August 11, 2020
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. Working alongside their mentors, our interns have waded through tons of historical research, assisted in curatorial work, pitched in during exhibition installations and organised outreach events! If you would like to become our next intern, visit NUS Museum’s student development page for more information.
Beverly Devakishen is a final year Masters student in the Department of Southeast Asian Studies at the NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Working as a Curatorial Publications Intern for the Wartime Artists of Vietnam exhibition, Beverly was involved in the editorial processes of a publication around the exhibition.
As an intern, I was working under Sung Yunwen, the curator of the exhibition Wartime Artists of Vietnam, which showcased pieces from Ambassador Dato’ N. Parameswaran’s collection of Vietnamese art. As I was tasked with helping with the upcoming publication on the collection, I had to familiarise myself with the material and think about the issues their art brought to the forefront. Yunwen sent me brochures of the exhibition, and as I pored through their pages, I found myself yearning to see many of these art pieces in real life. I found it frustrating not to be in the same space as the artworks I was supposed to be working on.
The NUS Museum staff had organised a virtual tour of the museum for the interns one morning, and I was able to see the Vietnamese paintings and posters displayed on the whitewashed walls of the museum space. Although I still was not physically present with the art pieces, just seeing them in the museum space was enough to prompt me to think about these paintings and posters as objects with their own pasts. These art pieces had been bought from Northern Vietnamese artists who had survived the Vietnam war, who had lived experiences of the suffering that came with the conflict. Many of these pieces had been painted during the war itself. They had then been collected by Parameswaran, the Malaysian Ambassador who had developed a fascination with Vietnamese war art. Now, here they were, glistening behind polished frames in the NUS Museum. Did art transcend the mundane, messy reality of the history foreign relations between Vietnam and Singapore? I began to think about Singapore’s role in the Vietnam war.
It is no secret that Singapore supported American intervention in the Vietnam conflict. Lee Kuan Yew had openly declared that ‘if American troops were withdrawn from South Vietnam it would not be the South Vietnamese people who would be determining their destiny, but armed terrorists’ [1]. His support for U.S intervention stemmed from his perception of communism as a threat to Singapore and to his leadership. When Lee Kuan Yew agreed to let Singapore be used by American soldiers as a location for Rest and Relax during the war, there were protests led by the Barisan Socialist Party. Such anti-American sentiments were clamped down upon. On 26 August 1966, the Singapore Parliament passed a Punishment for Vandalism Bill. In his speech in Parliament, Lee singled out those who ‘went about shouting and carrying anti-American, anti-British, and pro-Vietcong slogans’ [2].