Diary of an NUS Museum Intern: Lee Pei Yi

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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Lee Pei Yi is a third-year English Literature and Art History student at the Nanyang Technological University. During her time here as our Exhibitions intern, Pei Yi assisted in research and execution of our prep-room project Visual Notes: Actions and Imaginings.

You think of museums in parts, in metonyms; in white walls, high ceilings, frames, plinths, spotlights, wall texts, brochures. You think of exhibitions to be complete; with a beginning and an end, with a linear narrative, with a clear message, with a need to educate.

That was in 2015, when you were convinced that your future would not include trips to exhibitions, studying catalogues, and trying to recognise which version of Venus was painted by Botticelli for a visual memory test happening the next morning. The 2019 version of you thinks back to that time, laughs at 2015-you, and decides that it was a good thing that you encountered post-modernism, contemporary art as well as a love for reading and research in the midst of meeting graduation requirements and just finishing a summer internship before your fourth year begins.

In the summer of 2019, you encounter a challenge never faced before: the task of working on a prep-room project. Previously, all exhibition proposals were merely hypothetical, a way of navigating the images of works presented to you on a black slide in a dark room in the basement of ADM. You had merely written up a three-thousand-word essay, with a rough exhibition layout done up on Microsoft Powerpoint. All for a grade, but nothing for a real, actual exhibition.

Standing in the prep-room in front of four black boxes containing a collection of studies, sketches, watercolours, acrylics and sketchbooks accumulated by Jimmy Ong over the years of his practice, a new question pops into your head. You now stand in a space where things may or may not happen. A space newly devoid of a previous idea, now a blank slate for new ideas that will grow out of Jimmy’s sketches of bodies, landscapes and dogs.

How do you speak your understandings of a living artist’s practice into a space?

When the prep-room was empty except for Rampogan Macan, newly installed.

Featuring Johann who has been an integral part of my internship journey, and has stepped on bubble wrap multiple times with me.

As a Humanities student by training, you turn to texts by instinct. You look to the most recent written work on Jimmy’s practice. An essay by T. K. Sabapathy, a series of interview snippets between him and Jimmy, sixty-eight pages of words, and you find a somewhat-answer on page thirteen.

“Above all, interpreters are not mouthpieces for artists; interpretive writings do not stand in for what artists say or write on their art.”

You keep this at the back of your mind as you watch the selection of displayed works come together. You see the large Rampogan Macan first, then the bright blue display cabinet, the photographs coming together with the large sketches, the black and white bleeding into bright colours, Lee Kuan Yew beside Farquhar, a Grecian seaside put next to a view of Keppel Harbour. The list goes on and on, and you could think of more ways to describe how Jimmy’s studies are arranged with his photographs if you had a bigger vocabulary (and perhaps a bit more eloquence in your syntactic choice). The installation of works is completed, the reproductions and wall texts are printed, the monitors are plugged in, and before you know it, the space is no longer empty like it was in the middle of May. It is a now new space, a new prep-room, with a new title and a new description, with new works, with new meanings.

Jimmy’s studies and photographs being laid out.

He once called his collection of photographs an analogue, low-tech version of Instagram.
I suppose, what we did in the prep-room, was a version of re-curating his feed.

The binder now placed in the prep-room.
A literary accumulation of my understanding of Jimmy’s practice through the various texts written about him.

On the last day of the internship, you sit on the bench in the space, and you wonder if what you are going to say later in your walkthrough with your supervisor will be a coherent verbalisation of your thoughts and comprehension of the new meanings that you have helped put into the space. A space where things may or may not happen: a space of Jimmy’s visual notes, a space of imaginings and happenings.

You now think of museums like literary texts; of meaning, or understandings, of interpretations. Maybe, you think, this is how you bridge the gap between your two majors. The prep-room is a space that gave you the opportunity to fill it up with studies and objects, in which you had a say in the selection. It is a space that allowed you to put together the meanings and elements that you had encountered, and in turn enabled you to formulate your own understandings and meanings; not only of Jimmy’s studies and practice, but also of the NUS Museum as a space and also of the spaces within. You think of the other spaces visited in the course of the internship: the UCC, the Esplanade, the National Archives, Centre 42, the Bicentennial at Fort Canning, and you decide that this rethinking will definitely occupy your mind for a little longer.

A rare picture of me caught in action trying to lift the acrylic sheet protectors in the cabinet. Photo credits to my fellow intern Jane, who shares my love for early/late lunches. 

Maybe future you might have something different to say about this, but for now, you think this combination of words is sufficient in encapsulating this summer.

“I’ve just been putting all these elements together. It is completely irreverent and free play.” – Jimmy Ong about putting together various inspirations in his works.

From Bukit Larangan to Borobodor: Recent Drawings by Jimmy Ong, page 47.