Diary of an NUS Museum Intern: Simone Tam

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! 

-

Simone Tam is a third-year Literature major and Arts and Humanities minor at Yale-NUS College. During her time here as a Film Programming Intern, Simone assisted Outreach Senior Executive (Programmes), Mary Ann, in the execution of Turf Wars — an online film programme organised around the antecedent exhibition, tropics, a many (con)sequence. 

As part of the internship experience, we were part of a parallel program that was centered around the politics and materiality of display, specifically concerning the organic nature of film slides and various approaches to its preservation. The material we got to work with were a collection of positive film slides from T.K. Sabapathy’s teaching repository.

Digitized image of “reclining” Buddha, captured by T.K. Sabapathy.

I feel like he is looking at me. Phra Buddha Sai Yat (reclining Buddha), an expanse of mass that lies in stillness, 37 meters long, 8 meters tall. 

The reclining Buddha is a major iconographic theme in Buddhist art that pictures the death of Sākyamuni and his entering into the parinirvāna (final nirvāna). This is a monolith that represents the interstitial Buddha, designed to remind its viewers of Buddhist truths that should shape the way one understands, appreciates, and interacts with the finitude of life. Its presence also serves as a record of the historicity of Sākyamuni’s death, a material artefact created posthumously in remembrance. When he died, his body was reabsorbed whence it had come, leaving an abrupt absence in place of what was once a beloved teacher. 

In other pictorial imaginations it is embellished with surrounding detail to evoke a greater sense of homecoming, aimed at inspiring some universal desire to see the Buddha again. It is a product of both grief and hope, and within this tension a question arises: In the space between intangible concept and concrete materiality, life and death, how does meaning move? 

In this picture, I see both Phra Buddha Sai Yat and the image of a man who moves through time with his instrument of documentation: the analog film camera. Behind the lens is art historian and educator T.K. Sabapathy, documenting this visual centrepiece of Wat Lokaya Sutha, Ayutthaya, Thailand. 

In a time preceding Shutterstock and more modern technological implements, positive film slides were the teaching material of choice. Its archival ability to reproduce an image from a specific time and place made this mode of remembrance and display a reliable source of presenting visual information. However, it is fragile in its organicity, taking after human processes of decay and fallibility. I think Buddha was on to something in his warnings against (material) attachment and the impermanence of life.

A positive film slide from T.K. Sabapathy’s collection.

As something that is supposed to capture an unchanging image, the slides are not as inert as they seem. While the structure of the image (in terms of its composition, subject matter, and geometry) remains intact, there are many slippages and organic drifts in information over time. Changes in temperature and light cause colour and matter to degrade, displacing the image from its “original”. In the image’s shifting visual resonance, it opens up fears of expiration and possibilities for reimagination. 

Film restoration is a resource that thus aims to mend the disappearing visual information contained within the slide. But even in restoration, these updated images will circle around the original and never overlap. The artistic interpretation of the restorer allows for some individual agency in choices of colour correction, one that may never fully replicate the original. The act of capturing Phra Buddha Sai Yat on camera, for example, is already an act of reproduction — it is a shrunken image in a 35mm frame that merely signifies the concept of the original. It is not the original but a copy of it.

Positive film slides documenting snake species 

from Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum.

In a similar way, each colour correction is the restorer’s attempt to reproduce the concept of what the image is supposed to represent. However, this is fundamentally a product of extrapolation and projection, no matter how scientifically or archaeologically informed the process of colour matching is. As a result, each restoration effort is an approximation of the original master copy. We thus found ourselves asking what the term “original” even means. And in this age of technological reproducibility, why should the master copy still continue to be important when digitisation takes over? 

Walter Benjamin once said that the master copy has an “aura”, and that with increasing reproduction (and therefore, access) to the original, the master copy loses its “aura”. As more copies are made, the original becomes symbolically more identical to its copies. 

These slides are a collection of landmarks, people, and artefacts that are currently being transcribed into pixels, copied into virtual archives. I don’t know what Walter Benjamin might say about this, but I think it is beautiful that the slides embody the aesthetics of disappearance in both its image-content and antiquated materiality. I think it is also beautiful that digitised versions can remind us of this as it always holds the reminder of provenance.

We have different practices of remembrance: Buddhists in Thailand may erect a 37 meter long and 8 meter tall statue of Sākyamuni, lovers may keep ticket stubs, and here at NUS Museum we may digitise slides to remember our foremost art historian’s travels and the reminders of disappearance captured within. 

These slides are a map of their own becoming, situated in the Museum as a space which outlasts its bygone worlds. As I leave, a particularly resonant thought that I find has tacitly informed museological practice is this: 

How do we prepare for — and respond to — death and disappearance?

Fake film shot of my working space during the internship.

I’d like to thank the NUS Museum for this internship opportunity. To my supervisor, Mary Ann: thank you for your grace and wisdom — in the space and trust I have been given I have had room to grow. To my fellow intern friends: thank you for being on this journey with me. I often found myself recharged by the kindness and laughter that you all brought. To all the other Museum staff I have interacted with, I will keep in fond memory the warmth of our encounters.