Functioning as an open-storage, the Resource Gallery provides an encounter with the NUS Museum’s collections and their histories. Objects are organized to accommodate material categories, area classifications, as well as contingencies of collecting and its strategies, having their roots in the shifting curatorial positions and museum practice since the mid-1950s: with the formation of the University of Malaya Art Museum in 1955; and at the Nanyang University, the Lee Kong Chian Art Museum in 1969; in each occasion contingent to questions of its day.

Focus and methods across these periods evolve or differ, but if continuity is to be seen within the broader motif of “…the dignity that comes with cultural independence”, how do we begin to productively and contemporaneously invest into the interplay between objects and their material agency, predicaments of collection, and potential points of entry; and as such to invite and sustain trajectories both enduring and inflected.