Diary of an NUS Museum Intern: Nguyen Dang Hoai Dang

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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Nguyen Dang Hoai Dang is a year 3 Chemical Engineering student at the NUS Faculty of Engineering. As our Collections Management Intern, Dang has assisted the collections team with the exhibition Wartime Artists of Vietnam: Drawings and Posters from the Ambassador Dato’ N. Parameswaran Collection.


As a Collection Management Intern working on the Vietnam Wartime Artists Collection, I felt a deeper connection with my Vietnamese root and had a chance to further learn about the Vietnamese arts scene, especially wartime arts. The time spent zooming into the paintings to check the artist signatures, deciphering ‘artistic’ handwriting from the sketches and researching on the artists biography as well as the animated conversations with my supervisor about his visit to the Vietnam Fine Arts Museum have inspired me to explore it and many more museums myself.

The internship also offers me great insights into what’s happening at a museum behind all the displays (nope, not a hidden door to a secret chamber). From insightful conservation workshops to thought-provoking discussions about what it is to be a museum (philosophy much), I was in awe of all the buildings (aka potential museums) that we visited. Who would have thought Golden Mile Complex is a prospective candidate for the proposed museum definition from the International Council of Museums (ICOM)!

I used to think of a museum as per its traditional static current definition provided by ICOM – “a […] permanent institution […] which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment”. However, upon the various visits to heritage-worthy sites like the NUS Baba House and Golden Mile Complex, I had challenged my own idea of a museum as well as that of ICOM’s current definition. Although the term “the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment” provides a very encompassing and concise understanding of what a museum holds, the current definition is still too static and inflexible of what a museum can be. However, the proposed definition is also too political and far from being “inclusive” as it underlines that museums ought to move towards democratization – a challenge for some less developed and developing countries where economics still play the most important role, Vietnam inclusive.

In fact, the museum definition discussion seems to be out of questions for Vietnamese museums, most of which are war memories museums for education and tourism purposes. The more aesthetic ones like the fine arts museums are rare and unpopular amongst the people who do not have a very strong museum-going culture. In the end, Vietnam and many more non-ICOM member have their own definitions of a museum, making it very subjective. Perhaps, the ICOM definition should not be called a definition per se, but a vision of the council.

Furthermore, the roles museums play in society are also not emphasized enough in the proposed definition. Hence, the current definition’s purposes of “education, study and enjoyment” should be kept with the addition of a few more values and words that came up during our final discussion during the definition workshop, for example, sustainability, engaging and inspiring. This may seem like a subset of the proposed definition “social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing”, but the suggestions above are more specific, practical and politically neutral than the choice of words used by ICOM.

In fact, remaining apolitical while having an opinion, a stand to inspire and educate is one of the challenges faced by museums. Moreover, keeping up with current trends to attract and cater to more diverse audiences, competing with regional museums in terms of tourism and so on are among the difficulties museums in Singapore need to overcome in the coming decades. In the end, museums (however defined, individually or collectively) all aim to contribute to their society one way or another, therefore, should not be limited by any type of definitions.