Diary of an NUS Museum Intern: Kang You-Jin

Note: 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 our internship page for more information! 

-
Kang You-Jin is a third year English Language student at the NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. During his time here as our Museum Outreach intern, You-Jin has written reviews and conducted research on past and upcoming film programmes.


My first encounter with the NUS Museum came in 2018, ironically not at the museum but at UTown. It was a screening of Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Look of Silence (2014), part of the film series titled ‘Shadows After Dark: Uncovering Post-Colonial Southeast Asian Cinema’. That the museum organised regular film series – with screenings, talks and conversations – intrigued me; I had otherwise been largely ignorant of NUS museum, aware of it only as the museum that was ‘not the one with the dinosaurs’. Little did I know that I would have the chance to work on these film series at the museum as an Outreach Intern! 

The first task I was given was to write a review for the recently concluded Dériver/Arrivée film series. And so my first week at the museum was spent watching the films and recordings of talks and discussions from each of the series’ sessions, reading the relevant literature on the topic, as well as engaging with the exhibition which the film series was centred around: “…you have to lose your way to find yourself in the right place”. The exercise of reviewing and re-viewing the series was greatly facilitated by the guidance and feedback from Mary Ann, my supervisor, and this gave me a better appreciation for the thought behind the conceptualisation of the museum’s film series. 

My focus then quickly shifted to the upcoming film series, and I found myself knee-deep in the nitty-gritty of film programming at NUS museum. This ranged from blog design and public engagement, to contacting filmmakers and distributors for screening rights, and scouring the web for any piece of useful information. The work was sometimes tedious, with many dead ends and roads to nowhere, but necessary for the planning and execution of a film series. I’m looking forward to seeing the film series to completion as I extend my internship. 

Apart from the assignments given to us by our supervisors, this supersized batch of thirteen interns also undertook an internship activity together with Michelle, our internship coordinator, to wrestle with ICOM’s (International Council of Museums) controversial decision to drastically change their definition of a museum. While I was initially dismissive of the significance of this institutionalised definition, hearing that some museums depend on the definition for government funding made the definitional issue a real and practical one.

In order to help us think about the amenability of museums (or possible museums) in Singapore to both the current and proposed definitions, we went on field trips every week to test and negotiate the viability of both definitions for the spaces we visited. These visits, in addition to being thoroughly enjoyable, generated many questions about the nuances and implications of the museum definition. For example: How does a heritage house like the NUS Baba House align or disalign with the museum definitions, as a restored ancestral family home? What about the calls for the conservation of Singapore’s brutalist architectural icons, such as Golden Mile Complex – would a possible ‘museumification’ of the compound (or part of the compound) aid in conservation efforts, and at what cost? If education must be one of a museum’s chief aims, then what do we make of the Science Centre and other children’s museums which incorporate play in the museum experience, seeing as ‘education’ does not feature explicitly in the proposed definition?

Never meant to be definitively answered, such questions nonetheless provided food for thought as we took up our own positions on the ICOM definition change, which we then presented to each other at a roundtable discussion in the final week of the internship programme. I take issue with ICOM’s proposed definition, by nature hegemonic, and which cannot adequately account for the vast typology of museums around the world. While it is inevitable that meanings shift – and likewise the role of museums with society – the considerable backlash towards ICOM’s departure from an iterative approach to the museum definition likely suggests that the proposed definition is too much of a leap; perhaps the definition itself needs re-defining, as vision instead of definition. While attempting to arrive at a point of closure on the issue proved to be an impossible task, thinking through it together, while simultaneously working on our own individual projects, has surely led each of us to think about what we want museums to be, and what we want them to stand for.

A big thank you to all NUS Museum staff for being kind and ever-welcoming, to Michelle for all the planning which went into the programme and an infectious passion for museums, to Mary Ann for her patience, support and supervision, refining my ideas and introducing new lines of thought, and to my fellow interns without whom there wouldn’t have been so much laughter and fun. It was a wonderful December, and I’m excited to see how the journey continues.