National University of Singapore

Shared Heritage: "As We See It"
A Travelling Exhibition

11 May 2012 to 13 June 2012
NX Gallery, NUS Museum
Free Admission

“Shared Heritage: As We See It” is an exhibition on ideas, stories, and images relating to cultural heritage. Borne out of a workshop that comprised students from both Asia and Europe, the theme of cultural heritage is explored and presented through visuals, interspersed with textual elements drawn from their discussions on the theme.

In presenting on the theme of cultural heritage, we encounter its varying elements through ideas, stories, images, and the sensorial, invented in unique ways across the multi-varied cultural and historical landscapes. The result is an exhibition that invites the viewer to engage with shared heritage as seen by the participants themselves.

This exhibition is organised by the Asia-Europe Foundation and NUS Museum.

Rupal Shah / Tautology of Memory

23 April 2012 to 28 December 2012
NUS Museum
Free Admission

Tautology of Memory is a single channel video shot by artist Rupal Shah at the archaeological site of Ajanta in Western India.* The display is mediated through the multiplicity of voices that define an archaeological site, including the echoes of the tour-guide focusing on the murals and frescoes, constantly alluding to and reifying popular perceptions; the artist partializes this reification by employing her child’s exploration of the caves.

Simultaneously, curatorial interventions first engage with colonial India’s foremost architectural historian, James Fergusson’s publication Rock-Cut Temples of India, a detailed and systematic documentation of Ajanta containing the photographs by another nineteenth century military-surveyor Robert Gill; and second with a 1927 newspaper report which applauds a decade-long documentation project undertaken by an art school student, Syed Ahmad at Ajanta.

Evoking ironies, paradoxes and humour which descend on history and its sites, acutely choreographed between text, fragment and aesthetic, juxtapositions made playful with comments on colonial and postcolonial mappings of archaeological heritage, one is compelled to ask, does Ajanta lend itself for official surveys, archaeological scholarship, artistic projects or the heritage-making industry? What remains asserted, what has been reclaimed?

[Image: Gallery impression, Rupal Shah | Tautology of Memory, NUS Museum, 2012]

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

9 February 2012 to 31 July 2012
NUS Baba House
Free Admission

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.

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

PRINTS prep-room

8 February 2012 to 30 June 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.

Click here to download the worksheets for Primary school.

Click here to download the worksheets for Secondary school.

Camping and Tramping Through the Colonial Archive:
The Museum in Malaya

Till 2 Dec 2012
NUS Museum
Free Admission

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
• Shifts - Other and Self
• Accumulations - Object, Order, Wonder

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]

Sculpting Life: The Ng Eng Teng Collection

Ongoing
NUS Museum
Free Admission

Ng Eng Teng (1934 – 2001) was a painter and potter by training but is most recognised for his sculptural pieces featuring humanist themes. A beneficiary of the artist's generous donations, NUS Museum has over 1,000 of Ng's works including sketches, paintings, maquettes, sculptures, figurines and pottery. An archival display-cum-exhibition, the presentation is divided into three sections – The Formative Years, Body/Form/Perspectives, Materials/Processes/Public Works – exploring a range of biographical, stylistic and thematic interests. The presentation surveys the breadth and depth of Ng’s oeuvre and encourages further research and dialogue on the artist, his productions and facets of the era in which he lived and worked.

[Image: Ng Eng Teng, Acrobat, 1988, Ciment fondu, paint]

Click here for the exhibition brochure in PDF format.

Ways of Seeing Chinese Art

Ongoing
NUS Museum
Free Admission

Ways of Seeing Chinese Art features over 200 objects including ceramics, jades and bronzes from the Lee Kong Chian Collection. The exhibition presents a comprehensive history of Chinese ceramic art with more than 100 ceramic pieces dating from prehistory to the early 20th century, representing wares produced by major kilns in China.

[Image: Polychrome Jar with Floral Motif, Late Ming (17th C), Jingdezhen Ware, Jiangxi]

Click here for the exhibition brochure in PDF format.

NUS Baba House

Ongoing
157 Neil Road, Singapore 088883

Visits are by appointment only.
Visitors are required to sign up in advance for heritage tours which fall on Mondays 2pm - 3pm,
Tuesdays 6.30pm - 7.30pm, Thursdays 10am - 11am & Saturdays 11am - 12pm.

For enquiries, please visit
http://www.nus.edu.sg/museum/baba,
call [65] 6227 5731

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.