Ok so, the title. I knew, even before the start of the semester, that NUS had its own museum and that it was free for all to enter. By all, they really do mean anyone and everyone, so go during the weekdays or something if you hate crowds. I went on a Friday nearly 3 weeks ago and it happened to be a weekday during the school vacation, so the galleries were pretty much empty save for a couple of straggling humans.
Robot painting and other tools (Yeoh Shih Yun)
Choreographed Collisions (Tribute to Steph) (Yeoh Shih Yun)
We are Singapore (process documentation) (Yeoh Shih Yun)
We are Singapore: Lion Roar, Life, Stand Together, Future, Peace (Yeoh Shih Yun)
Marking time (2011 till now) #1-4 (Yeoh Shih Yun)
Diary: 4-15 April 2009, Bergen, Norway (Yeoh Shih Yun)
New Paintings (Yeoh Shih Yun)
Right next to the Yeoh Shih Yun exhibit was the Archaeology Library, where there was a mishmash of dug-up artifacts and demolished fragments of tiles and whatnot. I think this section was meant to be an archive of sorts, kind of like the Resource Gallery on the top floor, because it was not very well-lit and things were all just lumped together on a shelf. There were a few glass cases that had labelled materials in them though and those were pretty fascinating to look at.
The dug-up artifacts and jewellery were mostly from Fort Canning Hill, Parliament House Complex, St. Andrew's Cathedral, Istana Kampong Glam, Pulau Saigon and the Belitung Wreck. I don't know too much about these archaeological sites, but I was thinking about how great it was that some of these absolutely gorgeous materials were traded into Singapore and remained here until they were found! I've linked some resources in the respective sites' names if you (or I in the future) want to check it out and learn something new °˖✧◝(⁰▿⁰)◜✧˖°
The last section of the first floor gallery was the Lee Kong Chian Collection, which showcased many traditional chinese ink works on canvas/paper. On hindsight, they may have put this collection and the Yeoh Shih Yun one in the same space since both deal with the same mediums hmm........
Calligraphy (Lim Tze Peng)
Woman Selling Fruits (Tan Kian Por)
While waiting for the lift to head up to the second floor gallery, I saw this little space called Prep-Room: Of Place And A Paradox. I wasn't sure whether you were supposed to go in or not (it was labelled a prep room after all), but I did anyway and it turned out to be one of those not-so-permanent exhibits that was supposed to not be all that perfect. This one was about the Patani Art Space in Thailand, which I found out after watching the video in the exhibit and doing a little bit of googling on my own with the free school wifi (accessible even in the museum!)
There were more exhibits on the second floor, with the first I encountered being another prep room. Armed with the knowledge of what a prep room was this time round, I was slightly more eager to explore what was in this second one. IT DID NOT DISAPPOINT!!! This second prep room, titled After Ballads, was stunningly put together and just took my breath away the moment I walked in. I stumbled upon this beautifully written piece about the setting up of this room on the NUS Museum blog and I loved it so much that I had to share.
After Ballads took up the entire room. By this I don't just mean that it had pieces throughout the room; I mean that it literally occupied the room with its presence and I think that was what the artist meant to do. One thing flowed over to the next and there's no start or end to this place. Visually, the colours flowed together and juxtaposed against one another in a way that made walking through the room a whole experience.
The next exhibit that I walked through was Radio Malaya: Abridged Conversations About Art and this I loved too. There was a poem written and spoken in Malay at the start (or actually end...?) of the exhibit that I thought was really funny, and was also referenced by Harith in his piece that I linked above. The other bit that I liked about Radio Malaya was the play written by S. Rajaratnam, printed and displayed throughout the exhibition. It got me thinking about what constituted a national identity, in this context a "Malayan identity" and how language plays a part in shaping or is being shaped by this identity. The play also referenced how other countries like India were able to artificially construct a national identity, as in Gandhi and his nationalist movement, which tied in really nicely with the modules that I took this past semester. Seeing as I visited this exhibition about a week after my finals ended, this was a really unexpected but nice quirk/touch/thing that I have no words for except that I'm glad happened.
The Radio Malaya exhibit was co-hosted with the South & Southeast Asian Collection, so these more folksy paintings and sculptures are actually a part of the permanent collection.
As I've mentioned earlier, the Resource Gallery on the third floor was kind of just a storage area that doubled as a gallery space that you could look into if you wanted to. A lot of the pieces in there were South Asian art, as well as (uncensored) contemporary art.
The gallery space next to the Resource Gallery contained Homeless: An Exhibition By Chow And Lin, as well as Ng Eng Teng: 1+1=1. The first I was excited about since the write up looked promising, but I ended up being a little disappointed at the lack of visual impact when I walked in. I was actually also quite confused at the link between the message that they said they were sending and the visual pieces that I saw. If anyone reading this has been to this exhibit and understood what it was, please let me know because I don't want to be confused.
The Ng Eng Teng exhibit I rushed through because my camera was about to die, so I'm disappointed that I wasn't in the head space to fully appreciate it. But here are some of the pieces that I thought were pretty neat!
All in all, I thought it was pretty cool that we have our own museum on campus that housed really interesting and insightful pieces! I'd love to come back again to see new installations as they come by, but for now, I'm going to leave this here as the last post of 2018.
