NUS MUSEUM

In Stride with the Future, Malacca in the Late StraitsEra-March-14, 6.30pm, NUS Baba House

2012-03-02T16:05:00.002+08:00

Zow Sock Teck’s makeshift stall (No. 106)

opposite the Capitol Theatre, 2003.

Photo source - Malacca: Voices From the Street

14 March 2012, Wednesday

NUS Baba House

Seating capacity is limited to 30 persons

To register, please email babahouse@nus.edu.sg

Programme:

6.30pm – 7pm: Cocktails

7pm – 8pm: Talk

Beyond Malacca’s officially designated and Unesco-recognized historical centre, peripheral neighbourhoods represent an important period of the city’s cultural history that is often overlooked. Streets, buildings and surviving trades bear testament to an era of expansion during the inter-war years and renewed optimism following the economic depression of the late 1920s, when Malacca embraced the future in new forms of architecture, commerce, transport and entertainment.

This presentation will look at the places, people and projects of neighbourhoods defined by

Wolferstan Road and Newcome Road, two streets which demonstrate Malacca’s confident stride in the early decades of the twentieth century, and how industry and innovation of the time shaped the city’s way of life.

About the Speaker

Penang-born Lim Huck Chin studied architecture in England and Australia and has worked on conservation and heritage education-related projects in

Malaysia

, including the restoration of Malacca’s Cheng Hoon Teng temple and the Model Restoration Project at 8 Heeren Street. He published and co-authored Malacca: Voices from the Street, a study of Malacca’s social history and cultural landscapes. He has served as Council Member of Badan Warisan Malaysia (Heritage Trust of Malaysia) and Penang Heritage Trust, and is currently involved in the National Art Gallery of Singapore as well as cultural projects in Lisbon, Portugal.

This talk is held in conjunction with the exhibition Capturing the Straits: Painting and Postcard Views from the 19^th and Early 20^th Centuries (www.nus.edu.sg/cfa/museum/exhibitions.php)

Identitas | Film Screening, Wed, 7-March-2012, 6pm, NUS MUSEUM

2012-02-29T14:19:00.001+08:00

Admission is free. Please register at museum@nus.edu.sg or call 6516 8429 / 6516 8817

* Film is in Bahasa Indonesia with English subtitles. There will be a short talk prior to the
screening.

Identitas (Indonesia, 2009): the story about a rather bizarre relationship between Adam (Tio Pakusadewo), a frustrated worker at the hospital’s morgue, and a nameless young woman (Leoni Vitria hartanti) whose father is hospitalized, depicted against the backdrop of poverty, corruption and despair. It is the story of powerlessness of nameless citizens against the machinations and progress of an equally nameless and insensitive state. Humanity seems to be lost and death the only ‘easy’ way out of such a situation.

THE FILM SCREENING SERIES features a selection of research-inspired film screenings at the NUS Museum. This series is done in collaboration with a module on Topics in Malay Narrative Art Forms. Malay films from Indonesia, Malaysia as well as Singapore from the 1950s onwards will be shown. Spanning different genres, the themes include historical narrative and political context, modernity, identity, gender, racial tolerance and violence, and religion.

Companionable Objects, Companionable Conscience: Reflections on Sunaryo's Titik Nadir

2012-02-28T12:01:00.001+08:00

Photo by Kenneth M. George, Terbungkam (Silenced) at Selasa Sunaryo Art Space, Bandung, August 1998

30 March 2012, Thursday, 6.30pm, NUS MUSEUM

Admission free. To register email: museum@nus.edu.sg or call 6516 8817 / 8429\

Although this is increasingly a time of transnational solidarities, an unwavering commitment to or concern about the nation has been a longstanding and primary factor in the shaping of art works and biographical art writing in Indonesia. This talk explores the summons of the nation in the making of “companionable objects” and a “companionable conscience” in Indonesia’s artworld. I focus in particular on an installation presented by the acclaimed Indonesian artist, Sunaryo, a 1998 work called Titik Nadir (“The Low Point”), put together as Soeharto’s regime fell apart. The evocative objects and iconoclastic gestures that made up Titik Nadir in some ways subverted or exceeded the “conscionable” and oblige us to reflect on what may be spent or lost in aligning one’s heart and art with the nation and a national art public.

Chairperson: Prof. Prasenjit Duara, Asia Research Institute & Office of Research, Humanities and Social Sciences Research, National University of Singapore.

This talk is co-organised by Asia Research Institute and NUS Museum

Speaker
Kenneth M. George has been a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 1999, having served previously at Harvard University and the University of Oregon. He is a specialist on Southeast Asia and a Past Editor of the Journal of Asian Studies (2005-2008). His ethnographic research in Indonesia has focused on the cultural politics of minority ancestral religions (1982-1992), and more recently (1994-2008), on a long-term collaboration with painter A. D. Pirous, exploring the aesthetic, ethical, and political ambitions shaping Islamic art and art publics in that country. His books include: Showing Signs of Violence: The Cultural Politics of a Twentieth-Century Headhunting Ritual (awarded the 1998 Harry J. Benda Prize for best book on Southeast Asia by the Association for Asian Studies); Spirited Politics: Religion and Public Life in Contemporary Southeast Asia (co-edited with Andrew C. Willford); and most recently, Picturing Islam: Art and Ethics in a Muslim Lifeworld. Ken has been the recipient of major postdoctoral fieldwork fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture. His fellowships for writing and study include awards from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the Institute for Advanced Study. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the UW-Madison Institute for Research in the Humanities.

From Shanghai to Jalan Sultan by Kay Ngee Tan, 8-March-2012, 6.30pm, NUS MUSEUM

2012-02-24T17:29:00.008+08:00

Talk by Kay Ngee Tan, Singaporean Architect, Author and Lead Architect for Singapore Pavilion at Shanghai World Expo 2010

Admission is free. To register email: museum@nus.edu.sg or call

6516 8817 / 8429

This talk will introduce recent work of Kay Ngee Tan Architects, which spans across different cities as well as vastly different cultures.

Speaker:

Tan Kay Ngee is an award-winning architect. He graduated from the Architectural Association, London in 1984 and was the prize winner of the RIBA Students Competition in 1985 as well as the London Royal Academy Young Designer Award in 1987.Selected as one of the “581 World Architects” by Ma Gallery Tokyo in 1996, projects of the office include: the Commune by the Great Wall in Beijing which won the Venice Biennale Silver Award in 2002, the Singapore Management University, and the Singapore Pavilion of Shanghai Expo 2010.The office work was showcased in the Singapore Pavilion at 2004 Venice Biennale, and the 2007 Singapore Season in Beijing. The office won the Japan Design Award for the Kinokuniya Bookstore, Sapporo in 2006, and the Singapore President’s Design Award for Page One Bookstore at Vivocity in 2007.

Recent projects include the IHQ for Bread Talk Group, The Sultan - Boutique Hotel in a Malay conservation area of Singapore, Apartments in Taipei for JUT and Villas in Hengzhou, China. Currently the office is working on the master-plan and the architectural designs of Fantasy Island, a group of untouched eco islands in Singapore Strait that is only 17Km from mainland, design includes Aqua Villas, Hillside Villas, Hotel and other Commercial and Entertainment facilities. Kay Ngee has been a prolific writer on Arts, Culture and Cities for many years. In 1978, his collected essays titled “Never Ending Summer” were published in book form. In 2006, after his long sojourn in England, he returned with “Strawberry Fields Revisited” and his latest volume of essays, “Magnetic Fields of Cities” was chosen by Yazhou Zhoukan (Asia Week) as Ten Best Books of 2008 - first Singaporean Recipient in the non-fiction category. Both “Strawberry Fields Revisited” and “Magnetic Fields of Cities” were published in new Simplified Chinese edition by Shanghai Bookstore Publishing House in August 2009. Kay Ngee still writes for Lianhe Zaobao in Singapore, and Ink literature magazine of Taiwan.

About Curating Nation:

In recent years, the idea of the nation has been studied not merely as a site of economic, political or geographic persuasions but also as a cultural object of analysis. Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Camping and Tramping Through the Colonial Archive | The Museum in Malaya, this talk series brings together leading practitioners from Southeast Asia in an attempt at discerning the complexities involved in curating aspects of the nation within museological or gallery settings. Ranging from the deployment of exhibitions as a mode of cultural production, to the play of cosmopolitan identities at international biennales, curating nation is conceived as a platform for the interdisciplinary discussion of memory, object and practice.

Event Recap | Filipiniana: Collecting Culture in the Philippines by Patrick D. Flores

2012-02-24T15:54:00.000+08:00

WATCH THE QNA HERE:

Filipiniana: Collecting Culture in the Philippines
By Fiona Tan
Year 4, History Major

The second presenter of the Curating Nation series, Professor Patrick Flores, gave an enlightening presentation on the history of art collecting and nation-building in the Philippines. Exploring individual collectors such as Jorge Vargas, Fernando Zobel, and Arturo Luz, Flores traces the different ways the nation was curated in line with the socio-political changes.

Perhaps the most dramatic moment of Philippines’ recent history is the People’s Power Revolution which ended the 21-year reign of Ferdinand Marcos. The Marcos regime was known for its patronage of the arts, with the First Lady Imelda Marcos endorsing numerous cultural projects and activities. The pressing question faced by Philippines was thus the need to deal with both the post-colonial legacies and the post-dictatorship stigma attached to the Marcos name.

To this issue, Flores offers no easy answer. Acknowledging the self-reflexive efforts of Marian Pastor Roces, Curator of the Museo ng Kalinangang Pilipino which was part of the Cultural Center of the Philippines, a legacy of the Marcos cultural policy, Flores notes her own hesitation at being raised on a pedestal. Returning private collections of archaeological and Muslim art to rebuild the museum from scratch, Roces embarked on an ambitious attempt to resist the ethnographic atemporal present through curating a living museum of Filipino culture, but disappointingly concludes that “museums are the least congenial place for exhibiting flow.”

This scepticism of the museum space was once again evoked by Roces’ evaluation of another project of hers, an exhibition of sugar plantations at Negros Museum. Attempting to curate the banwa (old town) corner without succumbing to “the pull of reverie and bourgeois delectation” and consigning it to “the rarefied domain of the nostalgia-charged relic”, Roces is pessimistic given the nature of museums as she comments:

Museums resurrect ruins to conjure a romantic rarification, so that the objects, texts and images within it are charged with other-worldly desirability. But it is also in this sense of the museum as grandiloquent ruin that its representational impotence shows up, as indeed it did in the “banwa corner”. Although rendered in three-dimensional space, the banwa in the museum remained socially, historically, and conceptually “flat.” It was flattened by the word museum (the sign and power of the building), which transforms everything in it into relics.[1]

Flores goes on to talk about how Roces considered it a failure, with the astute comment that “juxtaposition is acceptable but not re-categorization”. Despite how objects seemed condemned to certain fixed categories and are considered “flat” once they are exhibited in the sterile space of a museum, it seems overly harsh to consider them failures. The use of “failure” seems to foreclose, or at least seriously deter, further experimentation within the oppressive restrictions of the museum space.

Is re-categorizing really the goal of a post-colonial museum, or will it render yet another layer of silencing of voices? If the colonial museum typology is condemned for its rigid categorization which silences agency of the indigeneous, would the national museum typologies avoid the same act of violence? Is it ever possible to re-categorize without silencing any perspective? Perhaps juxtaposition, if done with taste and self-reflexivity, could be considered a limitedly successful outcome in itself.

[1] Marian Pastor Roces, “Pictures at an exhibition: re-presenting the sugar industry at the Negros Museum, Philippines”, in House of Glass: Culture, Modernity, and the State in Southeast Asia, edited by Yao Souchou (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2001), pp. 275-276 [pp.270-286]

Filipiniana: Collecting Culture in the Philippines was held on 2 December 2011 at the NUS Museum.

Event Recap | Reflections on SUSURMASA

2012-02-24T14:32:00.001+08:00

WATCH THE ENTIRE TALK HERE:

SUSURMASA
By Zhang Xintian
Year 1, History Major

What is a national identity? How does a nation narrate its national story through museums and how should we make sense of them? The first speaker of the Curating Nations talk series, Zanita Anuar shared with us her experience in defining and presenting Malaysian identity through curating the landmark exhibition SUSURMASA Seni Lukis Malaysia Bersama 50 Tahun Balai Seni Lukis Negara or Timelines of Malaysian Art.

Zanita Anuar shared with us how the Malaysian national identity is presented in the National Art Gallery of Malaysia. National identity is never a simple concept. It is made up of multiple threads and timelines. What the curator needs to do is attempt presenting perspectives on national history through artworks that resonate such themes the most. Creating exhibitions, then, is to narrates a national story from the curators’ perspective, giving visitors some insights into the nations past. How problematic this is, is a matter of debate.

For SUSURMASA, the timeline was composed into six sections: “Prehistoric”, “Maritime”, “Illustrated”, “Malayan”, “Iconic” and “Contemporary”. Chronologically placed, the aim was to engage the Malaysian national identity not only as a singular master narrative, but also as a story that contains multiple discourses and tensions. For instance, in the “Contemporary” section, new impressions and movements were represented. Contemporary artists were mobilized to voice their opinions through varying art genres and mediums. Zanita reflected that the curatorial team acknowledged that the diversity of contemporary art enabled numerous discussions and experiences to emerge. Perhaps the "contemporary" is a very potent site, if mobilized well.

However, presenting a national history is not without its challenges. How does one display a holistic national narrative? Zanita acknowledged the difficulty in presenting a diverse national history. Nonetheless, she shared the ideal situation that the gallery strived to achieve: to give the 'peripheral' a voice. These would add on to the diversity in the gallery and showcase all kinds of possibilities in defining a nation.

Event Recap | Down the Grand Canal

2012-02-23T17:18:00.002+08:00

WATCH THE ENTIRE TALK HERE:

Down the Grand Canal
By Fiona Tan

Year 4, History Major

The fourth installment of the Curating Nation Talk Series brings us back to home, with June Yap providing both a broad overview of the Venice Biennales and Singapore’s participation, as well as her personal insights and reflections of her involvement curating Ho Tzu Nyen’s The Cloud of Knowing at the 54^th Venice Biennale in 2011.

Yap’s presentation was also the first in the Series to discuss exhibitions of the nation to an international audience, not simply a national one. The Venice Biennales, which allowed for self-determined exhibitions by the participating nations, provided a platform in which the nation is already given, naturally making curating nation a lower priority. Yap was emphatic about her position on curating nation – that it was not necessary and undesirable in the ways it limits creativity. However, she acknowledges that people, viewers and various institutional stakeholders, have the capacity to interpret artworks in ways which fit into their notion of nation. Rather than a conscious effort of curating nation, Yap seems to suggest that what occurs at international biennales is an individualized response of viewing nation.

Nevertheless, the structural division of the Biennale into national pavilions and representations also mean that politics of nationhood inevitably penetrate into exhibitions, with Taiwan and Hong Kong having collateral events instead of national pavilions. Given that Singapore’s participation was mediated by national agencies – as in the case in many other participating nations – the nation still loomed large in the foreground. For instance, Lim Tzay Chuen’s Mike (2005) presented the difficulty of moving a national monument from Singapore to Venice, ultimately reinforcing rather than blurring national borders.

Ending her presentation with some instances of trans-national art works featured at the Venice Biennales, such as Navin Rawanchaikul’s Paradiso di Navin (2011) and Israeli artist Yael Bartana’s …and Europe will be stunned (2011) at the Polish Pavilion, Yap seemed to intend for a discussion on curating and exhibiting of contemporary art works beyond the nation. However, the post-talk discussion was preoccupied with questions of who decides the curating of the nation at such international exhibitions.

The issue of practical benefits arising from Singapore’s participation was raised, which Yap deftly handled by steering it away from quantifiable KPIs and pointing to intangible benefits such as how it facilitates a “civil exchange” and puts Singapore on the international art radar. However, beyond flogging the proverbial dead horse of cost-benefit analysis, the persistent lines of questioning on the nature of the selection process and why Singapore should even participate seemed to betray a sense of indignation about the elitist way in which the nation is curated and exhibited. This indignation is shared by people who don’t get to even negotiate the different conceptualizations of nation in these artworks because they don’t get to see it. While the curators might attempt to move beyond boundaries of nationhood, it seems that the public might not be ready just yet.

However, that ought not to foreclose the possibility of trying. The attempts at challenging the national divisions inherent in the structure of the Venice Biennale reveal that the results might sometimes be surprising. The selection of Simryn Gill, Sydney-based, Singapore-born and Malaysian-raised artist to represent Australia at the upcoming Venice Biennale in 2013 serves as a further reminder of how national identities might be superfluous in a globalised world. And though it might seem “presumptuous” at present, as a member of the audience quickly points out, I look forward to a Southeast-Asian exhibit put up in a national pavilion, or even a regional Biennale in Singapore.

Of Wayang, Buangkok, and Bukit Brown: Photographing Heritage

2012-02-20T16:55:00.001+08:00

23 February 2012, Thursday, 7.00pm, NUS MUSEUM

Admission free. To register email: museum@nus.edu.sg or call 6516 8817 / 8429

A Panel Discussion

Speakers: Ken Cheong and Zann Huang

In this second installment of THE PHOTOGRAPHY SERIES, we explore the role of photography in relation to heritage, a much-discussed concept that comprises investigation into aspects of history, memory, spaces, and rituals. Used as an instrument of documentation, photography becomes a medium through which these are immortalised through photographs; where slowly-eroding rituals are re-enacted through pixelled motion; and where our ideas about what is recognised and perceived as ‘national’ heritage becomes archived within visual compositions. Along with these arise problems of what is then to be identified as ‘national’ heritage, authentic or fabricated, projecting into larger themes of ownership: whose heritage are we documenting, and why?

Featuring the works of photographers Ken Cheong and Zann Huang, this panel discussion will feature the photographers’ visual documentation and insight into the ritual of the Wayang, as well as spaces like Buangkok and the Bukit Brown Cemetary, trailing into a discussion of how documentation via photography infers and affects our construction of heritage in Singapore.

Event Recap | China, India and the Role of Art in the Asian Century

2012-02-16T14:43:00.002+08:00

WATCH THE ENTIRE TALK HERE:

Reflections on Possibilities: Museum, Art and the Sublime

By Eddie Koh

Year 4, History Major

I recently had the privilege of attending a thought provoking talk delivered by Prof. Prasenjit Duara, which centered on the idea of the “sublime” in Asian Art, a concept that he defined as the ability to master the “awesomeness” of the beauty in nature and thus conveying this in art. He explored this further with a brief comparison of the differences between the essences of sublime found in imperial Chinese art vis-à-vis modern Asian art.

The case-study he adopted was the ‘West Heavens’ China-India Project, which he noted embodies the prolific mix and presence of the sublime in contemporary Asian art. While the movement’s primary goal was to facilitate cultural exchanges between China and India, Prof. Duara pointed out that there were artworks and ideas generated by the artists and curators and critics that successfully re-captured the idea of the sublime.

For details on the different artworks of the West-Heavens Project: http://westheavens.net/en

One particular aspect of the talk that caught my attention was his mention of the ever present tension between the tendency of art towards freedom and the imposition of control over art through exhibition within certain confines, like the museum. Prof. Duara remarked that as a result of this, art exhibitions are appearing within public spaces, as an attempt to move beyond the traditional confines.

While he was referring specifically to art, if one extrapolates the idea to include the field of curating and museology in Singapore, the effects of such a change can represent a significant re-negotiation of the museum’s role and position in Singapore’s society. Should such a change ever take place, it will mean that the museum will no longer simply exist as a passive entity, quietly engaging with sections of the public who are willing to tread into its halls. It will morph into an entity that will actively, and even aggressively, reach out to interact with as much of the public as possible.

The museum, in this case, will cease to be a supplementary institution in education, becoming an active agent in shaping the minds of the public. While this amplification of the museum’s voice does much good in enlarging the museum’s role as a transmitter of knowledge, there is a need to be wary of the dangers such as the imposition of its own perspective onto the public.

Diary of an NUS Museum Intern : Tan Yeeling

2012-02-13T10:28:00.002+08:00

For the month of January, NUS Museum hosted 5 interns as part of Temasek Junior College's WOW! 2012 Attachment Programme where the students were given the opportunity to engage in real world situations and to provide insights or solutions. Each week, each student will take it in turns to blog about their experience and give us a little glimpse into their world.

Tan Yeeling rounds up the last of the blog posts from our interns from TJC.

As succinctly as I can put it, after one month of seemingly endless MRT rides to Clementi, spending pre-lunch with the usual cries of “I’m hungry. Where shall we go for lunch?” and enduring the unpopular post lunch lassitude with cups of coffee, I am proud to declare that we have finished an entire month of internship at NUS Museum.

My friends have mentioned earlier in their respective blog posts about our tasks for the entire internship and our progress throughout the weeks. To briefly summarize what was required of us, we had to bring an exhibition over to our school: Temasek Junior College, create an itinerary for the “Camping and Tramping” Exhibition, and to create 2 sets of worksheets for the newly set up exhibition “Family Intimacies”.

We were ideally well paced in our advancements, and even within all the work that had to be done, we still found time to satisfy our hunger with 1 hour lunches, and choose to rewatch Sherlock episodes on our own laptops. What was impressive was the fact that every morning, we would plan out what had to be finished at the end of the day, and despite the occasional procrastinating, we always finished the workload before heading home. In between all of that, there were no strives, no major disagreements, and we always found time to crack a joke or two.

Listening to friends talk about their own internships, we were indeed very lucky to be chosen by the NUS Museum. We were given a reasonable amount of time to finish everything at hand. Unlike our peers, it was neither too little, nor too much. We were never physically drained by our workload, but we always had something that we could start on, or further improve on. And above all that, I am further impressed by our group’s need to treat our projects with dignity. We brainstormed thoroughly for ingenious ideas, instead of choosing the easy way out of doing everything in a slipsloppish and cliché manner. Research was done thoroughly and drafts were constantly revised before any of the prototypes were started.

Personally, I believe what made the internship as meaningful as could be was well beyond the projects and our tasks at hand. It was the physical environment that we had to work with, that reminded us of what to better expect in our own future. The office, lunch hours and people in the office helped us to gain an insight to one of the many possibilities our future working environment could be. An example, yes, the train rides everyday were unanimously something that we agreed was physically draining, but it is a personal reminder that these people that board the trains every morning could be one of us someday. Even little things, like coffee in the afternoon and having conversations with colleagues remind us that despite stepping into a working environment, even with the increasing workloads and never-ending burdens, these things remain an intrinsic part of our lifestyle and we don’t grow out of it even if we fail to realize.

As we close doors to one month of our internship, I know I speak for everyone when I say that it has been a very eventful internship. True, there were no remunerations for our work but it was unnecessary and would have rebuked the necessity of gaining exposure and experience in a working environment which was ultimately the point of the internship. Also, we are grateful to all the help that Michelle, our mentor and all the other people at the office who have gladly welcomed us and helped us in this month. That said, and as a last note, we apologize for our occasional outcries of joy, or simply, incessant longing for food!

Diary of an NUS Museum: Zhang Shihe

2012-02-13T10:13:00.003+08:00

Here, Zhang Shihe shares her experience over the past 4 weeks.

This is our last week in NUS museum. Looking back to see the whole journey that we have been gone through in the past one month is really a valuable as well as genuinely enjoyable experience. We have learnt a lot through different tasks assigned to us as well as the communication with people who work in NUS museum. We have not only learnt knowledge but life skills as well, which are very precious and very helpful for the rest of our lives. We had a good time here in NUS museum, not because it was easy but because it was challenging and eventful. We are so satisfied and proud to say that we have been progressed in NUS museum this month and did not waste this period of precious time.

There were mainly three tasks assigned to us. Each of them focuses on different aspects and we have learnt different things from different tasks. The first was to bring The Moving Museum travelling exhibition from NUS Museum to TJC. This involved lots of work of emailing, communicating and negotiating with different people such as our mentor Ms Cai, SC leader as well as our president. Through this task, we have learnt how to work together with several different departments. On top of that, we also realized the importance of planning as it makes sure that everything is kept on track. Hence every task needs a specific plan before starting to do it. We often made use of the whiteboard in the meeting room from which we worked from in the office to keep track of things to accomplish at the end of the day.

Our second task was to create a self-guided itinerary programme for the Camping and Trampingexhibition. To be honest, it was a very challenging task. We were so excited when we worked out a design that was very creative. However we faced troubles in the following days. There were challenges such as figuring out the size of the final product, the descriptions that we have to write by ourselves about certain display items. Moreover none of us were experts at Photoshop, so it took us almost the whole month to figure out how to make things work. Although this task was really tough, I am so happy to see that none of us have thought of giving up and or resorting to an easier way. Finally with the help of our mentor Michelle and our friend and countless times of trying, we finally came out the product that we want.

The third task was to create educational worksheets for both primary school students and secondary school students, based on the new exhibition Family Intimacies. In order to come out with relevant questions to the central theme of the exhibition, we read through all the reading materials about Family Intimacies. Five of us developed 2 sets of worksheets individually before picking out the better questions to be consolidated into one worksheet. Of course, we had to keep updating them based on our mentor's comments. We went through 6 drafts before we arrived at the final copy.

All in all, our internship here in NUS museum was really helpful to us and it was a really an enjoyable and unforgettable memory. Here I want to thank our school for providing us such a precious chance to learn. It is really a privilege for us to work here and learn in this totally different and new environment. On top of that I would like to thank our mentor Michelle and the other staff in NUS Museum for teaching us lots of different skills, caring for us and creating such a friendly ad lovely working environment for us. Thank you so much. I love working in NUS museum.

Supergarden, Curating the Singapore Architecture Pavilion at the 11th Venice Biennale, 16 February 2012, 6.30pm, NUS Museum

2012-02-10T12:33:00.001+08:00

A Talk by Peter Sim and Lilian Chee

16 February 2012, Thursday, 6.30pm, NUS MUSEUM
Admission free. To register email: museum@nus.edu.sg or call 6516 8817 / 8429

Model of 2494, FARM & Kwodrent

As objects, buildings are often appropriated to embody national or statist identities. They are large, permanent, and habitually iconic. They can be displayed like trophies. However, this kind of objectification undermines the complex processes and evolving nature of architecture as an increasingly cross disciplinary practice as opposed to an autonomous one. In this respect, exhibiting architecture to reflect a national imagination is always tricky thing. Traditionally this would be achieved through architectural models and drawings but such means may recount only one side of a more colourful, complicated and multifaceted story.

FARM, with Lilian Chee, were appointed as lead curator and designer of the Singapore Pavilion at the 11th Venice International Architecture Biennale 2008. The pavilion, SUPERGARDEN, presented design culture in Singapore at a moment when architecture is actively redefining its aesthetic, professional and intellectual boundaries in relation to other design fields.

Speakers
Peter Sim is a Director at FARM. Following his graduation from the National University of Singapore in 1997, he worked in Singapore and London for several years. In 2007, Peter joined FARM, an award-winning cross disciplinary design practice. Since 2005, FARM has worked on community projects which promote the arts. It organises national public art competitions and events. It arranges free quarterly talks by designers and artists. In 2007, FARM established its cross disciplinary design arm. In collaboration with artists and designers, it works on a diverse range of projects. These include architecture & interior design, product design & merchandising, graphic design & branding, art installation & sculpture, exhibition design & curatorial work. FARM was awarded the President’s Design Award in 2010 for its interactive installation “The Tree”. Besides developing his practice as an architect, Peter is also a Design Tutor at the School of Architecture at the National University of Singapore.

Lilian Chee is a writer, theorist and designer. Trained at the Bartlett and the National University of Singapore, where she is currently Assistant Professor, Lilian’s research focuses on domesticity. Her publications include ‘An Architecture of Twenty Words’, in Negotiating Domesticity (2005); 'A Web in the Garden', in Pattern, Haecceity Papers (2007), ‘Living with Freud’, in AD Atmosphere (2008), ‘Performing Domesticity: Ma Qingyun’s Father’s House’, in Home and Space, Haecceity Papers (2009) and ‘Under the Billiard Table’ in the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography (forthcoming 2011). She also serves as Regional Editor for the Journal of Architecture. Lilian is currently working on a project exploring representations of Asian domesticity in architecture, art and film.

THE FILM SCREENING SERIES | SAYANG SI BUTA

2012-02-10T10:58:00.003+08:00

Film Still Sayang Si Buta

Date: Wednesday, 15 February 2012
Time: 6pm
Venue: NUS MUSEUM
Admission is free. Please register at museum@nus.edu.sg
or call 6516 8429 / 6516 8817
*(Film is in Malay)

Sayang Si Buta (Singapore, 1965) is a grotesque rendering of a story about two sisters, one well-behaved and blind (Annie), the other more cosmopolitan and 'modern' (Asmah). The idyllic life in a poor kampung setting takes a horrible turn when Asmah dates a famous eye surgeon, who eventually cures Annie and marries her. In this movie physical blindness serves as trope for forgetting the old traditions and blindly pursuing a modern life style.The will be a short talk prior to the film screening.

PRINTS | prep-room

2012-02-08T17:07:00.003+08:00

Lim Mu Hue, Those who are not involved view the matter clearer, 1966, Woodblock print on paper

8 Feb – 30 Jun 2012

NUS MUSEUM

Free Admission

A space exploring the woodblock print medium as the subject and material for production, dissemination and consumption; Reproduction of prints by Choo Keng Kwang, Foo Chee San, Koeh Sia Yong, Lim Mu Hue, See Cheen Tee, Shui Tit Sing and Tan Tee Chee are made available for teaching and learning.

THE FILM SCREENING SERIES | Singapura Dilanggar Todak

2012-02-03T17:33:00.004+08:00

Film Stills by Shaw Organisation Pte Ltd

Date: Wednesday, 8 Feb 2012
Time: 6.30pm
Venue: NUS MUSEUM

The well-known legendary Malay tale of how the kingdom of Singapore came under deadly swordfish attacks, symbolizing the disintegration of the king’s rule. Singapura Dilanggar Todak was produced in 1962 by Omar Rojik for Shaw Brothers. There will be a short talk prior to the screening.

Capturing the Straits | Painting and Postcard Views from the 19th and Early 20th Centuries

2012-01-27T16:37:00.001+08:00

[Charles Dyce, The River from Monkey Bridge, 1842- 1843. Watercolour & Ink on paper]

This exhibition brings together paintings of the Straits Settlements by Charles Dyce who was a resident of Singapore in the 1840s, and postcard views of Malacca dating to the early half of the 20th century. As visual sources, they collectively provide a window into the production and reception of landscapes in colonial Malaya, underpinned by new encounters, negotiations with pictorial conventions, and evolving regard of Malaya as a transformative space.

Presented at the NUS Baba House, a residential unit built and actively inhabited in the colonial period, the exhibition also provides glimpses into the nature of urban transformations in the Straits Settlements.

Diary of an NUS Museum Intern: Li Yixuan

2012-01-27T14:41:00.001+08:00

For the month of January, we will be publishing a special edition of Diary of an NUS Museum Intern. The museum is currently hosting 5 interns as part of Temasek Junior College's WOW! 2012 Attachment Programme where the students are given the opportunity to engage in real world situations and to provide insights or solutions. Each week, each student will take it in turns to blog about their experience and give us a little glimpse into their world.

This week, Li Yixuan shares with us her experience of her time at the Museum.

It was the third week of our internship, and it was really a fulfilled and cheerful week. We have completed the project of creating educational worksheets for both primary school students and secondary school students, based on the exhibition just installed FamilyIntimacies. The exhibition has been installed since last week. The opening ceremony of the exhibition was on this Thursday, 19^th January. Based on the installation and a closer look at those photographs in the exhibition, we were more familiar and more confident to edit and perfect the educational worksheets. When we visited the installation of Family Intimacies, we felt that it was really a difficult project to trace the entire family of such a huge size one. However, through this project, the family was able to find back their connections and the small branches of the huge global family would able to tie together again. This photograph project was a meaningful one, which made us think about our own family, and pay more attention to build up and maintain the kinship.

Meanwhile, we were still trying to create our prototype of the self-guided itinerary of the exhibition Campingand Tramping. Creating a prototype of the self-guided itinerary was much harder than we thought it would be. It took more than one week for us to find out a way to make the prototype efficiently and economically. Although we have decided the form of the itinerary and have completed the descriptions for exhibition items, using photoshop to make the pictures and the descriptions fit into the circular shape of the itinerary was the most challenging part for us since we were not very good at this technology. After Michelle gave us some advices, we went online and researched about the skills to use photoshop. We were still very confused though, and we decided to ask our peers good at photoshop. Our friend Le Yan taught some skills to us, and we finally got some clues to figure out the problem. We believed that we could finish the itinerary by next week. The prototype seemed desperate to us, but we believed that challenges allowed us to make progress and fulfilment. It was worth working along.

We went back to our school TJC on Friday for discussion and confirmation with our teacher mentor Ms Cai Yi Tian in TJ. We have confirmed with her about the dates and location for the Moving Museum in TJC. We put our minds at rest for this project as we could make sure there would be no rush and incapability of implementation of the Moving Museum project.

Till now, we have followed our initial planning of the 4 projects we were assigned to at the beginning of our internship. We even achieved more than we expected since we progressed ahead. This made us learn that planning was really an important thing to do before we focused on doing certain project, especially when there were several projects going on at the same time. Thanks to Michelle for advising us to make timelines for every project, hence we could work in an orderly way.

There is only 5 days left of our internship program here at NUS museum, we hope that the last few days would be meaningful and fruitful as the half of the month passed. The experience we had in NUS museum would be very helpful and unforgettable in our future life!

Down the Grand Canal | Singapore at the Venice Biennale, 3 February 2012, 6.30pm, NUS MUSEUM

2012-01-25T17:31:00.005+08:00

A talk by June Yap, Independent Curator, Singapore

Ho Tzu Nyen, The Cloud of Unknowing, 2011,
Installation with single-channel HD projection, multi-channel,
audio, lighting,smoke machines and show control system.

The Singapore Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, presenting The Cloud of Unknowing by Ho Tzu Nyen, is Singapore's 6th participation at the international exhibition. Down the Grand Canal: Singapore at the Venice Biennale looks at the history of Singapore's participation at what is considered one of the most significant biennales internationally. Generally spoken of in terms of national representation, the discussion focuses on the issues, anxieties, implications and expectations in imagining and representing art practices and
developments from Singapore.

Speaker

June Yap is an independent curator based in Singapore. Focusing on contemporary art practice, selected curatorial projects include the Singapore Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale with artist Ho Tzu Nyen for the exhibition The Cloud of Unknowing (Italy), the video programme You and I, We’ve Never Been So Far Apart: Works from Asia for VideoZone5 for the Center for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv (Israel), The Future of Exhibition: It Feels Like I’ve Been Here Before at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (Singapore), Das Paradies ist Anderswo / Paradise is Elsewhere at Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa) Stuttgart and Berlin galleries (Germany), Some Rooms (co-curator) with Osage (Hong Kong), Bound for Glory, an exhibition of works by Wong Hoy Cheong at the National University of Singapore (NUS) Museum, and MATAHATI - For Your Pleasure with Galeri Petronas (Malaysia).

About Curating Nation

In recent years, the idea of the nation has been studied not merely as a site of economic, political or geographic persuasions but also as a cultural object of analysis. Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Camping and Tramping Through the Colonial Archive | The Museum in Malaya, this talk series brings together leading practitioners from Southeast Asia in an attempt at discerning the complexities involved in curating aspects of the nation within museological or gallery settings. Ranging from the deployment of exhibitions as a mode of cultural production, to the play of cosmopolitan identities at international biennales, curating nation is conceived as a platform for the interdisciplinary discussion of memory, object and practice.

Curating Nation

2012-01-23T13:58:00.005+08:00

In recent years, the idea of the nation has been studied not merely as a site of economic, political or geographic persuasions but also as a cultural object of analysis. Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Camping and Tramping Through the Colonial Archive | The Museum in Malaya, this talk series brings together leading practitioners from Southeast Asia in an attempt at discerning the complexities involved in curating aspects of the nation within museological or gallery settings. Ranging from the deployment of exhibitions as a mode of cultural production, to the play of cosmopolitan identities at international biennales, curating nation is conceived as a platform for the interdisciplinary discussion of memory, object and practice.

Speakers

14 October 2011, 6.30 pm

Curating Nation: Reflections on SUSURMASA

Zanita Anuar (Director of Museum Innovation, Malaysia Museums Department)

2 December 2011, 6.30 pm

Filipiniana: Collecting Culture in the Philippines

Patrick D. Flores (Professor of Art Studies at the Department of Art Studies at the University of the Philippines)

19 January 2012, 6.00 pm

China, India and the Role of Art in the Asian Century

Prasenjit Duara (Raffles Professor of Humanities, National University of Singapore)

3 February 2012, 6.30 pm

Down the Grand Canal: Singapore at the Venice Biennale

June Yap (Independent Curator, Singapore)

16 Feb 2012, 6.30 pm

Curating the Singapore Architecture Pavilion at the 11th Venice Biennale

Lilian Chee (Assistant Professor, Department of Architecture School of Design and Environment, NUS) and Peter Sim (Architect and co-founder of WORK, FARM Architecture and Interior Design)

1 March 2012, 6.30 pm

Singapore Pavilion for the Shanghai World Expo 2010

Kay Ngee Tan (Principal Architect, Kay Ngee Tan Architects)

12 April 2012, 6.30 pm

Guerrilla Archaeologists and the Singapore Story

John Miksic (Associate Professor, Southeast Asian Studies Programme, NUS)

20 April 2012, 6.30 pm

Travelling Without Moving: Thai Contemporary Art Historicised

David Teh (Assistant Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, NUS)

UMAC 2012 SINGAPORE | CALL FOR PAPERS

2012-01-20T17:25:00.002+08:00

University Museums & Collections Conference

10 – 12 October 2012

NUS Museum, National University of

Singapore

CALL FOR PAPERS

29 February - 1 May 2012

Please click here for details on the submission of abstracts.

Publication Announcement! Family Intimacies | Anderson & Low

2012-01-19T18:34:00.001+08:00

Contents

Foreword | Ahmad Mashadi | Head, NUS Museum

Curatorial: “Unpacking the Family Tree”| Nurul Huda B. A. Rashid | Assistant Curator

Essay: “A Journey towards Family Intimacy” | Edwin Low of Anderson & Low

The exhibition, Family Intimacies, by photographers Anderson & Low is a visual documentation of Edwin Low’s global family. Born to parents who migrated from China to Malaysia in the late 1910s and early 1920s, and leaving home during his teens to further his education in the U.K., this project is a reflection of Low’s ‘wish to establish a connection with his family’, now spread across different continents. Initiated after the death of Low’s father, the project, whilst serving as a tribute to the Low family, also brings to light themes of memory, place, and identity. Using photography as the main medium of discourse, this exhibition features contemporary family portraits – captured within different homes – alongside old black-and-white photographs taken by Low’s father, each telling different, often poignant, stories of the family across time, space, and memory. Says Low, ‘Really, as we think about it, there is no beginning to this project, and there will be no end. What you see here is just one snapshot from one perspective, one view that will change with time. Ask any other of the 120 relatives of my family and their views and memories will be different.’ In mapping out the Low family tree, Family Intimacies will feature personal and conceptual facets of what make up our idea of the family, both in the present and in the remembering.

Curator, Nurul Huda, elaborates: “[It is] important to realise that in putting together an exhibition on a family tree, the issue of loss and absence has to be recognised. When looking through any family album, there are always people who cannot be identified or rather, can only be identified by parents or grandparents […] They are nonetheless ‘family’. […] Juxtaposing the different media of archival photographs, new portraitures and a reflection essay by Low about his journey of regrouping the family, Family Intimacies presents to the audience a family tree not in its perfect form – for none is – but as one embracing its stories, memories, and especially absence. Family Intimacies articulates the dynamics of this ever-evolving idea of the family as one that is neither rooted in the past, present, nor future, as it is a free-floating concept with stories that change with each narrator, site and spectator.’

Diary of an NUS Museum Intern: Vanessa Teo

2012-01-19T14:13:00.005+08:00

Note: Diary of an NUS Museum Intern is a series of blog posts written by our interns about their experiences during the course of their internships. Besides working hard and fast in their cubicles, our interns have travelled to Bandung and Malacca, organised symposiums, waded through tons of historical research and pitched in during exhibition installations. At NUS Museum, each internship is as different from the last. If you would like to become our next intern, visit our internship page for more information!

For the month of January, we will be publishing a special edition of Diary of an NUS Museum Intern. The museum is currently hosting 5 interns as part of Temasek Junior College's WOW! 2012 Attachment Programme where the students are given the opportunity to engage in real world situations and to provide insights or solutions. Each week, each student will take it in turns to blog about their experience and give us a little glimpse into their world.

This week, we hand the baton over to Vanessa to share their day to day challenges and their visit to the NUS Baba House. (Image: Vanessa is second from the left.)

Our second week at the museum has been an eventful one, filled with challenges as well as genuinely enjoyable moments. This week, we began working on our third and final project for this month-long attachment, a task to create a set of educational worksheets for both primary and secondary school students for an upcoming exhibition, Family Intimacies. This project made me wonder about whether visitors to the NUS Museum, whether students or the public, would be able to fully comprehend the exhibitions in just a single visit. In creating the worksheets, we were able to have access to the artist's essay, curatorial writings as well as the photographs used in the exhibition. However, not everyone has the luxury of obtaining such items to understand an exhibition, so we had to attempt to bring across themes through our worksheets. We’re currently still in the process of doing and editing our worksheets, so hopefully when we’re done, we’ll have worksheets that will enable students to understand the exhibition better.

Juggling three projects at one same time, we often made use of the whiteboard on one wall of the meeting room from which we worked from in the office to keep track of things to accomplish at the end of the day. Ling Shan was often our scribe for taking down things we discussed and planned on the spot, as she sat in front of the whiteboard, but we took turns to write down lists of things we had to complete daily. With such a huge whiteboard to use, we did use it to doodle a little, but it was all good fun and we’re still keeping on track!

While working on our second project to create a self-guided itinerary programme for the Camping and Tramping exhibition, we encountered the challenges of figuring out the size of the final product and creating the main piece that would help guide visitors by providing information about certain display items. None of us are experts at Photoshop, so figuring out how make things work posed a problem for us. Until now, we have yet to find a way to solve the problem, but I do believe we’ll get to the solution if we continue to experiment with the available options.

Visiting the Baba House on Thursday morning for a tour of the house opened my eyes to what the Straits Chinese culture was like. Moreover, there were bits of furniture and architecture that were very representative of Chinese culture and the tour taught me things I had yet to know about the culture. The main parts of the house are well conserved, and the sights and lighting all seemed to bring me back to the 1920s. There was an alluring quality about the old pieces of furniture and stationery, even the tiles and carvings on the walls. From this, I saw the museum’s efforts in helping to preserve something valuable to our history and culture, as the people of modern times are able to step into the past by stepping into this house to learn more about the Straits Chinese.

Our week has provided us all with valuable experience that we can carry on for the rest of our life, and I have certainly enjoyed every moment spent here. With two more weeks to finish our projects, I believe we will be learning even more things that will prove to be useful to us, and would be satisfied with all we have managed to complete within the month!

Diary of an NUS Museum Intern: Ng Ling Shan (TJC)

2012-01-12T16:41:00.002+08:00

It’s been a week since my team of 5: Vanessa, Yee ling, Shihe, Yixuan and I first stepped into the NUS Museum to start our attachment with the museum and I haven’t looked back at my decision since. It was really lucky for us to have been able to get into this attachment. The experience which I’ve gained and the things which I’ve learnt from being attached to the NUS Museum has been tremendous.

Although it has only been a week, we are already in the midst of 2 of the projects which have been assigned to us and it’s been really enjoyable working and planning with my team. Although all of us were not that familiar with the NUS Museum, the past one week there has changed a lot for us. We learnt a lot about the museum and also had a chance to understand the different exhibitions and share our interpretations with each other, which has allowed us to bond and to get to know each other better.

I’ve always been interested in museums and just the word "museum" would automatically interest me. Hence, being attached to the NUS Museum is a really wonderful experience for me. Although we will not be there for long, I am sure that within the one month which we will be at the museum, we will definitely gain some life skills which will benefit us in the future as well as really memorable experiences which we will remember for the rest of our lives.

Over the first week, we have been working on two of our projects, the first a project with the end product being bringing The Moving Museum travelling exhibition from NUS Museum to TJC. Over the past 5 days, we managed to plan out the 5Ws and 1H regarding the exhibition and we also decided that we would try to sell the museum's merchandise to our schoolmates. We have also been brainstorming on how to get everyone who passes by the area to really take a look at the exhibition and the ideas which we have brainstormed are quite promising!

The second project which we have been working on is to make a self-guided itinerary programme for secondary school/junior college students and we have also proceeded fairly well on that project in the past week, coming up with the main design, the displays and the descriptions of the displays. I am sure the itinerary would turn out quite well after it has been made and I’m looking forward to seeing the end product myself!

It has been a really delightful as well as eventful first week at the museum! Within this short period of time, I’ve already gained much knowledge of not just the museum itself but also life skills and experiences of working with others which will definitely benefit me and my friends in the future. It’s really been a privilege for us to be able to be attached to NUS Museum and I’m sure the next few weeks to come would be as rewarding as the first week has been for us!

Diary of an NUS Museum Intern: Chiam Zhi Quan

2012-01-10T15:18:00.002+08:00

Chiam Zhi Quan is a first-year student at the School of Design and Environment, majoring in Project and Facilities Managment. Zhi Quan joined us as a Collections Management intern and had the opportunity to be part of the day-to-day work of how our Collections team manages our four collections and prepare artworks for installations.

A short but fulfilling one month in the NUS museum. During the internship, I was given the freedom to work with people from several departments (collection, curatorial, outreach and conservation under The Conservation Studio). This enabled me to better understand how museums function as well as to appreciate art through a different perspective. I no longer have the misconception that art is only about creation.

While the creation of art is important, the preservation of it is as crucial, although it is often overlooked. When exposed to an artwork, most people like me will immediately relate it to an artist or a specific art movement without any acknowledgement to those that have committed to put the work on display. The process of bringing in an artwork (or artifact) to exhibiting it is a tedious process that requires thorough planning. In order to achieve project success, these plans have to be coordinated and communicated both within and between the museum and external stakeholders such as art movers, artists and donors.

In the case of donations made to the museum, the collection department will need to consider storage issues, record and assign accession number to all objects. After which, conservators will be brought in to analyze conditions and determine actions to restore or stabilize the objects. When they are ready to be exhibited, curators will then need to decide on what and how to display so as to effectively convey the message of an exhibition. This is achieve with the manipulation of light and space and good knowledge of each items through extensive researches.

After the establishment of an exhibition, the outreach department and curators will develop programs which further engage audiences. For example, in an ongoing watercolor workshop conducted in the museum, participants were allowed to explore the museum and make sketches of the exhibits. This interaction creates a new level of understanding for the viewers in which they are forced to observe every single details of the display.

In this internship, I was fortunately involved in an upcoming photography exhibition. I was given the chance to participate in the selection process and the designing of the exhibition. Although I did not communicate or work with the artists directly, I learned that a good and close working relationship between artists and curators is important to bring out the best of all exhibits. Artists will definitely have their own concept of presenting their works, but in a museum setting restricted by space, the curator probably plays a more critical role than any artists as it is ultimately their home ground. In addition, this relationship has to be built on trust such that curators can maximize the potential of each works

As a whole, this internship has changed my perception of art and there are many factors to consider in preserving art. We should really credit those that worked hard behind the scenes, as they are the ones that bring the past into the future.

Manga Dreams: Anderson & Low

2012-01-09T12:36:00.002+08:00

A Talk by UK-Based Photographers, Jonathan Anderson and Edwin Low

Manga Dreams, by artists Anderson & Low, is a photographic series that revisits recurring themes of Identity, Costume, Persona, and Performance through the genre of Manga. The project presents a hybrid art form that blurs the distinction between photography, portraiture, graphics, calligraphy, and cyber-culture; posited as a reaction to the current ubiquitous influence of Manga, Asian graphic novels, and animation on youth culture. The result is a photographic series of images that move between worlds of the real and the fantastical, inviting us to reconsider representations of the different themes and ideas embedded within.

View Manga Dreams series at the Anderson & Low website.

Diary of an NUS Museum Intern: Eddie Koh

2012-01-04T10:23:00.004+08:00

Eddie Koh is a fourth-year History major from the Faculty of Arts and Social Science at NUS. Eddie's first internship with the NUS Museum ran from May-July 2010, where his research centred upon important figures in the Museum's history. Eddie joined us once again for the summer of 2011 for a second round to delve into the history of the NUS Museum. During this second internship stint, Eddie has taken to keeping a diary, meticulously recording his thoughts and impressions as he engages with research on William Willets, the museum's second curator . Let's all take a little peek into his notes and find out what he thinks of Willets.

Ever since my foray into art history as a result of my experience in the Camping and Tramping exhibition, William Willetts has become something of a person of curiosity for me. From knowing next to nothing about the individual, I became acutely aware of the tremendously important role he played as the National University of Singapore Museum's second curator. The fact that he had been credited by some to be the person who revolutionalized Southeast Asian art history underscored how influential he must have been during his time. This entry shall be my attempt at recording all my musings and thoughts about Willetts as I work my way through another project concerning the man himself.

30^th May 2011

William Willetts is obviously a very complex person. From a Scientific background, he then transited into becoming an Art Historian due to a particular life changing experience for him in a Chinese Art Exhibition. He has remarkably profound knowledge of many types of art, Chinese and Southeast Asia art for example. This knowledge stretches from historical understanding of each art down to the minute technical details regarding the production of the art. Intriguingly, Willetts also highlights that there is an intuitive level towards the appreciation of artwork and there is no avoiding this particular ‘sense’. Only through a balance of intellectual and intuitive appreciation of the artwork, can a richer understanding be attained. While this seems to be Willetts’ claim, it would appear that Willetts leaned more heavily towards the intellectual analytical side of artwork appreciation, as seen from his elaborate technical description of many artworks.

6^th June 2011

Despite all his knowledge, Willetts, in most of his work, refrains from making symbolic or aesthetic judgment on any artwork. He seems to strongly believe in allowing his audience to form their own opinions about the artwork. While he highlights that artwork tend to reflect the society the artwork was created in and even illustrate for the reader the historical background of the artwork, he often stop short of making the final connection between the two, leaving the reader to make the connection themselves. Michael Sullivan once remarked that Willetts believed in the idea of an “art historian’s neutral ground’, could this be what he was referring to? Perhaps this could also explain for why Willetts goes to such great lengths in expounding every single detail of any artwork to the reader, both historical and technical? Perhaps hoping to give his audience all the necessary information to formulate their own perspective on the artwork?

16^th June 2011

A great deal of what Willetts came to be known for, during his time in Southeast Asia, has much to do with what he wrote in his first publication titled Chinese Art. His elaborate description of the art pieces, his search of the appropriate words to describe them and his specific interest in particular art fields are such examples. While many such idiosyncrasies have stuck with Willetts, unchanged, there exists one such exception. Willetts originally rejected the use of Ceramics as a terminology to describe the art work he was examining in Chinese art; however, this seemed to have changed when he moved into Southeast Asia art. With the change in terminology usage, there was also a change in focus regarding the description of artwork.

20^th June 2011

Willetts was involved in the separation of the University of Malaya Museum collection in 1962/3. It was very likely that he separated the collection in such a way so that the collection would in one way fulfill separate objectives and would also represent the location the respective separated museums were situated in. Therefore most of the bronze, sculptures and other artwork related to this genre were moved over to Malaya. Singapore retained a few but these were only token representation of different forms of bronze work and sculptures. The paintings were divided equally between the two museums, however the content varied greatly. The Singapore collection reflected works about the country or works that came from the country mostly. The Malaya collection represented more of the Southeast Asia world, with a number of paintings depicting various scenes from Malaya. The pottery collection seems to have been separated equally as well but how it was done so, that remains to be seen.

28^th June 2011

After finally getting my hands on some of the works written by William Willetts in India, it would appear certain notions I have had about him is beginning to solidify. One of these notions was his interest in fields that his contemporaries had not yet ventured into. Being far from a behind the desk art historian, he would take great efforts to go out of his way to particular temple sites in India that has yet to be explored thoroughly by his contemporaries and examine them. This is perhaps one side of him that stuck with him and eventually pushed him to examine Southeast Asian Ceramics (another field that was not well known during his time) later on in his life. Suffice to say, Willetts was not a conventionalist when it came to art history. Perhaps this remained true until the later part of his life, when he returned back to his first love, Chinese Art.

9^th July 2011

My time here at the museum is coming to an end. Yet another 2 months worth of holidays has passed by remarkably and regrettably fast. The project on William Willetts is coming along unexpectedly well, marked with greater prospects than what had been initially conceived. If all works out well, I would be able to get my hands on more materials written by Willetts, opening yet more doors for me to explore this great individual’s past. I am not ashamed to admit that finding out more about this fascinating character is fast becoming a deep interest (obsession…?Nah...) of mine!

Check out Eddie's first post here.

Family Intimacies: Anderson & Low

2012-01-02T12:41:00.004+08:00

click here to view gallery impressions

19 January - 8 April 2012
NUS Museum
Free Admission

Family Intimacies by photographers Anderson & Low is a visual documentation of Edwin Low’s global family. While the project serves as a tribute to the Low “Lau” family, it brings into light the different themes of memory, place, and identity. Using photography as the main medium of discourse, this exhibition introduces not just ritualistic and site-specific content – portraits of family members in respective homes; places in China; ethnographic images of a funeral procession – but also displays the process of ‘unpacking’ the family as a concept – its stories, memory, archival photos – and how this alludes to larger themes of memory and history-making.

Family Intimacies also mirrors our understanding and thus consumption of how we begin to view our own family trees. In mapping out the Low family tree, this exhibition features the personal and the conceptual facets of what make up the idea of ‘family’, both in the present and in the remembering.

Check this out! See what by Johanna vlaminck has to say about Heman Chong's Calendars (2020-2096)

2011-12-27T16:37:00.000+08:00

Language of a City

“A good question to ask is if we could imagine meaning out of memories in the future.” - Heman Chong

Heman Chong, a Singaporean artist, curator and writer currently based in New York, is internationally recognised for having participated in Manifesta 8 in 2010, the 2nd Singapore Biennale in 2008, SCAPE Christchurch Biennale in 2006 and Venice Biennale in 2003. He has also held solo exhibitions in Kunstverein Milan, Motive Gallery in Amsterdam, Vitamin Space in Guangzhou, Art in General in New York and Sparwasser HQ in Berlin, among others. Here he talks about his recent work, Calendars (2020—2096), and shares his thoughts on the language of the city.
click here to watch the video
This video was commissiond by British Council Singapore.

Check this out! See what Patrick Benjamin has to say about Heman Chong's Calendars (2020-2096)

2011-12-22T16:31:00.000+08:00

Interview: Heman Chong by Patrick Benjamin

In his archival project of 1,001 photographs of empty places islandwide for Calendars 2020-2096, the much lauded local contemporary artist, manipulates traditional notions of time and space as well as national narrative. He elucidates further to Patrick Benjamin. click here to read the online article

China, India and the Role of Art in the Asian Century

2011-12-20T17:47:00.004+08:00

A talk by Prasenjit Duara, Raffles Professor of Humanities, National University of Singapore

19 January 2012, Thursday, 6pm, NUS MUSEUM
Admission free. To register email: museum@nus.edu.sg or call 6516 8817 / 8429

This talk will use the opportunity presented by the ongoing “Western Heavens” series in Shanghai that has, over the last two years, been bringing together artists, filmmakers, writers, social and art theorists and their works from China and India, to grasp how contemporary artists, curators and intellectuals are conceiving of the role of art in bridging and negotiating the gap between societies in Asia.

In what ways has the role of art in society changed over the last century? Although it is perceived to have a social role, art is both big business for the rich and also often divorced intellectually and aesthetically from popular tastes. In this context, it is perhaps necessary to grasp the changed socio-cultural context and institutions through which art can play a public role. The presentation is a preliminary effort to approach these questions from a historical perspective.

Speaker
An internationally reputed historian of China and Asia more broadly, Prof. Duara has delivered over 50 keynote and distinguished lectures internationally since 1996. In 2008, he delivered the keynote address at the anniversary conference of Thirty Years of Reform and Development in the PRC in Peking University, organized by the Ministry of Finance, PRC, Asian Development Bank, & Peking University, and in 2010 he represented one of eight global Indian Thinkers in the series From West Heavens to the Central Plain: India-China Summit on Social Thought held in Shanghai. His research interests include social and cultural history, problems of development, nationalism and imperialism, religion, historical thought and social theory. He also serves on the editorial boards of several international journals and on the advisory and review boards of scholarly institutions. He has written four books and edited another.

About Curating Nation Talk Series
In recent years, the idea of the nation has been studied not merely as a site of economic, political or geographic persuasions but also as a cultural object of analysis. Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Camping and Tramping Through the Colonial Archive | The Museum in Malaya, this talk series brings together leading art practitioners from Southeast Asia in an attempt at discerning the complexities involved in curating aspects of the nation within museological or gallery settings. Ranging from the deployment of exhibitions as a mode of cultural production, to the play of cosmopolitan identities at international biennales, curating the nation is conceived as a platform for the interdisciplinary discussion of memory, object and practice.

Indian, Ptolemaic and Hellenistic Terracottas: Exploring multi- / trans-culturalism in Antiquity

2011-12-20T17:43:00.003+08:00

A Talk by Dr. Naman P. Ahuja, A /P, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

20 January 2012, Thursday 4pm, NUS MUSEUM
Admission free. To register email: museum@nus.edu.sg or call 6516 8817 / 8429

Whereas the Hellenistic impact on the art of Gandhara is well-known to scholars, this lecture delves into the importance of a shared trans-cultural visual culture between Egyptian (Ptolemaic and Roman), Hellenistic (Seleucid) and Indian (post-Mauryan) antiquities, by focussing on the terracottas and ivories of Bengal, the Deccan and even sites in Northern India.

Indian terracottas reveal more than a passing resemblance with contemporaneous Egyptian and Hellenistic terracottas, regions which traded with each other extensively, both via land (and its riverine routes) and sea. Not only is there a predilection for using the technique of moulding and double-moulding, but looked at more widely we see them governed by similar iconographic concerns. Further, we are often equally at a loss to accurately interpret the iconography of the objects in Indian, Mediterranean or Egyptian terracottas; related as they are, not to the major public monuments and main icons, but to domestic worlds, grave goods, ex-votos, common beliefs in everyday rituals and festivals, many related to fertility and childbirth.

Artistically, terracotta is the medium where many ideas were first experimented upon before they were committed to stone. At the same time, many terracotta artefacts were used in ephemeral rituals and then discarded; their study thus permits an insight into those aspects of religious worship little studied by art-history where the emphasis has been on grand monuments of more durable materials like stone. Inexpensive and easily replaced, terracottas are by their very nature a source for a unique telling of a more personal history, reflective of a shared trans-cultural history of religious cults as worshipped in peoples’ homes rather than what is evidenced from grand stone statuary alone.

This talk is co-organized by the Office of the Deputy President (Research and Technology), National University of Singapore and NUS Museum.

Speaker:
Naman P. Ahuja is Associate Professor of Ancient Indian Art and Architecture at J N U, New Delhi, where his research and graduate teaching focus on Indian iconography, sculpture, temple architecture and Sultanate period painting. He has recently completed a Nehru Fellowship, under the auspices of which he authored The Making of the Modern Indian Craftsman:Devi Prasad (Routledge, 2011). He has held Fellowships, Visiting Professorships and Curatorial charges at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, SOAS, the British Museum and the Kusnthistorisches Institut in Florence. He has curated several exhibitions in India and abroad on themes ranging from Ancient to Modern Art. Some of his publications include: Divine Presence, The Arts of India and the Himalayas (Five continents editions, Milan, 2003) which was translated into Catalan and Spanish, “Changing Gods, Enduring Rituals: Observations on Early Indian Religion as seen through Terracotta Imagery c. 200 BC – AD 200” in South Asian Archaeology, Paris, 2001, and, Ramkinkar Through the Eyes of Devi Prasad (Delhi, 2007).

Check this out! See what Mayo Martin from TODAY has to say about Heman Chong's Calendars (2020-2096)

2011-12-05T17:29:00.004+08:00

We RAT on Heman Chong and his Calendars!

Ongoing at the NUS Museum is Calendars (2020-2096), the latest installation work from Heman Chong. For seven years, Chong went around taking photographs of different spaces in Singapore that are seemingly abandoned (most of them weren’t) and created this amazing grid installation of a future Singapore. It’s probably the best exhibition to come out this year, or at least it’s right up there in my books.........click here to read the online article

Check this out! TODAY Article: 05.12.2011

2011-12-05T17:22:00.004+08:00

click here to read article

Explore Singapore 2011: Photography for Children, 4 December 2011 | Photo Gallery

2011-12-04T12:23:00.003+08:00

click on the above image to view photo gallery

For the second day of our Explore Singapore 2011 weekend of workshops, we teamed up with Objectifs to present Photography for Children, a workshop designed for children and their parents to learn about the basic concepts and techniques of photography. We then headed out to Haw Par Villa for a field shoot. As we wandered through the theme park, parents shared with their children their memories of the place while the kids put their new knowledge of photography to the test by shooting photographs for a photo story. Back at the Museum, the kiddies spent the afternoon selecting images, learning to tell stories through their photographs and then finally creating their photo stories which they then shared with each other. Thank you to everyone for participating in the workshop! We hope you enjoyed learning about photography and the visit to Haw Par Villa.

Posted by: Michelle Kuek (Outreach)

Explore Singapore 2011: Batik Painting for the Family, 3 December 2011 - | Photo Gallery

2011-12-04T12:18:00.006+08:00

Morning Session
Click on the above image to view photo gallery

Afternoon Session
Click the above image to view photo gallery

Walking into the NUS Museum last Saturday, visitors were greeted with the scent of melting wax as we launched the first day of our weekend extravaganza of workshops for National Heritage Board's Explore Singapore 2011 with the Batik Painting for the Family workshop. This workshop was organised with the intention of teaching more people about the traditional art of batik painting and to encourage family bonding by asking parent & child to team up to create a piece of batik. Through meticulous instruction from the batik instructors from Kamal's Artshop, parent & child waxed and coloured a white piece of cloth to create their very own batik art. Big thank you to everyone who attended, we hope you enjoyed creating your batik piece as much as we enjoyed having you here!

Posted by: Michelle Kuek (Outreach)

Publication Announcement! Calendars (2020-2096)

2011-12-01T18:32:00.002+08:00

Content

Essay | “Heman Chong: Calendars (2020 – 2096)” | David Teh

Essay | “Calendars (2020 – 2096): Ahmad Mashadi in Conversation with Heman Chong”

***

Calendars (2020-2096) comprises 1,001 images of deserted public interiors in Singapore photographed over a span of 7 years (2004-2010). It signals specific concerns of Heman Chong's practice, one that can be located in the intersection between time, space, and situation. The 'archive' of images, set within the premise of how one marks time, generates an imaginary meandering within the interiors of Singapore, a city that is constantly being remade, often appropriating signs and styles from a wide spectrum of influences. Based on a series of revisitations to the public spaces that Chong has a prior relationship to – shopping centers, museums, MRT stations, schools – the artist carefully frames the spaces without attempting to add any new meaning to the space. No permission was requested for any of the photographs captured, nor was any prior arrangement made to have it devoid of people. Thus, the photographs veer less towards the staged, but rather, can be seen as ready-mades. Yet this appropriation very quickly transmutes into another creature, one of fiction and narrative. The project can be viewed in its entirety as a novel about interior spaces, as well as, a historical (also a kind of imaginary fiction) document of interior spaces.

Featuring an essay by David Teh, as well as a conversation piece between Ahmad Mashadi and Heman Chong, this brochure brings into light elements of Heman’s practice.

To order our publications, please write to museum@nus.edu.sg

NUS Museum

University Cultural Centre, 50 Kent Ridge Crescent

National University of Singapore, Singapore 119279

T: (65) 6516 8817

E: museum@nus.edu.sg

W: www.nus.edu.sg/museum/

Film Screening | Sinbad, Shipwreck, and Singapore, 30 November 2011, 7pm, NUS MUSEUM

2011-11-30T12:14:00.003+08:00

Photo by Nurul Huda

Sinbad, Shipwreck, and Singapore

Film Screening

30 November 2011

7pm – 8pm

As part of a collaboration between the University Scholars Program (USP) and the NUS Museum, Sinbad, Shipwreck, and Singapore is a module-based project revolving around the exploration of varying interpretations and cultural issues related to the Belitung Shipwreck (sometimes known as the Batu Hitam wreck). Through the use of contemporary, fictional, and historical materials, students studied the shipwreck and its historical context in the first half of the semester. This was followed by meetings with contemporary Singaporean artists, Noor Effendy and Victric Thng, who introduced and discussed issues concerning the articulation of information and ideas through methods of filming and scriptwriting. The final product is a set of creative and through-provoking short films, produced, directed, and edited by the students, as they share their tales of the sea.

This segment will feature a short introduction by Professor John Miksic, followed by the students’ presentations of their short films.

Click here to view e-flyer

Friday Evening @ NUS MUSEUM | Street scenes: Drawing and Watercolor Workshop for Beginners

2011-11-25T12:14:00.005+08:00

10 Sessions: 16 Dec 2011 - 3 Mar 2012
Time: 6.30 pm - 9.30 pm *
Venue: NUS MUSEUM and
various outdoor locations
(in & around NUS Baba House, 157 Neil Road)

Fees: $ 400 (excluding materials)

Limited to 10pax only
To register email:museum@nus.edu.sg
or call 6516 8429

Upon receiving a confirmation email, please make the course fee payment by Friday, 9 December 2011

* Timing varies for outdoor sessions

Have you always wanted to learn how to draw and paint? Let artist Marvin Chew show you in a 10-week workshop held at the NUS MUSEUM, from basic drawing techniques, sketching to watercolour painting. The workshop is tailored for beginners and hobbyists by providing the platform to learn the fundamentals of art-making.

About the Artist:Marvin Chew is the current Vice-President of Singapore Watercolour Society. He has been teaching watercolour art since 2008, and specializes in landscape and street scenes watercolour painting. His works have been exhibited locally and abroad. In 2010, his work was juried into the prestigious National Watercolor Society’s 90th Annual Exhibition in Los Angeles, USA.
Marvin paints mainly in a semi-realistic style using transparent water-colours but imbues the energy of Chinese calligraphy as can be seen by the play of lights and shades and the use of bold spontaneous brushstrokes in his works.

Click here to read e-flyer

Click here to view workshop outline

Calendars (2020-2096)

2011-11-21T11:03:00.008+08:00

click the above image to view gallery impressions

Calendars (2020-2096)

NUS Museum

2 December 2011 - 12 Febuary 2012

Calendars (2020-2096) comprises of 1,001 images of deserted public interiors in Singapore photographed over a span of 7 years (2004-2010). It signals specific concerns of Heman Chong's practice, one that can be located in the intersection between time, space and situation.

The 'archive' of images, set within the premise of how one marks time, generates an imaginary meandering within the interiors of Singapore, a city that is constantly being remade, often appropriating signs and styles from a wide spectrum of influences. Based on a series of revisitations to the public spaces that Chong has a prior relationship to - shopping centers, museums, MRT stations, schools - the artist carefully frames the spaces without attempting to add any new meaning to the space.

No permission was requested for any of the photographs captured, nor any prior arrangement was made to have it devoid of people. Thus, the photographs veer less towards the staged, but rather can be seen as ready-mades. Yet this appropriation very quickly transmutes into another creature: one of fiction and narrative. The project can be viewed in its entirety as a novel about interior spaces, as well as, a historical (also a kind of imaginary fiction) document of interior spaces.

Filipiniana: Collecting Culture in the Philippines by Patrick D. Flores, 2 December 2011, 6.30pm, NUS MUSEUM

2011-11-14T17:15:00.002+08:00

The collector Jorge Vargas and family in their living room in Manila, surrounded by paintings of Juan Luna

Date: Friday, 2 December 2011

Time: 6.30pm

Venue: NUS MUSEUM

Admission is free

RSVP: museum@nus.edu.sg
or (65) 6516 8817 / 8429

This presentation traces how a collection of things considered “cultural” is formed in the various phases in the project of the nation and its consolidation in the Philippines. It focuses on three collecting agents (Jorge Vargas, Fernando Zobel, and Arturo Luz) and their practice to reflect on different historical periods from the mid-twentieth century through the Pacific War and on to the seventies, surveying the political tendencies attending imperialism, war, and post-independence nation-building. The government of Ferdinand Marcos, largely through the efforts of First Lady Imelda Marcos, oversaw the most extensive cultural development program in this history, an analysis of which brings this paper to complete the loop of its reflection: the aspiration to render a post-colonial exhibitionary aesthetic for a living culture that has survived successive colonialisms. This takes us to the Cultural Center of the Philippines, main edifice of the Marcos cultural policy, after the uprising in 1986, when a Museum of Philippine Culture was opened under the curatorial direction of Marian Pastor Roces. It is perhaps only Roces among her peers in the Philippines who has had the opportunity to revisit the vexed modernity of collecting culture in the Center, organize an alternative to it, and live to tell the tale of its failure. Her candid and cogent thoughts on this process finally lead us to reconsider earlier models of the universal exposition, the local museum, and the transnational art center.

Speaker

Patrick D. Flores is Professor of Art Studies at the Department of Art Studies at the University of the Philippines, which he chaired from 1997 to 2003, and Curator of the Vargas Museum in Manila. He is Adjunct Curator at the National Art Gallery, Singapore. He was one of the curators of Under Construction: New Dimensions in Asian Art in 2000 and the Gwangju Biennale (Position Papers) in 2008. He was a Visiting Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1999 and an Asian Public Intellectuals Fellow in 2004. Among his publications are Painting History: Revisions in Philippine Colonial Art (1999); Remarkable Collection: Art, History, and the National Museum (2006); and Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (2008). He was a grantee of the Asian Cultural Council (2010) and a member of the Advisory Board of the exhibition The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds After 1989 (2011) organized by the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe and member of the Guggenheim Museum’s Asian Art Council (2011). He co-edited the Southeast Asian issue with Joan Kee for Third Text (2011).

About Curating Nation Talk Series

In recent years, the idea of the nation has been studied not merely as a site of economic, political or geographic persuasions but also as a cultural object of analysis. Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Camping and Tramping Through the Colonial Archive | The Museum in Malaya, this talk series brings together leading art practitioners from Southeast Asia in an attempt at discerning the complexities involved in curating aspects of the nation within museological or gallery settings. Ranging from the deployment of exhibitions as a mode of cultural production, to the play of cosmopolitan identities at international biennales, curating the nation is conceived as a platform for the interdisciplinary discussion of memory, object and practice.

click here for e-flyer

Talk & Film Screening | BEYOND BENGAL & “BRING ‘EM BACK ALIVE”, 17 November 2011

2011-11-12T16:52:00.001+08:00

Date: Thursday, 17 November 2011
6:30pm - 7:00pm - Talk by Dr Sandra Khor Manickam & A/P Timothy P. Barnard
7:00pm - 8:00pm - Beyond Bengal
8:00pm - 8:15pm - Brief interval
8:15pm - 9:00pm - “BRING ‘EM BACK ALIVE”

Admission is free. Please register at museum@nus.edu.sg or call 6516 8429 / 6516 8817

The movie “Beyond Bengal” was written and directed by Harry Schenck and released in the USA in 1934. Shot in Perak, British Malaya, with the cooperation of the Sultan of Perak and the assistance of colonial officers, the film is part of the genre of exploitation films, exposing the deep, dark recesses of the jungles of faraway places. The film features a mix of National Geographic-like footage of Perak in the 1930s, elements of exotic exploitation in the love story between two natives, and it injects a good measure of horror in the scenes of crocodiles eating humans. Bewildering, entertaining and truly a movie of its time and culture, “Beyond Bengal” will be shown in tandem with an episode of 1980s American television series “Bring ‘Em Back Alive!”, which focused on the life of animal collector Frank Buck in Singapore and Malaya, to show the fascination American movie-makers had about Malaya, and their attempts at representing Malaya through film.

Sandra Khor Manickam has recently been awarded her PhD from the Australian National University, School of Cultures, History and Languages. Her dissertation focused on the construction of aboriginal races in the history of anthropology of British Malaya. Dr Manickam has a long-standing interest in issues surrounding nation, race and knowledge formation in Malaya. She is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Department of History, National University of Singapore.

Timothy P. Barnard is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the National University of Singapore. His main area of research is on the cultural and environmental history of Southeast Asia, with particular attention to the Malay world. He has published a number of articles and book chapters on Malay film in Singapore.

Click here to read e-flyer

2011-11-11T18:40:00.004+08:00

Date: 4 December 2011, Sunday
Venue: NUS Museum
Time: 10am-5pm

Limited to 20 participants (ages 9-12)

Course Fee: $10 (inclusive of 1 adult admission)

To register, email museum@nus.edu.sg. For enquiries, call 6516 8817 / 8428
Upon receiving a confirmation email, please make the course fee payment by 20 November

Photography for Children is a workshop designed for children and their parents to learn about the basics of digital photography within the environments of a museum to nurture a new museum-going audience. The workshop will also include a field shoot to the nearby Haw Par Villa for a participants to try out their new skills! (Participants are required to bring their own digital point & shoot cameras for this workshop.)

About the Instructor
Chia Yan Wei is a photographer, designer and educator teaching design and photography courses at Objectifs: Centre for Photography and Filmmaking. She is also actively involved in arts education programmes with the Lindy Hop Ensemble (Singapore) in various schools in Singapore. As a photographer, Yan Wei has been featured as emerging young talent in Asian Photography magazine and has also exhibited her design work in the Milan Fair and the Shanghai World Expo.

Click here to view e-flyer

Batik Painting for the Family, 3 December 2011

2011-11-11T18:33:00.001+08:00

Date: 3 December 2011, Saturday
Venue: NUS Museum
Time: Session 1: 10am -12pm
Session 2: 2pm - 4pm

Limited to 10 pairs of parent and child per session
To register, email museum@nus.edu.sg. For enquiries, call 6516 8817 / 8428
Upon receiving a confirmation email, please make the course fee payment by 20 November

To encourage bonding within the family, NUS Museum has designed a fun and interactive batik painting workshop for families to take part in. Parent and child will pair up to learn the history, art and techniques of this traditional Asian art. Families can also look forward to working together to wax and colour their very own batik creation!

About the InstructorsKamal’s Artshop has been providing art education services to Singapore schools since 2006. Their artist-teachers specialise in art forms such batik paintings, cartoon caricatures, watercolours and graffiti art. All programmes are endorsed by the National Arts Council of Singapore. Kamal’s Artshop was started by Mohammed Kamal Bin Dollah, a Singaporean artist, art educator and professional caricaturist.

Click here to view e-flyer

NUS MUSEUM Programmes in Conjunction with Explore Singapore

2011-11-11T18:13:00.002+08:00

Art Writing 101, 3 December 2011, 10 am to 5pm, NUS MUSEUM

2011-11-10T10:42:00.008+08:00

                                [ABOVE] NUS Museum collections, Camping and Tramping, Throught the Colonial Archive: The Museum in Malaya
                                           [LEFT] Marcel Duchamp "Coat Hanger", Centre Pompidou, Paris. Photograph by Jill Chuang

You've always wanted to write about art, and didn't know where to start: For new arts managers, students
considering working in the arts, museum and gallery folks, art aficionados, corporate art program persons.

Date  : 3 December 2011 (Saturday)
Venue : NUS MUSEUM
Time  : 10 am to 5pm
Fees  : $ 100 for Gallery/ arts organisation
                     personnel/ NUS staffs/ students/ alumini
  : $130 for public
  : $70 NUS Students
  : $30 registration fee (non-‐refundable)

Programme Outline
1. Visual Arts: Critical Appreciation
2. Assigning Meanings
3. Writing Short Descriptions about Art & Objects
3 sessions x 2 hours, total 6 hours.

To register email theo.bookme@gmail.com

Course Leader
Seah Tzi-Yan directed an art gallery for 17 years, was co-founder of the Art Galleries Association, Singapore (1996) & ARTSingapore (2000). She has much experience in developing exhibition programs. She has lectured extensively on arts management practice at Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts where she adjunct lectures on the diploma and degree programs. She ran the Education Program for ARTSingapore 2010. Recently, she led a team of conservation trained dressers for “Valentino Retrospective” at Resorts World Sentosa under Les Arts Decoratifs, Paris.

click here to read e-flyer
click here to download the registeration form

Talk & Film Screening | Singapura Dilanggar Todak, 10 Nov'11

2011-11-08T12:42:00.002+08:00

Film Stills by Shaw Organisation Pte Ltd

Date: Thursday, 10 November 2011
6.30pm: Talk by A/P Timothy P. Barnard
6.45pm: Screening of Singapura Dilanggar Todak (In Malay with English language subtitles)

Admission is free. Please register at museum@nus.edu.sg or call 6516 8429 / 6516 8817

Drawing on a 14th century myth in the Sejarah Melayu (Malay Annals), the film Singapura Dilanggar Todak tells of the folly of Paduka Sri Maharaja, the ruler of Singapura. In the tale, a young boy saves the inhabitants of Singapura from deadly swordfish attacks only to fall prey to court intrigues. The Sejarah Melayu goes on to state that the guilt of the boy’s tragic end was laid on Singapura. Using the film as a point of reference, A/P Timothy P. Barnard will discuss how the 14th century myth has undergone numerous ‘retellings’ and how each retelling is inextricably linked to the rewriting of history.

Singapura Dilanggar Todak was produced in 1962 by Omar Rojik, an established Malay director with Shaw Brothers. The film is in Malay and for this screening it will be shown for the first time with English language subtitles.

Timothy P. Barnard is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the National University of Singapore. His main area of research is on the cultural and environmental history of Southeast Asia, with particular attention to the Malay world. He has published a number of articles and book chapters on Malay film in Singapore, and is currently working on a book on the history of the Komodo Dragon.

Event supported by

Shaw Organisation Pte Ltd

click here to view e-flyer

Framing the Familiar: Photographing the Family

2011-11-02T17:50:00.005+08:00

As part of The Photography Series held at the museum on 20 October, our two speakers, Dr. Oh Soon-Hwa and photographer Sean Lee, covered interesting aspects of what it means to photograph the family.

Dr. Oh Soon-Hwa introduced the works of several photographers and their different perspectives and interpretations of what make up the 'family portrait'; non-conventional captures that sometimes force the eyes to look away, momentarily. Through these works, we are introduced to different manifestations of the family, ethnographic slices into different spaces and livelihoods, and how they exist (or rather, are portrayed). These captures are evidently different from what would we otherwise recognize as 'normal' family portraits and thus, challenge our ideas of how the family can be presented and discussed.

Below is a list of the photographers introduced during the talk, along with their works.

Sally Mann | Nan Goldin | Larry Sultan | Elinor Carucci | Philip Lorca diCorcia | Chris Verene
Click on name for link to photographer's work

Photographer Sean Lee shared his series "Homework", which involves not merely the documentation of the relationship between his family members, but also in creating personalities within carnivalesque set-ups that yield elements of the theatrical. His photographs do not just present us with the role each family member plays - mother, father, sister, brother - but also introduces us to the characters each family member adopts. He morphs their bodies into beings; masks their superficial; exposes the hurt. Sean also shared that in photographing his family, albeit through these unconventional captures, he is creating a family album as the family gets together for these shots, and in the process, develop shared experiences and memories of their time together.

Below is a short film featuring behind-the-scenes footage of Sean and his "Homework" shoot.

shot by Invisible Photographer Asia

Sites of Practice: Here & Elsewhere | Artists' Dialogues on Performance Art

2011-10-27T11:37:00.001+08:00

(from left to right: Amanda Heng, Let's Chat, 2009. Jose Tence Ruiz, License, 1993. Lee Wen, Stories My Father Never Told)

Date: 4 November 2011, Friday
Venue: NUS Museum

Please RSVP by 3 November at museum@nus.edu.sg
For enquiries, please call 6516 8428 / 6518 8817

Programme
10.00am: Opening Remarks by T.K Sabapathy
10.30am: Sites of Practice: Here & Elsewhere | Amanda Heng, Jose Tence Ruiz and Lee Wen in Conversation. Moderated by Kwok Kian Woon
12.00pm: Sorpresa! / Surprise! | Performance by Jose Tence Ruiz

Sites of Practice: Here & Elsewhere features Amanda Heng, Jose Tence Ruiz and Lee Wen coming together to detail themes, strategies and problematics of performance art and encounters with its ‘publics’ in Singapore during the late 1980s and 1990s. For Ruiz, a Filipino whose practice is rooted in the social struggles of the Marcos period, his residence in Singapore necessitated an investment into newer strategies, negotiating perspectives of audience, values and artistic activism. Affiliated to the Artist Village, Amanda Heng and Lee Wen pioneered performance art as a principle device in connecting with emerging perspectives on the alternative, responding to institutions and their hierarchies, and widening reception of contemporary as global practice. What were the emerging conceptual propositions? How and where were these articulated? What limits? What implications to contemporary practice today?

Sites of Practice is part of the Philippine Art Trek 2011, and is co-organised by the Embassy of the Philippines (Singapore) and NUS Museum.

Sites of Practice | Filipino Performance Art Abroad

2011-10-27T11:24:00.003+08:00

Date: 3 November 2011, Thursday

Venue: NUS Museum

Please RSVP by 2 November at museum@nus.edu.sg

For enquiries, please call 6516 8428 / 6516 8817

Programme

4.30pm: Arrival of Guests

5.00pm: Opening Remarks by Amb. Minda Calaguian-Cruz, Philippine Ambassador to Singapore and Ahmad Mashadi, Head of NUS Museum

5.15pm: Talk and Performance by David Medalla

8.00pm: Launch of The Pocket Arts Guide

Sites of Practice: Filipino Performance Art Abroad, the anchor event of the Philippine Art Trek 2011, will be headlined by David Medalla, arguably the most thought-provoking artist to have emerged from the Philippines in the last half-century.

After a long hiatus, Medalla’s return to Asia will be highlighed by a lecture entitled Halo-Halo at Guinataan (Mix-Mix and Coconut Cream’d), where Medalla will evoke the memories of his formative years in the Philippines, dedicating his talk to the memory of his mother and in remembrance of the Filipina women who were his mentors. A performance entitled Bato-bato sa Langit ang Tamaan Huwag Magagalit (Stone-stone in Heaven (Sky) whoever Gets hit (by it) must not get angry), will see David Medalla with Adam Nankervis conduct a game that is used to pass the night away by relatives and friends of the Deceased during a Wake. The game begins with The Stone from Heaven being passed from person to person, upon whom it lands on, is invited to recite a poem or sing a song. Thus, the Deceased travels to heaven accompanied by the voices of his/her relatives and friends.

David Medalla is a Filipino international artist. His work ranges from sculpture and kinetic art to painting, installation and performance art. Medalla constantly shifts his strategies and media; when one thinks one has him pinned down as a situationist, a surrealist, or a conceptualist, one is stumped as he continues to endlessly conceive other fantastic, often unrealisable schemes. His work stretches back to the sixties when he co-founded Signals Gallery in London and presented international kinetic art, among other art forms.

Sites of Practice is co-organised by the Embassy of the Philippines (Singapore) and NUS Museum.

Maintaining Heritage Series | Motifs in Peranakan Art

2011-10-26T10:11:00.002+08:00

Walking Tour: Reading the Cosmopolitan Layers of Singapore, 29 October 2011

2011-10-20T14:36:00.001+08:00

Date: 29 October 2011 (Saturday)
Time: 9am – 11.30am
Tour fee: $10 (for NUS students), $25 (for NUS staffs and general public)

*Please make tour fee payment by 20 Oct 2011 at NUS Museum upon receiving a confirmation email

Limited to 20 pax. To register, email museum@nus.edu.sg or call 6516 8429.

This walking tour option will begin from Palmer Road area, one of the oldest cosmopolitan settlement in early 19^th century Singapore, where the Hakkas, Parsis, Yemenis, Malays lived together in a small fishing village called Tanjung Malay or Tanjung Pagar. The oldest Hakka temple in Singapore Hock Teck See, and the mausoleum of the famous Yemeni saint of Singapore Habib Noh are still standing there amidst rapid urbanization and high pressure of urban development.

The walk will retrace the former coastline of the bay (Telok Ayer) towards Singapore River, passing through various religious buildings and significant places, such as Siang Cho Keong Temple, Al Abrar Mosque, Fujianese Thian Hock Keng Mazu temple, Southern Indian’s Nagore Durgha Islamic Shrine, Hakka’s Ying Fo Fui Kun association hall, Fuk Tak Chi temple, Teochew’s Yueh Hai Ching temple, underground mosque Masjid Moulana Mohammad Ali, etc. The tour will end at the former harbour and fish-market at Boat Quay near Raffles Place MRT station.

Dr Johannes Widodo is an Associate Professor and Deputy Head (Admin & Finance). He is also the Co-Director of Tun Tan Cheng Lock Centre in Melaka and Executive Editor of JSEAA (Journal of Southeast Asian Architecture).He teaches on the history and theory of Southeast Asian architecture, Typology and Morphology in Architecture, and Singapore urban history among other subjects.

click here to view the e-flyer

Writing Power: Zulkifli Yusoff

2011-10-20T11:36:00.000+08:00

2 Aug 2011 - 9 Dec 2011
Exhibition extended until 19 Feb 2012
NX Gallery, NUS Museum

Regarded as a pioneer of installation art in Malaysia, Zulkifli Yusoff’s Writing Power looks at how historical texts affect cultural memory and understandings of nationhood. Exploring how history can be made relevant to contemporary times, Zulkifili’s artistic renditions draw upon the fascinating and complex relationship between the visual and the written - leading his audiences to ponder, if it matters not-knowing what art means, who made it, when, what’s it called, or how to approach it?

Writing Power is held as a companion to the ongoing exhibition Camping and Tramping Through the Colonial Archive: The Museum in Malaya, which explores the rise of the museum and themes on the archives in British Malaya from the 19th century onwards and how contemporary practitioners may lay claim to it.

News: Mapping of Asian Collections, an ASEMUS Project

2011-10-19T11:33:00.002+08:00

ASEMUS (Asia-Europe Museum Network), a cross-cultural network of Asian and European museums, is currently developing a mapping project of museums and their collections. The project is part of the network's focus in the promotion of "mutual understanding through collaborative activities" and "facilitating the sharing and use of museum collections". The project "will focus on three areas; the Mapping of Asian Collections, the Mapping of museum professionals and expertise and the Mapping of museum-related projects and engagements across Asia and Europe. The initial phase of the Mapping Project will focus on the Mapping of Asian Collections." See Mapping Project official site for details.

As a member of ASEMUS, NUS Museum facilitates the listing of Southeast Asian university museums with collections of Asian art into the project. We will welcome suggestions and feedback.

News from Kuala Lumpur: The newly opened University of Malaya Art Gallery

2011-10-18T12:03:00.004+08:00

The University of Malaya has recently opened UMAG (University of Malaya Art Gallery), an initiative and vision of its Vice Chancellor, Tan Sri Dr Ghauth Jasmon. The official launch is planned sometime early next year along with its detailed programmes, but a brochure foreshadows its purpose and intent: UMAG will house a collection of modern art works, including those by Syed Ahmad Jamal, Latiff Mohidin, Ibrahim Hussein, Chen Wen Hsi and MF Hussain. Many, particularly the latter, may be traced back to their pre-separation origins at the former University of Malaya, Singapore, in the 1950s and 1960s. Currently the University of Malaya also administers Museum of Asian Art, which manages the collection. While we wait for further news, the formation of Gallery will certainly be an opportunity to coordinate and consolidate strategic directions of the two entities.

Brochure Cover - Featuring an Image of the Chancellory Building

Brochure Back Cover - Map and Contacts

Given the significance of its collections and its history/histories, UMAG, located at Chancellory Building, is strategically and symbolically positioned as the University's cultural legacy. Its facilities include miniature paintings gallery, audio-visual gallery, artist's studio, reference and research rooms, and a cafe. The mission of the UMAG is marked by a sense of clarity and confidence; "to make the visual arts an essential part of the experience of all University of Malaya community, to advance knowledge of art and culture, to serve as a world-class destination for members of the national ad international communities, and ... as a public gateway to the University's intellectual resource." The mission is to be supported by collections, exhibitions and public programmes, aimed at a range of audiences "from the uninitiated to the expert". A key initiative is the reintroduction of a Resident Artists Programme which provides fellowships to Malaysian artists. Among the four appointed is printmaker Juhari Said.

Video | Interactions with R.E. Hartanto

2011-10-18T10:34:00.000+08:00

Video designed by Sherilyn Tan

The Photography Series | Photographing the Family

2011-10-15T00:24:00.005+08:00

Photographing the Family will constitute of a panel discussion, which will feature speakers Dr Oh Soon-Hwa and Sean Lee as they relate their expertise on photographing the family through discourse and practice, respectively.

click here for e-flyer

As part of the first installation of The Photography Series, this preview of works by photographers Geraldine Kang and Hanzhi Khoo offers an entrance into the different ways of looking and thinking about photographing the family.

In the Raw
by Geraldine Kang

"In the Raw" began with the intention of addressing my personal observations about my family, and bringing the family closer together through (what would seem to a Singaporean family to be) an absurd and uncomfortable method of orchestration and participation. The naked flesh, implied or otherwise, is meant to be a metaphor for issues concerning the body, physical and emotional openness, parent/caretaker-child dynamics and death. Visually, the images are crafted based on memories with the people involved (immediate and extended family) but are not necessarily about the memory itself. Rather, they serve as broader illustrations of relationships between sitters at the point in time of the picture. It is also through this collective "performance" for the camera that forges new memories and opens doors for communication and reconciliation.

Dears, Our Home
by Hanzhi Khoo

"Dears, Our Home" is an ongoing compilation of images of my loved ones at home; capturing the very essential elements in my life. The ever-changing daily routines, everyday life, and objects speak of who I am, where I come from. There used to be six of us: five are women, four of which are daughters, no sons. I have three elder sisters, two of which are married. My father is the only man. As I gradually notice permanent changes in the family, I began to sense the fear of losing, and so, I began photographing everything around me, and it became a form of therapy to curb that fear. The photographs are constant reminders that the moments exist, a presence to be preserved, and that every little thing has its significance. I wish to capture all the moments that my little brain cannot hold onto, before Change creeps in quietly and takes them away.

*Details on the upcoming workshop will be released on this site at a later date

writing power | zulkifli yusoff Exhibition Opening and Panel Discussion, 15 October 2011, 4pm, NUS MUSEUM

2011-10-04T11:31:00.008+08:00

Saturday,15 October 2011, 4.00pm
RSVP @ 6516 8817 or museum@nus.edu.sg by Thursday, 13 October 2011

PROGRAMME
4.00pm - Arrival of Guests
4.30pm - Introductory Remarks, Assoc. Prof. TK Sabapathy
5.00pm - Panel Discussion*
6.30pm - Exhibition Opening and Reception

*Between Text, Icon and Archetype: Narratives of Malaysian Art, post-1990s Panelists: Mr. Zainol Abidin Shariff, Assoc. Prof. Goh Beng Lan, Ms. Zanita Anuar, Mr. Ahmad Mashadi
Moderator: Assoc. Prof.TK Sabapathy

About Writing Power

Assembling two installations Malaysian artist Zulkifli Yusoff completed almost two decades apart, Writing Power (re)stages and simultaneously unpacks the conceptual grounds and the workings that inform the artist’s practice. Once restated as a contemporary encounter, colonial and native texts – often lodged as literary or historical – offer fresh lines of enquiry, contextual re-positionings, anecdotal links, and re-significations purposeful beyond the articulation of artistic methods, projecting into the dynamic role of reading and its potentials. Writing Power enacts a matrix that prospects engagements between image, texts and ideas and the associated authorial positions, negotiations that implicate the viewer’s interpretative agency. An assemblage of sites exposing everyday work materials ranging from archival traces to testimonials to media prints which make visualizations possible, they form traces that are recalcitrant, fragmentary rather than fungible, calling out: if it matters not-knowing what these traces mean, who made them, when and why, where do we place them, or how to approach them, in the now....read more

Articles: Artlink Reviews Singapore Biennale and Camping & Tramping

2011-10-01T09:12:00.004+08:00

Excerpt from the online version of Artlink, vol 31 no 3, 2011, "Singapore Biennale 2011: Open House", a review by Pat Hoffie:

"To the outside world, the city-state of Singapore projects a façade of orderly compression – a smooth functioning, rational exterior that runs on the labour input of the foreign workers who make up the major proportion of its workforce. The fact that half of the sixty artworks were new or commissioned, together with the fact that nine of the artists were local, enhanced the exhibition’s potential to suggest a range of other ways of imagining the locale. Spectres of the past and fleeting visions of the uncanny flitted through a number of works, as did the tendency for the reappearance of mythical creatures more usually associated with other realms. Godzilla appeared as a cameo appearance in a number of works.

But it was another exhibition, run simultaneously at the National University of Singapore Museum, which provided a broader and deeper context from which to consider contemporary work in the Biennale. Much of the intelligence and magic of Ahmad Mashadi and Shabbir Hussein Mustafa’s Camping and Tramping Through the Colonial Archive: The Museum in Malaya came from a critical juxtaposition of a diverse number of objects from a range of historical periods. The exhibition format challenged the very taxonomies that separate rational from ‘non-rational’, art from artefact, and science from magic. Working like artists, the curators retrieved facts and data and details from cleavages that run under and between the idea of an ordered, ‘progressive civilisation’ that was used to establish Singapore as a nation. There was plenty of evidence of the kind of illegitimate, disqualified areas of experimentation and knowledge that run counter to the idea of polite, rational, classifiable cultural practices. All of which filled its rooms with the kind of irreverent, contradictory and speculatively rich tributaries of possibilities that often no longer flow so readily within the ecosystems of biennales."

Click here to access the Artlink article online.

Curating Nation: Reflections on SUSURMASA | A talk by Zanita Anuar, Director of Museum Innovation, Malaysia Museums Department

2011-09-28T16:37:00.009+08:00

14 October 2011, Friday 6.30pm, NUS Museum
Admission free. To register email: museum@nus.edu.sg or call 6516 8429

The landmark exhibition SUSURMASA Seni Lukis Malaysia Bersama 50 Tahun Balai Seni Lukis Negara or Timelines of Malaysian Art presented a large scale re-introduction to the Permanent Collection of the National Art Gallery of Malaysia (NAG) in conjunction with the celebration of NAG's Golden Jubilee in 2008. Its objective was to put on display, the permanent collection of national visual arts heritage. Curatorially, it was set up across six thematic galleries, as a series of encounters between the ethnographic and modern; the pre-colonial, the colonial, and post-independent; proposing timelines and entry points.

The talk examines the role of the curator as a trespasser of sites. In particular, the provocateur of museums and galleries, as sites where issues of identity, national memory, power and place intersect. The NAG has been engaged in the preservation, representation and contextualization of objects, cultures and histories over space and time. Institutional curators become culture brokers and memory shapers, and are influential in illustrating and re-illustrating popular perceptions of the past. The Malaysian art audience of the 21st century has demanded that the institution responsible for culture and arts take up the challenge of providing discourse around the diverse perspectives of multi-culturalism and under-represented groups. Investigations on ethnographies and postcolonial trends, have spurred the curators who have worked alongside area-specialists, historians and archaeologists to query the categories of art, aesthetics, text and authenticity in developing a National timeline. The Susurmasa becomes a site investigation.

Speaker
Zanita Anuar started her career as a Lecturer in INTI and LICT and assumed the role of Education Curator in the Nanyang Gallery of Art, Hong Leong Group Bhd, in 1993. She later served at the National Art Gallery of Malaysia from 1995 to 2010. In 2011, she assumed a new role as the Director of Museum Innovation at The Malaysia Museums Department, initiating appreciation programs in embracing innovation in a museum environment. She is currently advising The University of Malaya on their collections and curatorial strategies towards the creation of the University Malaya Art Gallery (UMAG), and is the Guest Curator for an upcoming charity exhibition in aid of Palestine and the Al Aqsa mosque.

About Curating Nation Talk Series
In recent years, the idea of the nation has been studied not merely as a site of economic, political or geographic persuasions but also as a cultural object of analysis. Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Camping and Tramping Through the Colonial Archive | The Museum in Malaya, this talk series brings together leading art practitioners from Southeast Asia in an attempt at discerning the complexities involved in curating aspects of the nation within museological or gallery settings. Ranging from the deployment of exhibitions as a mode of cultural production, to the play of cosmopolitan identities at international biennales, curating the nation is conceived as a platform for the interdisciplinary discussion of memory, object and practice.

click here to view e-flyer

RAKU WORKSHOP WITH DELIA PRVACKI: 24 Sep - Review........

2011-09-26T12:22:00.005+08:00

click on the above image to view photo gallery

With all participants enthusiastically immersed in the second day of the workshop's process Delia explained and illustrated different ceramics samples with varied materials and composition. Whilst emphasizing on differences between types of clay and firing, all subordinated to the functionality of the final product (industrial, commercial, ornamental etc) Delia also insisted that ceramics can be an independent form of art if practiced by artists who choose it as their medium and their "language" to express their creativity. In studio practice ceramicists-artists are allowed to try all sorts of experiments and innovations, and the ultimate criteria is to follow the originality and integrity of the artist's ideas and message shared with a high command of skill and technical knowledge.

As such, contemporary ceramics became an equal medium to any other mediums practiced by visual artists and is competent to translate all directions and discourse present in 2D techniques and 3D installations.In this context, RAKU occupies a very special space and offers endless varieties of interpretation. Within this course of this workshop, Delia's intention is to promote an alternative approach to ceramic art among practitioners and ceramic -lovers in Singapore.

Diary of an NUS Museum Intern: Fiona Tan

2011-09-26T12:09:00.007+08:00

Our intern from last summer, Fiona Tan has been featured in the NUS Campus Life column! Click on the image to read more about her experience of working in the Raffles Light Prep Room.

Click here to read more entries of Diary of NUS Museum intern.

Click here to find out about our Internship Opportunities

Vote for NUS Museum

2011-09-23T17:13:00.003+08:00

Hello everybody,

NUS Museum and the NUS Baba House are in the running for the Best Overall Experience category at the first inaugural Museum Roundtable Awards 2011. If you enjoyed your visit to the NUS Museum, the Baba House or a programme that we organised, we hope you will show your appreciation by voting for us.

To vote for NUS Museum and NUS Baba House

To vote for NUS Museum or NUS Baba House, click on this link: http://www.facebook.com/ILoveMuseums?sk=app_242921062415606

Click the “LIKE” button on the top-right of the page

After clicking “LIKE”, you should see the list of participating museums appearing in each category.

Click the “VOTE” button under the NUS Museum or NUS Baba House heading. NUS Museum is listed under the Art category and Baba House under the Culture category. If the page remains blank, please refresh the page.

In addition, you may write a comment about your experience and be eligible to win prizes. The voting period ends on 30 Sept.

The results will be announced on 4 October 2011 at the Museum Roundtable Awards prize presentation ceremony.

Writing Power | Zulkifli Yusoff

2011-09-20T17:56:00.012+08:00

Pelayaran Munsyi Abdullah [detail], 2003, Aliya and Farouk Khan Collection. [Gallery Impression, Writing Power | Zulkifli Yusoff, NUS Museum, 2011]

CLICK HERE TO ACCESS PRESS RELEASE

CLICK HERE TO VIEW MORE GALLERY IMPRESSIONS

9 September – 4 December 2011
Exhibition extended until 19 Feb 2012

NX Gallery, NUS Museum

Entering into the Malaysian contemporary art scene in the late 1980s, Zulkifli Yusoff’s practice looks at how historical texts color cultural memory and shape contemporary understandings of the Self. Often arranging materials in an assemblage of citation and juxtaposition, and presenting them as archival scaffolds, a complex of texts and objects, Writing Power draws on three texts which were mobilized by Zulkifli Yusoff for his installations since the 1990s. Namely, The Story of Abdullah’s Voyage to Kelantan (Pengajian Kesah Pelayaran Abdullah Munshi, c. 1838) which remains a crucial reference for the study of modern Malay literature, the Malay Annals (Sejarah Melayu, c. 16th century) which locates the genealogy of the Malay Sultanates of the Malaccan Empire, and the Malay Sketches (c. 1895) penned by the first Resident General of the Federated Malay States, Sir Frank Swettenham, which provides glimpses into his interactions with and regard for the communities of the region.

XII University Museums and Collections Conference |10 – 13 October 2012

2011-09-20T16:38:00.007+08:00

NUS Museum

National University of Singapore

The annual University Museums and Collections Conference (UMAC) will be held in Singapore from 10 to 13 October 2012 and it will be hosted by NUS Museum.

A Southeast Asian first, UMAC 2012 is an excellent opportunity for SEA university museums to engage with the global university museums community

In view of the dramatic growth of museums and exhibitionary interests in Asia, the conference in Singapore will discuss how university museums can remain relevant to educational institutions and institutions beyond; identify challenges confronting university museums and collections; share strategies adopted by university museums, collections, galleries and museum professionals.

Please click here for details on the proposed conference Programmes and theme Encountering Limits: The University Museum

Remembering no.157, 28 September 2011 @ Baba House

2011-09-20T14:31:00.002+08:00

RAKU WORKSHOP WITH DELIA PRVACKI: 17 Sep - Review........

2011-09-19T15:58:00.011+08:00

click on the above image to view photo gallery

The first session took place at Delia’s studio “Combinart” in Hiangkie Industrial Building, where the artist had exhibited some of her recent works.
The first session was a talk which Delia focused on a brief introduction in the world of ceramic art with a very personal interpretation of Raku's origin, as a specific technique for firing clay works. Delia’s intentions was to project the “accidental” discovery of “raku” in the context of Japan’s economic, social, architectural development and transformation in the late 16^th century, juxtaposed on aesthetics, craft, religion and philosophy of that time. As such, RAKU became a vehicle for promoting a new life style (tea ceremony and the use of special hand-made tea pots), sophisticated rituals and intellectual, artistic discourse, generating a fresh view and innovative methods of artistic expression, which were owervelmingly embraced, adopted and adapted by Western ceramicists in 20^th century, especially with the re-invention and diversification of this medium by American artists in 60s. This latest groups is credited to reinvigorate the technique and to contribute with innovative technology and adventurous logistic and a deep sense of community, ecological principles interwoven in RAKU craft studios.

Delia also explained her concept of the “natural” approach in the raku clay work as the energising force behind the “revolution” produced in the contemporary ceramic art by establishing new criteria for practicing and expressing ideas and creating a new visual language which is emphasised on freedom, spontaneity, improvisation with the ultimate goal to produce an object meant for contemplation. The magic and fascination with colours developing from raw materials, the process of hand-moulding the clay, the adventurous spirit to work directly with the FIRE in order to create the colour effect in a deliberate way, are the starting points for the participants in the workshop to reflect upon and to try to translate in the works they are encouraged to produce during following weeks in the workshop.

Proposed theme for the following sessions is related to idea of human body, skin, personal identity, a similarity to basic characteristics of clay as a material and the tactile and sensual appeal embodied in the completed artwork under FIRE. Delia expressed her views and belief that ceramic works are accessible to every passionate individual, as long as there is sincerity and sense for exploration in the working process. Delia says: Ceramic practice should not be limited to strict rules and the creative activity, it should be accepted as a moment of liberation, allowing our body (through our skin and hand’s work) and our senses (tactile and most importantly, the visual, chromatic appreciation of colours, texture of fired glazes, which all comes from natural, earth and metallic components) to translate our inner world. Watch out for more updates as the works are in progress....

Posted by Rohini Yuvaraj, NUS MUSEUM

Article | Passage : September/ October 2011

2011-09-19T14:27:00.008+08:00

Double click on the image to view pdf version of the article

Video | Interactions with R.E. Hartanto

2011-09-17T22:04:00.000+08:00

Note: This post is part of the online series Interactions with R.E. Hartanto: A Series of Scenarios, Schemes and Stories. This series documents the artistic process and development of Hartanto's latest series of works to be featured at NUS Museum in January 2012. It documents his visits to Singapore, the workshops he conducts and feature writings, photographs and notes from his earlier exhibitions. Acting as a conduit between the artist and the audience, the series provides insights into the artistic and curatorial processes of the project.

As part of the development for R.E. Hartanto's exhibition at NUS Museum next year, NUS Museum and the University Scholars' Programme co-organised a workshop from 14-16 Sept 2011 at USP Cinnamon College. The workshop called for Hartanto along with a group of NUS students and staff to confront the other self as a subject and material that would transverse the boundary terrain of self and society, perception and memories that are entangled inside the surface of the body.

During the three-day workshop, Hartanto and the participants engaged in discussions of his artistic process, the capturing of expressions of anxiety and a collaborative art-making activity. On the second day, the participants were asked to relieve a moment of anxiety while being photographed. Hartanto then chose the photograph that he thought embodied the theme of anxiety the best, rendering it into a sketch which was then divided into grids. During the art-making activity on the third day, each participant was given a few grids and asked to sketch what they see on each grid. They had no idea which photograph had been selected as they sketched their respective grids. After each piece was completed, they were pieced together and slowly the photograph-sketch was revealed...

Much thanks to USP for hosting the workshop and Hartanto and all the students who participated so enthusiastically in the workshop! We will be blogging more about the workshop in the next few days, so do look out for them!

Diary of an NUS Museum Intern: Melinda Susanto

2011-09-15T15:16:00.004+08:00

Note: Diary of an NUS Museum Intern is a series of blog posts written by our interns about their experiences during the course of their internships. Besides working hard and fast in their cubicles, our interns have travelled to Bandung and Malacca, organised symposiums, waded through tons of historical research and pitched in during exhibition installations. It was definitely no ordinary internship for them! If you would like to become our next intern, visit our internship page for more information!

Melinda is currently a 4th year Art History and Curatorship major from the Australian National University. Her internship was part of the IARU Global Internship Programme. NUS Museum has been welcoming interns from this programme for the past three years and we look forward to more in the future. If you would like to find out more about this programme, please click here.

When I started my internship at the NUS museum, little did I know how much I would gain from it! I got a crash course in Singapore history and the colonial museum through researching, tried my hands on some practical museum work, went on exhibition-related day trips and even attended a museum conference. The research experience itself was enriching, and oddly enough, resonates with a kind of past-present parallel. The colonial archive may well be a site of memory, but as I researched for Camping and Tramping, a tale of contemporary endeavours also unfolded before me.

‘Exploring the unknown’

Colonial Malaya, with its ‘exotic’ and then-unfamiliar people and locales, was an object of exploration and a space for imagination. Explorers chronicled their adventures, scientists illustrated newly-discovered species of flora and fauna, ethnographers recorded local folklore and collected artefacts, be it a keris or a basket. Malaya beckoned to people of varied backgrounds, where piqued interests provoked deeper research.

Similarly, Camping and Tramping as an exhibition presents an exploratory complex. As visitors to the museum each bring with them their own perceptions and world-views, they also come away with different thoughts. Artefacts are simply labeled with numbers -with further details provided in a gallery guide and much more in reference binders- rewarding those who seek further information, just the way once-upon-a-time expeditions played out. Witnessing a fortuituous school visit also showed me the youthful drive for knowledge: students armed with papers to draw, write and explain their interest and understanding of artefacts, echoing the inquisitive process of explorers, scientists, and ethnographers traversing through colonial Malaya.

‘Glimpses between the texts’

Through my internship, I spent much time delving into existing texts, research that made up the current exhibition – from writings of jungle and cave explorations, through records of mystic magic, to elucidation of flora and fauna – it all fascinated me how the history of Singapore and the rise of the colonial museum is filtered through the lenses of the writers of these texts.

These historical texts provide a glimpse, no matter fragmentary, into the personalities involved in establishing the colonial museum and the lives of the local population. Yet it is with a random thought that I realised, so does the exhibition and the existing stacks of research I was diving into. They too, tell a story of the researchers who compiled the mass of sources – the scribbles in the margins, the annotations in the bibliographies, are abound with curious and insightful thoughts on the research. While annual reports may reflect the interests of an official and what directed the priorities of the colonial museum, the stroke of a pen, a colourful splash of highlighting, reveals what each researcher considered significant and presented me with signposts as I sifted through the texts.

The acquisitions of artefacts reflected the efforts and mindsets of colonial officials; equally, amassing the range of books, newspaper articles and reports attest to the hard work and research-paths of last year’s interns. While an intriguing newly-discovered artefact or species may wow its then-audience, I am fascinated with an obscure reference found, thinking, “How did he/she find that!?”, a sentiment surely echoing that of past audiences.

The only difference in the texts’ function as archive of memory in the historical versus the contemporary sense is that I actually met some of the interns in person, while the gap between historical reality and the mirage of personalities glimpsed between the texts perhaps necessarily remains nebulous.

‘Intrigue. Search. Collect.’

The colonial archive may be seen as a product of accumulation. Many writers of these texts acknowledged that there was much more to know; they sought to record even more encounters as they explored the region, with the certainty that more knowledge will yield greater significance sometime in the future.

Then, it occurred to me that I, too, was gripped by some kind of fervour which drove me to fill up gaps and follow up trails of references to find something new, assembling heaps of papers and collecting links of relevance. I knew not where it would go, but that it mattered for me to keep being thrilled at new discoveries and adding to the collection of research, texts ranging from colonial artistic impressions of Singapore to the development of the Nanyang arts movement.

And then, just as the archival texts contained lists and tables attempting to organize the scientific and ethnological knowledge gained about the colonial environment, so too it seems the exhibition’s binders and lists of bibliographies denote previous researchers’ task of compiling and making sense of the research intended for this exhibition. To this, I also added my humble two cents’ worth: updating bibliographies and generating timelines plotted along the milestones of Singapore history, the development of the arts, the interactions between local communities and the colonial institution.

‘Peeling back the layers’

By the end of two months, I have come to realise that there are many layers to what is known as the colonial archive. I emerged from the internship with an appreciation of the complexities of postcolonial discourse, the histories of colonialism and its institutions. I also gained a valuable insight into the day-to-day work of the museum, from the process of engaging with research and generating scopes for exhibition content, to the installation process of an upcoming exhibition. All in all, it was a rewarding experience to be part of the NUS Museum’s internship program and I found it more than worthwhile to have swapped the wintry streets of Canberra for the sunny shores of Singapore during this break.

Article | Interactions with R.E. Hartanto

2011-09-13T15:07:00.001+08:00

(Please click on the image for the original article.)

To read more of Roy's writings, please visit his blog, Amor Fati by Roy Voragen.

Publication Announcement! Writing Power | Zulkifli Yusoff

2011-09-09T18:56:00.001+08:00

Contents:

Foreword | Ahmad Mashadi

Re-visioning Power | Zanita Anuar

Abdullah, Method, Object, Conversing with Zulkifli yussof | Hasnul J Saidon

Writing Power | Shabbir Hussain Mustafa

***

Writing Power enacts a play which prospects engagements between image, texts and ideas and the associated authorial positions, negotiations that implicate the viewer’s interpretative agency.

As an assemblage of sites exposing everyday work materials ranging from archival traces to testimonials to media prints which make ‘seeing’ possible, Writing Power form clusters of traces that are fragmentary rather than complete.

Writing Power constantly calls out: if it matters not-knowing what these traces means, who made it, when and why, where do we place them, or how to approach them?

Process | Interactions with R.E. Hartanto

2011-09-08T19:38:00.000+08:00

Interactions with R.E. Hartanto: A Series of Scenarios, Schemes and Stories

2011-09-08T13:35:00.000+08:00

ArtistR.E. Hartanto is an Indonesian artist, currently living and working in Bandung,Indonesia. He is known for his provocative portraitures that narrate stories ofcontemporary social political issues that are prevalent in our society.

As partof Hartanto's artistic process and development for his latest series of worksfor his first solo exhibition at the NUS Museum in January 2012, NUS Museum islaunching the online series Interactions with R.E. Hartanto: ASeries of Scenarios, Scenes and Stories. This series documents hisvisits to Singapore, the workshops he conducts, feature writings, photographsand notes from his earlier exhibitions. Acting as a conduit between the artistand the audience, this series provides insights to the artistic and curatorialprocesses of the project.

Hartanto'scurrent approach to the upcoming exhibition focuses on the theme of angst,revolving around the idea of constructing a "theatre of anxiety".This idea is based on a proverb he believes in, where every child is born a twin.He will attempt to confront the other self as a subject and material thattransverse the boundary terrain of self and society, perception and memoriesthat are entangled inside the surface of the body.

Workshop by Artist R.E. Hartanto

2011-09-06T18:48:00.000+08:00

Diary of an NUS Museum Intern: Chen Ziwei

2011-08-31T10:00:00.004+08:00

Today's blog post is brought to you by our current curatorial intern Chen Ziwei who shares about her experience working in the curatorial department with words and her own quirky illustrations. An alumni of NUS FASS, Ziwei is currently pursuing her degree in Fine Art and History of Art at Goldsmiths College, University of London. It just goes to show that it is never too late to pursue your passion!

Sometimes, going into something that you least expect of it brings you more surprises. It has been about three weeks since I started my internship at the NUS Museum and the experience thus far has been a pretty eye-opening one. The first mistake (and the admittedly most embarrassing one) was my imagination of the job scope of a curator. In my initial (and over-simplified) impression of curatorial work, it was plainly just about assembling works, organizing them into different themes, and then presenting them as an exhibition. Big misunderstanding.

To begin with, I had missed out a bulk of important stages before the actual execution of an exhibition. Also, I was corrected that it was the curator’s role to select the works suitable for the exhibition rather than the exhibition being derived by the works collected together; hence, the distinction between a curated exhibition and a group show. Having left out the fundamental stages to curate an exhibition, it was opportune that the focus of my internship was on the preliminary research stages that placed me from stage one in the preparation of an exhibition about Singaporean artist Mr. Lim Mu Hue.

Since most of his materials were in traditional Han Chinese characters, there was a need to translate texts into simplified Han Chinese characters so that it would be easier for most to read them since most Chinese texts are documented in simplified Han these days. I could decipher some of the characters in traditional Han but for those that I had difficulties figuring out, I used my handy Chinese dictionary to help me out. Though seemingly tedious, the task actually pushed me to revise my Chinese language that I had lost touch with since junior college.

Moving on, I had to gather more resources about the artist from external sources. External sources comprised of chiefly literature written on him or by him in libraries and newspaper archives. Notably, I had the privilege of looking for clues within the artist’s possessions that were donated to the museum after he had passed away. This was quite special to me, as I had never encountered belongings of an artist so up close and personal before. As I gathered the resources, I drew up a mind-map, brainstorming themes and research directions that the exhibition on the artists could take.

On the whole, the investigation process in the curatorial research has been gratifying. At times I almost feel like a crime-scene investigator. Piecing together achievements and significant events of the artist also allows brings to light how his artistic journey was like. Moreover, the fuller picture enables one to appreciate the perseverance and skillfulness of the artist that he was lesser known for. I do hope by the end of my internship to be able to round up more information and material about his achievements that the artist was less recognized for and present them as significant contributions to the art history of Singapore.

The Moving Museum: Leaving Your Legacy

2011-08-26T14:34:00.001+08:00

Talk & Film Screening | When the Sun Rises: A Toraja Priest ofthe Ancestral Way | Thursday 8 Sept 2011, 6.30pm, NUS Museum

2011-08-25T12:02:00.001+08:00

Diary of an NUS Museum Intern: Ryan Ng

2011-08-22T16:09:00.006+08:00

For our second diary entry from our interns working at the Conservation Studio, we have Ryan Ng, an Art Management student from LASELLE College of the Arts, to share with us his experience of working in a conservation lab.

During the three weeks of my internship at the Conservation Studio, I must say that I have gained many new insights on how things work in the studio.

I chanced upon the idea of conservation in art because of my lecturer, Lawrence, who taught me for one of my modules in Laselle. Through him, I became interested to find out more about conservation in art as I had no prior knowledge in this area.

Working in the conservation studio has made me realize that preserving a piece of painting is not a simple task. There are many aspects to look into and factors to consider. For instance, fading of the colour pigments in a painting would occur when ultraviolet light is present. Humidity is also another factor that would affect the paintings. And conservation of art not only comprises of paintings, but also sculptures.

I managed to understand all these concepts from all the lectures and practical work that we undertook daily. I found it really interesting to discover all the different tools and mediums used in conservation. Sometimes, working on artworks can be really exhausting. Long hours are required to be spent on each piece because every work is different. For each individual artwork, we first had to identify the problem, be it fading or paint crack, or even a tear in the artwork. From there, we would then rectify the problem accordingly. All these, are some of the repair/cleaning works that we do in the studio.

All in all, I personally feel that despite the short span of three weeks in the studio, it has been a real eye opener to me. Before stepping into this, my initial idea of museums was just for the mere appreciation of art. I never knew that appreciation required so much effort from the people behind the scenes. From now on, whenever I step into a museum, I wouldn’t just look at an art piece impassively, but stop and take time to have a closer look on the conservation efforts that has been put in as well. I feel that I’m really fortunate to be able to take on this internship as a chance like this is hard to come by. I hope that many others will be able to know about conservation and look at art from a different perspective.

Diary of an NUS Museum Intern: Andrew Lee

2011-08-15T11:41:00.006+08:00

Stretching canvas, cleaning artwork, repairing surfaces, these are just some of the things I have learned from my attachment with The Conversation Studio at the NUS Museum. As an arts management student, I often frequent museums for projects and have always seen exhibitions in perfect condition. However, I was unaware of the amount of labour that must be done before an exhibit can be set up. This attachment has allowed me to put my theory knowledge of conservational studies into a practical use and has made me realize the importance of conservation work.

Before a conservator can start cleaning an artwork, many considerations must be made before to prevent any misjudgements that might cause the artwork to be damaged and unable to be restored to its original condition. Conservators must see beyond the surface damage and stabilise the paintings before they are able to proceed with the repairing of the artwork. It is easy to take it for granted that paintings are in prime conditions. Hence it is vital to know that deterioration is happening at every moment and that many works could have been lost without the perseverance of the conservators. In addition, I have learnt much more about the different characteristics of various art materials such as their reaction time and their basic properties.

It has been a delight to have the opportunity to work on an upcoming exhibition during my internship. I was given the task of assisting during the set up of the artworks and while it seems like a simple job, it was manually challenging as well. It also opened my eyes to realise that a minor detail could cause a cascade of reactions. For example, drilling a hole that is 1mm off the actual measurement could disrupt the aesthetics of the layout. I have also learnt that precautions are highly essential, despite it seeming like a minor issue.

Conservators are truly the unsung heroes of the art scene because this uncommon occupation has provided us with a never ending continuation of beautiful artworks to admire. We often speak highly of the artists who have created the artwork, but little has been mentioned about the conservator, who constantly tries to preserve the works of art. During this six-week attachment, I have not only been constantly learning, but also enhancing and achieving my overall career goal as a visual arts manager, I now have a better understanding of the museum environment, the conservation of artworks and conservation work itself. Although it was for a very short period of time, I have truly enjoyed my experience at The Conservation Studio and I hope that I will have more opportunities in the future to work with them and to increase awareness on the importance of conservation works. Visits to museums and art galleries will never be the same again with the new insights I have – always remembering the tremendous efforts by conservators to preserve art for many generations to come.

Talk & Film Screening | King Kong & Komodo Dragon, 18 Aug'11

2011-08-08T17:57:00.002+08:00

NUS MUSEUM | OPEN HOUSE 2011

2011-08-07T17:45:00.001+08:00

Museum of National Identity, NUS Museum in The Good Paper

2011-08-05T10:42:00.002+08:00

This quarter's issue of Good Paper - The Paper for Awareness and Action, features the NUS Museum! In this article, we introduce the Museum's history and collections, discuss our practice and feature our on-going exhibitions and upcoming events!

You can pick up a physical copy of Good Paper at the NUS Museum or read the virtual copy online here, http://www.goodpaper.sg/museum-of-national-identity/