Diary of an NUS Museum Intern: Andrew Vijayan

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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Andrew Vijayan is a third-year Sociology student at the NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. As our Collections Management Intern, Andrew assisted the collections team and researched on the use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology for collections management in museums. 

It is a strange time to be an intern (or to do anything else really). A week before my interview with NUS Museum, the Circuit Breaker period started, as part of the government’s efforts to stem the transmission of COVID-19. Disrupted by the pandemic, my experience would diverge greatly from past museum interns.

 

I never met other interns in person or spent lunch breaks socialising with them. I never stepped into NUS Museum. I never touched any museum objects. This internship was mediated through a screen. Virtual became the choice of adjective for everything. Meetings were conducted online, with people fragmented into neat little black boxes. We visited NUS Museum virtually, experiencing it through a museum staff holding a camera. I became acquainted with museum cataloguing conventions by accessing the online collection on NUS Museum’s website.

As a collections intern, it is impossible to work from home. While other interns could feel comfortable reading and researching at home, I did feel a modicum of frustration in not being present in the museum to carry out my duties. The nature of the collections intern role is physical – caring for objects and ensuring they are in the best condition for preservation, exhibition and research. If I could not learn on the job, I had to learn about this unfamiliar field by reading and watching from home. I read technical manuals from museums around the world on how to deal with different types of hazards in a museum environment, how to log a condition report properly and how to identify different types of damage to objects. I watched videos of professionals explaining the types of gloves to wear when handling different objects and how to handle objects without placing undue stress on them. Besides learning about collections care, I was also tasked with researching Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology and its applicability for collections management in museums.

 

Watching videos at home on how to care for objects 

 

The bulk of my internship experience was reading at home as I could not physically be present in NUS Museum. On the penultimate day of my internship, I finally had the opportunity to meet my supervisor, Devi, in person. I accompanied her to witness the deinstallation and condition checking of paintings that NUS Museum had loaned to the Asian Civilisations Museum for an exhibition. I was thrilled as I was finally able to visit a museum physically for the first and only time during my internship, even if it was not in NUS Museum!  

 

I observed curiously as art handlers carefully furled and unfurled Chinese ink scroll paintings in a gallery stripped bare, while Devi and a conservator used a strong light to scour the surface of the paintings and note their condition. There were remnants of mould, ink bleeding through paper, and past restorative work on these paintings. These are tiny marks that are almost invisible to the naked eye and that not many would take note of. But for collections management and care, every small detail is crucial. 

 

A painting once hung here 

 

  Condition checking is an important process for objects under the museum’s care 

 

                        Painting almost ready to head home to the museum 

 

In my internship application, I wrote about how I chanced upon NUS Museum staff installing a painting and how I was struck by the amount of care and attention involved in displaying the artwork. While I never got to exercise care or handle an artwork in NUS Musuem, I am grateful for the opportunity to witness the display of tenderness towards artworks during the deinstallation process in the Asian Civilisations Museum as this crucial labour was invisible to most people. 

 

Thank you to Devi for being an encouraging supervisor and for answering my queries despite your busy schedule. Thank you to Mary Ann for planning and coordinating the internship programme and ensuring everything ran smoothly. Thank you to Anh, Deborah, Emlyn, and Jie Min for your hard work as we worked on the NUS Museum parallel programme and the CFA placemaking proposal. And thank you to the other interns whose thoughts have provoked new insights.