COLLECTIONS Straits Chinese Collection Ng Eng Teng Collection South and SouthEast Asian Collection Lee Kong Chian CollectionBABA HOUSEAbout Baba House
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EventsExhibitions
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SHIMURAbros Till December 2013
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SHIMURAbros, a sister/brother duo of Yuka (b. 1976) and Kentaro (b. 1979), are interested in the history of cinema and the deconstruction of cinema as a medium, utilizing various forms of films and incorporating sculpture and installation to create new expressions of imagery that prompt the somatic senses of the audience. Straddling the realms between the archaeology and histories of film and the moving image, the SHIMURAbros discovered that one of the earliest films to be made in the genre of the travel film was titled Road To Singapore, a 1940 comedy flick featuring Anthony Quinn. Working with the Sherd Library of the Lee Kong Chian Gallery, the artists focus on the archaeological materials of Dr. John Miksic and produce a video-based installation using plastic crates that are used to house the archeologists’ shards. ROAD MOVIE – Road to Singapore is a film that follows the trajectory of movement recorded as a shadow of the moving subject, opening a site where contemporary audiences can (re)live the feelings of the archaeological object and the people related in its history. ROAD MOVIE was originally presented as part of OMNILOGUE: Your Voice is Mine, an exhibition which featured six contemporary Japanese artists working with themes related to Singapore. It was co-organised by The Japan Foundation and NUS Museum from 19 January – 21 April 2013. [Image:Gallery Impression, SHIMURAbros Road Movie – Road To Singapore, video installation, plastic crates/size: 340x110x85cm, NUS Museum, 2013] | |
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Dressing the Baba: 5 December 2012 to 31 July 2013
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This exhibition features a selection of late 19th to early 20th century portraits of individuals and couples from ethnic Chinese backgrounds who were domiciled in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. As recent donations, the display surveys portraiture, its functions, and ideas it may convey. Significant to such enquiry is the projection of identities informed by gender, ethnicity and economic status, and the conventions of portrait making that facilitate such projections. Presented at NUS Baba House, previously the residence of a Peranakan Chinese family, the exhibition complements ways of encountering the cultural histories of the Straits Chinese, explored through portraits and their proposed contexts. | |
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106 Joo Chiat Place: 9 October 2012 to 30 June 2013
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The Ng Eng Teng House, located at 106 Joo Chiat Place was also known as ‘Studio 106’. It was not only the home of Singapore sculptor Ng Eng Teng, but was also used as his workplace until his passing in 2001. It was then turned into a residency space for artists and later acquired by a developer. Architecturally known as a panggung house, it is one of the remaining few of its kind in Singapore. This exhibition, as a laboratory that invites multiple readings and speculations, features an accumulation of objects as found and collected from the house, placed alongside archival documentation such as newspaper articles and images relating to and of the artist Ng Eng Teng. | |
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Sculpting Life: 9 October 2012 to 31 March 2014
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Presented as an open storage and second in a series of permanent exhibitions on artist Ng Eng Teng, Sculpting Life brings together a range of works that facilitate a mapping of the artist’s history and his explorations. Gathered are early pieces completed during his formative years at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (Singapore), Stoke-on-Trent College of Art (UK) and as a ceramic designer in Ireland from the late 1950s and 1960s; early explorations in ceramics and ciment fondu that foreground the mature phases of his practice; and seminal sculptural pieces that marked his importance among a generation of Singapore artists emerging during period of the 1960s. Documentations, drawings and maquettes will accompany the selection, providing an expansive view of his practice. The exhibition is also devised to prompt a mapping of themes and conceptual concerns of the artist. Significant among these, explorations into the human condition through an evolving articulation of the human form and their emotive potentials, and by doing so, he invests into them oblique and direct references to questions of self and identity. | |
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Biography of a Public Sculpture 9 October 2012 to 31 March 2014
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The murals Asian Symphony and Tropical Rhapsody were made by Singapore sculptor Ng Eng Teng for the Garden Hotel in 1971. Prior to the demolition of the hotel in 2010, the murals were salvaged and donated to NUS. They are now installed at the National University Health System Building and NUS Museum respectively. This display of images and artefacts along the Conservation Corridor records the process of surveying, dismantling and re-installing the murals. | |
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Camping and Tramping Through the Colonial Archive: Till 2 June 2013
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The term Camping and Tramping is inspired by a lesser known 19th century document compiled by a British officer describing the field work and travails of his time with the colonial office in Malaya. Documents such as these, along with colonial institutions, sought to fill a void in terms of Orientalist knowledge available for a colonist or itinerant audience interested in the region. Aggregating such texts which make up the colonial archive, this exhibition traces the rise of the Museum in British Malaya not just as an indicator of power over what was gazed upon as the exotic but by acknowledging that the very advent of the Museum resulted in a staging ground for a project of accumulation and the ordering of knowledge. Mobilizing artefacts from the Raffles Museum and Library (established 1874) and the University Art Museum, Malaya (established 1955), the exhibition offers the question of the Museum in Malaya as evolving propositions expressed through shifting concepts of colonial knowledge, its responses to emerging contingencies of colonial politics and eventual decolonisation, and changing regard for its publics and their aspirations. Collecting, documenting, ordering, preserving and displaying - functions declared and sustained - are tasks made complex by such contexts. Birth, transformation and end of institutions render collections and documents as dynamic sets of archives that are mobile and regenerative, opened to newer meanings and claims. The exhibition is divided into the following sections: • The Museum as Idea As reminders of how individuals in the region have laid claim to the colonial archive, the gallery also sites the practices of two post-colonial figures, Mohammad Din Mohammad and Dr. Ivan Polunin. Mohammad Din was a Singapore artist, traditional healer and collector who held that his works contained talismanic potentials. Arriving in Malaya from England in 1948, Dr. Polunin taught Social Medicine at the then University of Malaya. In an adventurous career that began with the filmic documentation of tropical diseases, Dr. Polunin's ethnographies grew to encompass hundreds of hours of film footage on Malaya's eclectic sociocultural practices and its rich biodiversity. Writings and artefacts have been mobilized from the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research (NUS), NUS Museum, Asian Civilizations Museum, National Museum of Singapore, National Library Board Singapore, Singapore Press Holdings, Singapore National Archives, and the Ivan Polunin and Mohammad Din Mohammad collections. [Image credit: Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research Collection. Photo by Nurul Huda] | |
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The Sufi and the Bearded Man: Till June 2013
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This exhibition re-members the keramat of a 19th century Sufi traveler from the Middle East who lives on in contemporary Singapore through her miracles and her shrine which was recently removed. Re-membering the keramat has involved a two-year long project of collaborating with Ali, an intermediary of the Sufi and custodian of the masoleum referred to by fellow devotees as "the bearded man". These conversations culminated in the keramat and its life-worlds entering a museum, a transition animated by the display of photographic evidence, material remains or artifacts, anecdotal histories and related documents. Considering alternative ways to recount and understand heritage, The Sufi and the Bearded Man, calls attention to devotional culture, lesser-heard narratives and esotericism in Singapore. [Image credit: Nurul Huda, Singapore 2010] | |
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Chinese Art Collection from the Lee Kong Chian Museum Ongoing
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The Lee Kong Chian gallery features the Chinese Art Collection and Export Ceramics from the Lee Kong Chian Museum. The permanent display is supplemented by ceramics from from the South and Southeast Asian Collections and the archaeological collection of Dr John Miksic. These exhibits are complemented by temporary exhibitions, conceived to engage the permanent collection critically. The Chinese Art collection consists of bronzes, ceramics and paintings, gathered to represent the expansive history of Chinese art. The nucleus of this collection was established and developed at the Nanyang University in the 1970s with significant expansion in the 1980s under the newly inaugurated National University of Singapore (NUS). This permanent display of Chinese Art focuses on Chinese ceramics and its development, categorising objects in relation to centres of productions and periods. A selection from the collection is featured in Collecting Histories, presented within the main gallery in open-storage format alongside ceramics collected by the then University of Malaya and University of Singapore. Collecting Histories comprises Southeast Asian and Chinese ceramics sourced from the region and mostly acquired between 1955 and 1973 - a period significant in the development of Southeast Asian art and ceramics as a field of study - led by the scholarship and research of the successive curators of the University of Malaya Art Museum, Michael Sullivan (1955-1960) and William Willetts (1963-1973). The third permanent component to the gallery is the Sherd Library, which presents a selection of archaeological materials from the collection of Dr. John Miksic, a living accumulation of an archive developed through his extensive work across the region since the late 1970s. [Image: Gallery impression, Ways of Seeing Chinese Art, NUS Museum, 2012] | |
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NUS Baba House Ongoing Visits are by appointment only. |
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Baba House is a heritage house which facilitates research and learning about the Peranakan community and its evolution. It exhibits the community's material culture in a domestic context, providing the unique experience of visiting a Straits Chinese family home dating back to the early 20th century. The Baba House aims to promote a wider appreciation of the Peranakan identity, history and culture, as well as architectural traditions and conservation efforts in Singapore. The Gallery on the third floor hosts temporary exhibitions featuring various Peranakan themes. | |
