The two ‘C’s of the NUS Museum

What work goes into creating the beautiful displays in the NUS Museum’s exhibitions? Often hidden from the public eye, collections and conservation are both crucial arms of any museum that work in tandem to support the museum’s visible efforts in exhibitions and programmes. Mary Ann Lim, Outreach Executive at the NUS Museum shares more about the hard work that goes behind caring for each and every artefact to ensure their longevity for generations after to enjoy.

 

Like any art institution, a cornerstone of the NUS Museum’s scaffolding is its vast collection. Exceptional to the NUS Museum however, is its status as a university museum which has shaped its collections and collecting strategies over the years. Consisting of over 8,000 artefacts and artworks across four categories, the Museum finds deep roots in its history spanning over 60 years. Inaugurated in 1955 as the University Art Museum at the then-University of Malaya located in Singapore, the first curator Michael Sullivan introduced the collections as a teaching collection. In an early 1959 document titled University of Malaya Art Museum, Sullivan outlined the aims of the museum and its collections, which were to provide “a centre for the study and enjoyment of art”, facilitate “research into the art and archaeology of Southeast Asia”, complementing the art history programme and gathering a “representative collection of art of those civilisations that have chiefly contributed to the creation of Malayan culture”¹.

Since then, the Museum and its collections have undergone many changes: divided, transferred temporarily, recalled, integrated and separated, amalgamated with other collections, and eventually expanded into its current form². Two significant moments in its history are worth mentioning here. The first, was Singapore’s separation from Malaysia in 1965, after which the collection was divided between the two universities across national lines. The second, is the merger of the post-separation University of Singapore with Nanyang University in 1980 which saw the Lee Kong Chian Collection consisting of materials from Chinese art history being adjoined to the NUS Museum’s collections.

A colossal collection also means that significant attention is required to ensure the works’ longevity – no mean feat if one considers the range of artefact types that the museum possesses, from ceramics and oil paintings, to stoneware and fabrics. Set up in 2008, the Conservation Studio currently supports the necessary preventive conservation work for the museum’s collections, which also includes consultation work on the Museum’s maintenance and various environmental conditions. Working in tandem with the Conservations teams is the Collections arm of the Museum whose labour involves documenting, accessioning, and managing the cycles of storage and display.

All this is, of course, not immediately obvious when one approaches the museum for the first time. To reference an equally established British television show a mere eight years younger than the museum: it’s bigger on the inside³. The collections are spread across the various levels (and over to the NUS Baba House located at 157 Neil Road), corresponding to their respective permanent exhibitions – the South and Southeast Asian collection in Radio Malaya, Lee Kong Chian collection in the eponymous Lee Kong Chian Gallery, Ng Eng Teng’s collection in the show 1 + 1 = 1, and the Straits Chinese collection at the Baba House – and are also housed in storage within the museum and externally. Tucked at a corner on the top floor of the museum is also the aforementioned Conservation Studio opposite an impressive mural by Ng Eng Teng titled Asian Symphony, that serves as a crucial exemplification of the Studio’s innovative research and work.

Material objects and spaces are also not the only things obscured from the public’s eye. Much of the work that preps the foundation for other crucial museological efforts, particularly in the areas of exhibitions, curation and therefore programmes, occurs behind-the-scenes. For instance, the elegant displays of valuable Cheong Soo Piengs and Jaafar Latiffs in the Radio Malaya exhibition conceal months of preparation before its presentation. If pictures could talk, these would speak of the painstaking and meticulous undertakings of both the Collections and Conservations teams, where the former would manage and keep track of artwork movements from storage to gallery space, and the latter would proceed to assess each work for damage, or to judge if the pieces have rested sufficiently away from the disturbances of light, dust, humidity and dirt.

This is not to say that the other capacities of the Museum slumber while this happens. All at once, the different roles in the Museum, from the Curatorial, to Outreach and Operations departments, work simultaneously with Collections and Conservations like a deftly constructed loom to weave intricate and complex tapestries of exhibitions, prep-rooms and programmes. Intensive coordination, but also layers of reflexivity, invisible relationships and pointed criticality fasten the threads and bind the trajectories and aims of the Museum firmly. Perhaps where the two Cs of the NUS Museum form its bulwark, behind them is one more equally obscured but no less embedded C that pervades every aspect of what constitutes the Museum’s labour; these are exercises of great care (cf. curare) and a starting point from which all of museological work flows.

 

 

[1] Michael Sullivan. ‘Art & the University Malay’, in The Singapore Artist, Journal of the Singapore Art Society, vol. 1, no. 3, March 1955 (Singapore: Singapore Art Society, 1955), pp. 4, 6.

[2] Ahmad Mashadi. ‘A University Museum: Contexts and Practice’, in Camping and Tramping Through the Colonial Archive: The Museum in Malaya (NUS Museum, 2011), p. 6.

[3] Of course, harking to Doctor Who which premiered on BBC in 1963.