Diary of an NUS Museum Intern: Seng Yu Ying

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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Seng Yu Ying is a second-year student studying Philosophy and English Literature at the NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. During her time here as our Film Programming intern, Yu Ying primarily assisted in the conceptualisation and execution of Whisper of History, an online film programme organised around two exhibitions, Wartime Artists of Vietnam and Wishful Images: When Microhistories Take Form. 

23 January: Confirmation of the first case of COVID-19 in Singapore 

7 April: First day of the circuit breaker 

11 May - 31 July: NUS Museum internship 

First: the elephant in the room. Over the course of three months, we witnessed 

1. The most devastating pandemic in living memory 

2. The resurgence of the Black Lives Matter civil rights movement 

3. A historic General Election 

4. The release of Lady Gaga’s Chromatica 

5. The escalation of riots in Hong Kong 

6. and so on 

Most of it was spent working from home. This blog post will hopefully serve as a piece of extelligence and remember what it was like, even after I forget. 

The past three months of this internship with the NUS Museum passed in a constant stream of information—books and lectures and virtual tours and movies (so many movies)—on old wars and living museums, filtered through the recollections and theories of other people. The three months spent holed up at home and watching other worlds pass by felt like a dream where I was digesting someone else’s memories. Whenever it felt as though things were about to get overwhelming, I found that there was an anchor in the presence of the museum staff, guest speakers, and fellow interns. Through the regularly scheduled workshops and meetings, loosely connected information on the nature of space and the mechanics of film programming took shape into solid ideas and new theories. Professor T. K Sabapathy’s guest lecture was one of the more memorable talks, partly due to the fascinating look into Singapore’s art scene in the 90s. It later inspired a long conversation with a fellow intern which began with marvelling over the nostalgia for a time in Singaporean art which we had never witnessed, and ended with calls for revolution. These days, most conversations about art and its institutions tend to end that way.

Screenshots from Far From Vietnam and 

The Future Cries Beneath Our Soil

One of my main tasks was to help with the planning of the film programme surrounding the exhibit Wartime Artists of Vietnam. During the process of preparation, I spent a week watching several films on the Vietnam War in a row. It came as no surprise when, after watching several hours’ worth of war movies, I emerged with an unshakeable sense of unease. The ruminations of other veterans, the power fantasies of their descendants, and the bleeding-heart documentarians had dislodged the centrality of my own family’s account of the war and situated it within a wider constellation of stories. It is one thing to read in an academic paper that history is hermeneutic, interpretive, subjective—and it is another entirely to feel it shifting and expanding in your own memory.

Screenshots from Far From Vietnam, Em Be Ha Noi, 

and The Future Cries Beneath Our Soil

Over the course of the internship, being involved with the planning of this digital film programme has prompted me to reconsider the nature of space—both digital and physical—and the power dynamics therein. My own undertaking had occurred voluntarily and on my own terms, but it was still a unidirectional experience, and it was not unlike receiving a lecture from a grandparent on Vietnam back in the good old days. The challenge, then, became one of intentionally averting passive consumption and prompting genuine engagement with the topic at hand. 

Without the physical presence of a wide screen, other audience members, or the propriety that comes with being in a public space, audiences find themselves re-orienting in a digital medium according to new, non-physical cues, and this will need to be accounted for in the planning process. The museum, as the event host, has the authority to direct the public’s attention, even if only for the duration and purpose of a digital event. Does this constitute a loss of autonomy on the part of the participant? What is the practical difference between control over digital displays and galleries which employ lighting techniques and physical displays to direct a museumgoer’s gaze? Should the boundaries of digital space even be defined by the distributor-consumer relationship? Each node of information is bracketed by other artists, contradictory art, and unrelated work from featured auteurs. What constitutes the field of vision in such a scenario? 

At present, I do not have certain answers to any of these questions. I am certain, however, that I would like to thank my supervisor Mary Ann for her guidance and patience, as well as Fangtze and Michelle for their support and advice. Special mention to my group members in the CFA placemaking project for coming up with “museum as lizard playground” and “science centre chicken carousel”—if any of this is still comprehensible in a few years. When we think of this strange, suspended summer, I hope that our recollection will not be defined by absence or distance, but by the space we held for each other.