pair of primates wears matching chartreuse hair ribbons. Kahlo’s painting is shown next to Patrick Ng Kah Onn’s 1958 self-portrait, wherein the Kuala Lumpur–born artist, a Chinese male, depicts himself as a Malay woman in a provocative meditation on identity, one rare for its time. The works rhyme visually, sharing browns and golds, and both artists stare straight-on, framed by their bushy eyebrows.

Another memorable moment of self-representation comes in the form of a filmed 1960s interview with Ni Pollok, an Indonesian dancer who was the muse—and later, wife—of the Belgian artist Adrien-Jean le Mayeur de Marpès, who painted idyllic Balinese scenes with her dancing in the center. We see not his canvases but an interview with Pollok who, in a scene that sums up the show, is asked whether she considers Bali a tropical paradise. “No,” she replies. “I was just born here.”

You would be forgiven for overlooking the works’ brushlessness—Liu conceals and controls his experimental methods—and you could appreciate the simple elegance of his compositions and his mesmerizing color combinations all the same. But the magic is enhanced when you come to appreciate how he directs the swirling ink he uses when marbling—a technique that involves adding droplets of pigment to a vat of water, then dragging the paper across its surface. Whereas most artists turn to marbling to invite an element of chance, Liu approaches it as a challenge to prove his control.

Firmly committed to his brushless bit, Liu developed his own kind of cotton paper that leaves visible, linear fibers. When you see a white line in a composition of his, you can bet that he first stained the entire page and then removed a cotton strand, revealing fresh, unstained paper beneath. In fact, once you focus on the brushlessness, you might find yourself looking at each of Liu’s impressive paintings and asking: how’d he do that without a brush?

Liu is dedicated to painting nature, and his moon paintings—colorful orbs hovering majestically in commanding compositions—count among his finest works. He first started painting the moon and other celestial bodies after watching the 1969 Apollo landing and experiencing a decidedly modern strand of the sublime that landscape painters have tried to evoke for centuries. He returned to the lunar motif again in the 2000s, with works whose crinkled, then flattened paper came to represent the moon’s craggy surface.

But all this is more than just a cool trick: Liu rewards curious, meticulous viewers of both his work and the world. One benefits from looking at his work as he looks at the moon, for wondering: how does this work? He shows how the moon can be more magical when you know some of the math behind the mystery—when you appreciate, for instance, that the moon is both 400 times smaller than the sun and 400 times closer to the Earth. When his painting Midnight Sun III (1970) shows the trajectory of a fiery astronomical presence moving across a dark sky, it isn’t didactic and it doesn’t demystify; it invites more marveling.

Liu’s celestial paintings merge geometric abstraction with a glimpse into the infinite, expansive cosmos. In this way, the works speak across time and culture. But they also respond to and update traditions specific to Chinese ink painting. In the 1970s, Liu established a modern ink art curriculum during his tenure as chair of the fine arts department of Chinese University Hong Kong. Art historians such as Wu Hung credit Liu’s work as a teacher—in addition to a 1983 exhibition of his art that eventually toured 18 Chinese cities—with showing a generation of artists how to modernize Chinese ink painting. And when, in the 2000s, contemporary Chinese art had its global explosion, experiments in ink were central to the narrative—as seen in major shows like “Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2013.

Gazing at the moon can sometimes make the world and its attendant problems feel small. But looking at Liu’s lunar works—none of which I’d known before seeing his impressive retrospective in Singapore—I was instead reminded that the world is big and brimming with artists oceans away whose work I have yet to encounter.