March 02, 2018
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.
Kwok Jia Yang is a first-year student at the Yale-NUS College. As our Radio Malaya Exhibition Research Intern, Jia Yang researched on and compiled a bibliography of writings related to Jimmy Ong, a Singaporean artist, assisted in the accessioning of the Jimmy Ong “Shoebox Photographs”, and researched on and conceived of an interview project of the Dragon Court period.
I began the internship wanting to experience an institutional perspective towards the arts. Each institution has a particular slant towards the conceptualization of exhibitions and shows. In particular, I sought to understand more about NUS Museum’s own curatorial approaches and processes. Additionally, I was interested in how institutions negotiated with practical real-life considerations and limitations.Something that stood out for me in the first few days was reading an introductory essay by my supervisor, Ahmad Mashadi, on the identity and practices of NUS Museum. One aspect that intrigued me about the Museum in my prior visits was the presence of the permanent collections in relation to the other temporary exhibitions. To me, there seemed to be only a tenuous link between each show, making it a seemingly disparate experience. The essay, however, defined and framed the institution’s position in today’s context as an “interlocutor of disciplines and knowledge”. Commenting on how the selectivity in curation could sometimes construct definitive narratives that marginalized other perspectives, the dynamics of power between the institution and viewer could be characterized as almost authoritative. In this manner, the institution acknowledged the agency of viewers in conceiving independent ideas, setting itself out as a “point of reference” to provoke discourse between the public, the artists, and curatorial themes and foster an “indeterminate set of readings”. For me, this intentional fluid approach fascinated me as works from the permanent collection could be read/presented in a multitude of ways in the context of a new topic, making the institution an exciting space for experimentation.