Diary of an NUS Museum Intern: Wong Li Fang

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! 

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Wong Li Fang is a third-year student majoring in English Language at the NUS Faculty of Arts and Social sciences. During her time here as our Archiving Assistant, Li Fang was tasked to look into the archival materials of artist Jimmy Ong, whose body of works and archives are currently exhibiting in our prep-room space through 'Visual Notes: Actions and Imaginings'.

The universality of archiving

When I first opened Jimmy Ong’s memorabilia box, it struck me how much the idea of Instagram has long predated social media itself. The urge to collect bits and scraps of memory manifested as physical photo collections then, and as cloud storage now. And these memorabilia have travelled through time and space to fall into my hands as I sift through candid photos and postcards, getting a glimpse into the private life of a stranger. Where is that line between private and public? What is the function or meaning in a museum keeping these items? How should one archive such things? 

What archiving means for museums (and us)

Memorabilia are not just personal keepsakes, but also a form of identity-making. And so – to use loosely – curated materials even before the archivist obtains it. The selection itself, some more careful than others, can reveal much about a person, like the inclusion of the notebook pages where a young Jimmy imperviously declares that he will not become an artist, decades before becoming one. Beyond the person, archives can reassemble a peek into context where these materials came from - the socio-political climate and material practices of the time – offering an intimate look that extends beyond the artist’s works and forming a broader sense of identity and place.

Going digital (and beyond) / archives transposed

On some days, I use the film scanner to transpose Jimmy’s film negatives and slides into a digital catalogue. In today’s context, archiving also entails some digitisation. Going digital then begs the question: is there a point in keeping all these physical materials? Materials that take up space, materials that will degrade over time, materials that are limited in physical access. Yet archival work is a space where digital and analogue collide. And it is here where we see reason to hold onto the physical items. In experiencing the materiality of these film slides, the sense of a time beyond us will hit you in a way looking at its digital counterpart cannot reproduce. 

Into the rabbit hole of archives

How should one even begin making sense of an archive yet-to-be? Archival materials tend fall naturally into categories demarcated by space, time, or materiality – like USA, 2001, or charcoal on paper. Less obvious are the thematic categories – do we go with portraits, croquis… or something else? The task of cataloguing and documenting information may be tedious, but archives are the seeds of where a new inquiry begins – not just for research, but even for an exhibition or art project. It is not just that museums are transformative sites of personal to collective identity, memory, culture, heritage, something. The archive also brings home the idea that the heart of museums lies in the personal. 

Politics of archiving (archives, not archives, and yet-to-be archives)

In my first week at the museum, my supervisor Sidd sent me off with readings on archival work. Here and elsewhere, the idea of archiving as political cut a continuing current across different texts. Its politics is inextricable no matter how objective the archivist strives to be, an idea poignantly summed up as “the relation between professing one’s craft and professing one’s humanity”.

If archives are repositories of identity and history, what we choose to include, what we choose to exclude, how we choose to organise it for possible interpretations – each choice becomes salient in constructing that repository. It is an awareness that may need to extend beyond just the archivist and to whomever looks at an archive. I invite you to do bring this awareness into reading this internship reflection, which perhaps may form part of an archive for NUS Museum’s history one day.