March 09, 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.
Michelle Lee is a third-year Anthropology student at the Yale-NUS College. As our Radio Malaya Exhibition Research Intern, Michelle built on existing research generated for the exhibition Radio Malaya: Abridged Conversations about Art, as well as conceptualizing video interviews with personalities featured in the exhibition.
As one of the research interns for Radio Malaya, I organised the exhibition bibliography and carried out research on performance art in Singapore. As someone with limited art history background before this, and who have had relatively little exposure to the art world, this truly gave me a crash course on the history of art in Singapore. When reading sources written at different points in history, what truly fascinated me was how intently people have been thinking and writing about art and its role in contemporary society at every given point in time. By reading critical essays, I came to appreciate how Singaporean art has influenced and been influenced by society and politics throughout the decades, and how it sheds light on history.