Diary of an NUS Museum Intern: Beverly Anne Devakishen

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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Beverly Anne Devakishen is a Master's student taking Southeast Asian studies at the NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. During her time at the NUS Museum, she worked under Sung Yunwen, the curator of the Wartime Artists of Vietnam exhibition, and assisted with the upcoming publication on the collection. 

As an intern, I was working under Sung Yunwen, the curator of the exhibition Wartime Artists of Vietnam, which showcased pieces from Ambassador Dato’ N. Parameswaran’s collection of Vietnamese art. As I was tasked with helping with the upcoming publication on the collection, I had to familiarise myself with the material and think about the issues their art brought to the forefront. Yunwen sent me brochures of the exhibition, and as I pored through their pages, I found myself yearning to see many of these art pieces in real life. I found it frustrating not to be in the same space as the artworks I was supposed to be working on. 

The NUS Museum staff had organised a virtual tour of the museum for the interns one morning, and I was able to see the Vietnamese paintings and posters displayed on the whitewashed walls of the museum space. Although I still was not physically present with the art pieces, just seeing them in the museum space was enough to prompt me to think about these paintings and posters as objects with their own pasts. These art pieces had been bought from Northern Vietnamese artists who had survived the Vietnam war, who had lived experiences of the suffering that came with the conflict. Many of these pieces had been painted during the war itself. They had then been collected by Parameswaran, the Malaysian Ambassador who had developed a fascination with Vietnamese war art. Now, here they were, glistening behind polished frames in the NUS Museum. Did art transcend the mundane, messy reality of the history foreign relations between Vietnam and Singapore? I began to think about Singapore's role in the Vietnam war. 

It is no secret that Singapore supported American intervention in the Vietnam conflict. Lee Kuan Yew had openly declared that ‘if American troops were withdrawn from South Vietnam it would not be the South Vietnamese people who would be determining their destiny, but armed terrorists' [1]. His support for U.S intervention stemmed from his perception of communism as a threat to Singapore and to his leadership. When Lee Kuan Yew agreed to let Singapore be used by American soldiers as a location for Rest and Relax during the war, there were protests led by the Barisan Socialist Party. Such anti-American sentiments were clamped down upon. On 26 August 1966, the Singapore Parliament passed a Punishment for Vandalism Bill. In his speech in Parliament, Lee singled out those who 'went about shouting and carrying anti-American, anti-British, and pro-Vietcong slogans' [2].

Unearthing this information made me think about the kind of posters that protesters in Singapore must have been carrying. If signs with ‘pro-Vietcong slogans’ [3] were made illegal in Singapore during the war, what is the implication of the fact that one of our universities now housed paintings and posters from North Vietnamese artists who would have been fighting on the side of the Vietcong? These artists were part of the group that Lee Kuan Yew had branded as ‘armed terrorists’ [4]. In declaring support for the South Vietnamese people, the image of the North Vietnamese in Singapore's foreign policy was not constructed with empathy and compassion, only with a strong sense that Singapore was on the right side of history. These 'armed terrorists' [5], whose memories had found their way into our museum, had produced paintings of scenes of death, of triumph and even of tender moments between lovers during the war. The ones that struck me the most, however, were the portraits. Staring at the viewer from their behind frames, hung on that pristine NUS Museum wall, the portraits were uncompromising and bold — I felt as if, in a country that was complicit in their erasure and suffering, some form of agency had been returned to the North Vietnamese people.

Thinking about space was an important part of the internship experience for me. Mary Ann ran a programme titled Space, Spacing and Spaces for the NUS Museum interns, in which we thought about the relationships we have to different spaces. Coupled with my reflections on the Vietnam war art pieces, I thought about the issue of a museum space’s connection to the wider nation state. I often find that being in a museum takes me out of the context of everyday life. Enclosed, presenting a coherent narrative, a museum fills your mind with carefully curated narratives presented from selected artefacts and art works. In the case of the Vietnam War art, one could get immersed in the world of Vietnamese wartime artists without thinking of the streets of Singapore, right outside the museum door, and the Singaporean institution the museum is part of. In this sense, the NUS Museum fulfills its purposes of fully immersing its visitors in narrative portrayed by the North Vietnamese wartime artists. Does a museum necessarily have a duty to ensure that connections between the artefacts and the country they are being displayed in are explored? Is it the duty of the viewer to draw these links? Are these connections important, or should the focus of the exhibition always only be on the art works and not on a wider, nationwide or regional history? 

While I do not have the answers to those questions, thinking about North Vietnamese wartime art in relation to Singapore's position on the opposing side of the war to these artists was eye-opening. In one of the seminars held, we were asked to write a list of demands in relation to an ideal space. My group and I wrote a letter that outlined what we envisioned would be a useful, utopian space. We wanted a space for unlearning harmful ideologies, a space for conversation and debate. For me, part of opening up a dialogue would be acknowledging a complicated past, no matter how unsanitary, and the part that these histories played in creating us and the spaces which we currently occupy. I believe that the art pieces I worked with have a valuable role in prompting questions and debate on Singapore's history as well as the nation’s foreign policy. This internship has held that space for me to reflect deeply on how I feel about Singapore’s entanglements with other Southeast Asian countries' histories. Yunwen was generous in letting me interpret the art in whatever ways I found useful, and she always encouraged me to do my own further reading. I am hopeful that there are spaces in Singapore that allow for reinterpretation and revisionist historical exploration. 

I would like to thank all the museum people for creating an intellectually stimulating and engaging programme for us interns and for giving us all your effort, despite the setbacks that COVID-19 has caused. The internship gave me a framework to think deeply about conservation, heritage and art. This is what I will take from the experience and hopefully apply to other jobs and aspects of my life.

References

1. Ang Cheng Guan, "Singapore and the Vietnam War," Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 40, no. 2 (2009): 364.

2. Ibid., 364. 

3. Ibid., 364. 

4. Ibid. 364.

5. Ibid., 364.