Diary of an NUS Museum Intern: Tan Wei Xin

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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Tan Wei Xin is a fourth-year student studying English Literature at the NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. As an Outreach Intern, Wei Xin was involved in the planning of NUS Museum's programmes for the annual HERE! Arts Carnival as well as social media marketing.

Having limited knowledge of art history and being largely unfamiliar with aspects of museology, I went into the NUS Museum internship with a slight degree of anxiety and a good dose of curiosity. I was keen on learning more about the NUS Museum’s collections as I had never been to the museum prior to the internship – a result of my procrastination, despite passing by the place countless times – as well as understanding the general behind-the-scenes operations of a museum. 

COVID-19 threw a wrench into many plans, including any hopes of being at the museum physically for the internship – and so began my first ever experience of a virtual internship, accompanied with the idiosyncrasies of online meetings, including the roaring sounds of planes flying over someone’s house, mics left on mute, and choppy internet connection.

As an Outreach Intern, most of my tasks revolved around the planning of programmes for the annual HERE! Arts Carnival as well as social media strategies. This was of course set against the backdrop of the circuit breaker and the urgent question that many artists and art institutions faced: how are we to engage with art in these times? As museums, galleries and theatres closed around the world, arts institutions had to pivot online and rethink outreach strategies. This opened up a whole plethora of opportunities, and as an audience member on the receiving end of all these online content, it was lovely revisiting recordings of plays staged in the past and exploring virtual tours of galleries overseas. On the flip end of this, however, was the challenge I faced in having to create such virtual engagement myself while devising outreach programmes and strategies.

Behind the scenes of our virtual tour filming 

session for the HERE! Arts Carnival

At the NUS Museum, we tried to sustain our outreach efforts despite the closure of the museum by ramping up social media engagement and showcasing gallery impressions of exhibitions as well as past prep-room projects and curatorial histories. With social media as the main platform of outreach, however, came the usual pitfalls and challenges: the threat of digital burnout, the inundation of content, and the passivity of mere information-sharing on our end. With so much going on in social media, how do we capture attention – and hold it? At the same time, how does one ensure the accessibility of information, yet probe and push for deeper and more critical thinking? 

An interesting series we did was a two-week social media lead-up to an online conversation conceived in relation to Jimmy Ong’s prep-room Visual Notes: Actions and Imaginings. In this lead-up, we posted various images and video clips of the artist’s works and gave prompts for our followers to submit questions on Instagram, which would then be taken up with the artist during the conversation. While this task was no doubt difficult due to some of the aforementioned challenges, it was an attempt to build a more dialogic approach with our followers on social media. 

The internship also opened up various spaces for critical inquiries, with weekly sessions where interns from different departments got together and discussed the broader issue of arts spaces in Singapore. This was primarily anchored on the Space, Spaces and Spacing conference held at The Substation in 1995 and was informed by thoughts and reflections on the present. Meanwhile, events such as the debate on the ‘essential’ versus ‘non-essential’ nature of artists and more urgently, news of the Intercultural Theatre Institute and The Necessary Stage losing their homes, brought to bear the continued relevance of issues we were discussing.

We had the honour of hearing from Prof T.K. Sabapathy 

during one of these sessions! 

On my own, I went down a little rabbit hole while working on the short film programme conceived in relation to the exhibition, tropics: a many (con)sequence. The short film programme was part of the HERE! Arts Carnival and was positioned as an inquiry into the tropics as portrayed in the cinematic imagination. As I began to look for short films related to the tropics, I began reading into the related topics of tropicality in the colonial imagination, slow cinema and eco-cinema, as well as post-Anthropocentric concerns. One of the highlights was getting to hear from the filmmaker Danech San on her inspiration, craft, and process behind the making of the film we planned to screen, A Million Years (2018).

One of the installations in tropics, a many (con)sequence 

While a virtual internship has its limitations, this experience has nevertheless opened up many spaces for learning, dialogue, and new perspectives, for which I am thankful. A shoutout to all NUS staff who made this possible and my fellow interns for being part of this experience!