Diary of an NUS Museum Intern: Tu Jie Min

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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Tu Jie Min is a second-year student studying Philosophy with a Minor in China Studies at the NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. During her time here as a Curatorial Intern, Jie Min worked alongside our curator Hsu Fang-Tze on the Lee Kong Chian Collection, conducting research on contemporary scholarship in the field of Chinese paintings. 

In  other  words,  we  do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do  not  live  inside  a  void  that  could  be  colored  with  diverse  shades  of  light,  we live  inside  a  set  of  relations  that  delineates  sites  which  are  irreducible  to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another. 

- Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias

An old photo of an exhibit taken at the National Palace Museum, Taipei

What is space? 

Earlier in the summer break, the internship had its initiation on a Zoom meeting. Very aptly, the interns were introduced to the idea of placemaking and were challenged to imagine the various possibilities for spaces. We all took turns to speak about what spaces meant to each of us, but it was more than just a conceptual exercise. After all, we were all sitting in front of our screens trying to emulate what would have been a physical meeting held at the NUS Museum. As we found ourselves necessitated by the new reality to repurpose the physical spaces we inhabited, it became evident that engaging with the alternative possibilities for spaces has an urgent place in real life.

Are spaces merely its manifestations? 

Through the weeks, it became increasingly certain that the only space we would share was the online space. The initial hopes of being able to return to the museum dwindled and the focus turned to how we could settle into a new rhythm to better collaborate while working from our respective homes. 

The space that I call my bedroom gradually took on a second role as a workspace. In the day, it became a place where I did my readings, research, and held meetings with everyone I worked with. At night, the space returns to a private place where I can retreat for rest and solitude. In this sense, relegating spaces to its manifestations seems inadequate. 

Late into the internship, my supervisor, Fang-Tze, shared a chapter for me to read, and in it, I found the mention of a heterotopia. A quick Google search led me to Foucault’s mentions of heterotopias as well as its surrounding literature. Interestingly, Foucault’s elaboration on heterotopias as ‘other’ spaces eventually found itself in ‘placeless places’ amidst other paradoxical analogies.

An old photo of an exhibit taken at the Gyeongbokgung Palace, Seoul

Here, our struggles to put an identity to spaces seem to resonate with each other. We have recognised the alternatives that are too obvious to be dismissed and yet too unfamiliar to be accorded with accustomed epithets. The efforts to navigate the ambiguous topographies of physical and abstract cavities seem to no longer suffice for the project of identifying spaces. Without a thing to put our fingers on, what we trace are hence the patterns and relationships we associate spaces with people, cultures, and time. To borrow Kelvin T. Knight’s words, the methodology used to identify spaces changes from archaeological to genealogical. Perhaps, this is where we can rightly begin our search for what spaces are. 

As this internship experience nears its end, I wish to thank everyone who has made this virtual internship possible. The online workspace was not easy to navigate, but I was glad to find myself in an enriching space held generously by the other museum mentors and interns. It was delightful to have been able to work with the kindest and most brilliant people. I am especially grateful to Fang-Tze and Gladys for holding space for me to learn and accomplish things I would not have been able to on my own.