Diary of an NUS Museum Intern: Ng Wei Ai

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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Ng Wei Ai is a third-year History & English student at the University of Oxford. During her time here as our Exhibitions Intern, Wei Ai has assisted our curator Hsu Fang-tze in various research which also includes looking into the museum's Lee Kong Chian Collection of Chinese Art.


I worked on the expanded text of Kwa Chong Guan’s lecture, William Willetts and the Practice of Asian Art History, which was delivered on 25 April 2018. Following T.K. Sabapathy’s lecture on Michael Sullivan the previous year, this anniversary lecture honoured the man who essentially acted as NUS Museum’s second director. 

The project reversed my initial impressions of institutional history as something dry and repetitive, characterised by endless red tape. It taught me that institutional history is, in fact, deeply personal. Research in the Resource Library helped me understand the colourful personalities who shaped Singapore’s universities and their contrasting approaches to art history. They were larger-than-life figures, with much more exciting career trajectories than I could ever have imagined. To this day, I’m still scandalised by the idea of writing a book on Chinese art without visiting China. At the same time I was touched by Sullivan’s habit of dedicating publications to his highly accomplished wife, Khoan. The lives and achievements of these pioneering art historians were truly exceptional, and I hope they’d have enjoyed listening to the anniversary lectures.

I also had the opportunity to accompany Fangtze to view her selection of paintings in the Scroll and Paper Study. I had no background knowledge of Chinese painting and calligraphy, and many names from the Shanghai and Lingnan schools were completely new to me. It was a great privilege to encounter these artists’ works in person as my very first exposure to the field. As each scroll was carefully unrolled, I struggled to keep up with Fangtze and Devi’s discussion and see what they saw in the fine details of brushstrokes and colour placement. With such a steep learning curve, interning under Fangtze’s supervision has vastly improved my understanding of art.

Venturing behind the scenes offered many insights into the long, arduous process of conceptualising and curating an exhibition. Possible directions for a future exhibition included Chinese ink in Southeast Asia, the revolutionary generation, and/or the division between natural and cultural history. We were confronted with the practicalities of displaying paper-based works, which need to be in rotation to minimise light exposure. Several times, hopes of displaying a work were thwarted by the realisation that it had recently been exhibited and would therefore have to remain in storage for a few more years. I was thrilled to be a fly on the wall for expert conversations observing that one piece of calligraphy had been done more hastily than another, or bemoaning Liu Kang’s habit of touching up his own paintings.

Watching the solar eclipse in UTown during lunch break

A glimpse behind the scenes of museum work was all I had hoped to gain from this 5-week internship. But NUS Museum staff went above and beyond by constantly going out of their way to share their expertise with us, and I’m grateful for the care and love of teaching they displayed at every turn. I would like to thank Devi for her kindness in letting me see some Charles Dyce watercolours for my thesis, as well as lending me the accompanying publications edited by Irene Lim. Thanks too to Jon, for the banter and jokes.

We were very fortunate to benefit from a teaching-centred internship programme. Our weeks were structured by field trips to Baba House, the Asian Civilisations Museum, Golden Mile Complex, and the Science Centre. Discussions and presentations revolved around the controversial proposed ICOM definition, with a final workshop serving to consolidate and refine our views. Throughout the programme, Michelle’s focused and nurturing tutelage facilitated lively conversations and helped us think more critically. The exposure and nuggets of technical knowledge we’d gleaned along the way came in useful, and I appreciate the space we were given to apply that background knowledge to developing our own views.

 Exploring a mirror maze at the Science Centre

The proposed ICOM definition makes an admirable effort to formalise museums’ role as living, teaching institutions actively engaged in the process of public education. The main issue is that it is too imprecise and repetitive to pass. Even as a mission statement, it’s rather unwieldy; as a definition it’s much too vague. Here’s my attempt to fuse the ideals of the proposed definition with the practical specifics of the current one in around 50 words.

A museum is a permanent space open to the public which collects, conserves, researches, and interprets the tangible and intangible heritage of diverse communities. It exhibits artefacts and specimens for society’s education and enjoyment, guaranteeing equal access to heritage for all people. It transparently represents polyphonic narratives and facilitates critical dialogue.

This isn’t great, but it’s trying to distil the spirit of the proposed definition into a few concise sentences.

Over the course of our discussions, it’s become clear that the proposed definition’s vision of a museum is important and necessary, notwithstanding François Mairesse’s comments about “fashionable values”. Based on the reflections and votes we shared on the second last day of the internship, I think we all get those principles. I just don’t get how to make them work. During the final workshop I disagreed with some of the other interns, who supported the very Singaporean concept of integrating capital-letters National Education into our museums, possibly in collaboration with MOE. I don’t think museums have a responsibility for forging national identity; that’s didactic, not polyphonic. The whole point of critical dialogue is to encourage visitors to decide for themselves. How representative would museums’ programmes and exhibitions be if they were charged with interpreting a quote-unquote Singaporean past? What happens to queer Singapore, communist Singapore, pre-colonial Singapore? Do we trust state-sponsored institutions to “acknowledg[e] and address[s] the conflicts and challenges of the present”?

I’m not sure the proposed definition as it presently stands is applicable in a Singaporean context. As Michelle and my fellow interns repeatedly pointed out, the controversy partly arises from the definition and surrounding debates appearing Western-centric. For example, Michelle taught us how museums are profit-driven institutions and may rely on tourist dollars to fund their development. That’s why any mention of being non-profit is missing from the draft definition above. Furthermore, what this internship programme hammered home is the ICOM definition’s importance in helping institutions qualify for funding. I don’t have much of an eloquent response to the funding issue. If our final discussions are at all reflective of reality, more money is always the answer.

Post-It note

The task begun at ICOM challenges us to extend conceptual boundaries while still keeping them precise. I’m all for expanding the definition to include centres, zoos, aquariums, public gardens — dynamic institutions that excite and educate visitors of all ages the way that a museum does. Museums, after all, are not static cabinets of curios dedicated to the storage of dead things. Michelle’s early tour of NUS Museum showed us how alive and mutable they are as spaces, from the architectural use of glass causing exhibitions to flow into one another, to the carefully layered textures of text/object/image/case, to the subconscious play of movement. That same week, Dani’s tour mentioned that Baba House isn’t climate-controlled — does that stop it from being a museum? Are temperature and humidity the only things differentiating a museum from a heritage centre? This internship upended all my assumptions and turned them inside out, and I look forward to continuing to question and find value in institutions old and new.

Golden Mile Complex