Chinese Heritage Center

I spent a lot of time at Nanyang Technological University when I was in Singapore. When I was employed by NTU, it was our base of operations for monkey research. So I spent hours slaving away in the lab in the Humanities and Social Sciences building. And every time I went there, I admired the adjacent Chinese Heritage Center and thought, "I really ought to go in there sometime." And I never did. So when I went back recently, I dedicated an hour to checking it out.

The outside of the place is decidedly impressive. There's nothing discreet about it. It really stands out from the rest of the more homogenous campus buildings.

Why didn't I visit sooner?!

The CHC was founded in 1995, and serves as a library, research center, and museum. The best part is that admission to the museum is free. You just have to be willing to haul yourself all the way over to the extreme west side of the island to get there!

As soon as I walked into the lobby, after noting the impressive interior architecture, I noticed something that really amused me. China is kind of known for copyright infringement (think of all those Chinese knockoffs, like Gocci or Addidas), so I found it funny when the first thing I saw upon crossing the threshold of the museum was the illegal usage of a copyrighted photo. Someone had made a cute little zongzi, or rice dumpling, with a face. But if you look closely at the eyes, you can see the watermark that indicates that the image of the face is copyrighted and should have been purchased for use. Pretty silly.

Check out the words on the left eye

Anyway, the interior of the building was impressive enough to tear me away from the copyright-infringing dumpling in only a few seconds. From the lobby, you can see straight up to the third floor.

Not a bad view!

When I was there, there were two main exhibitions. The Nantah Pictorial Exhibition opened in 2000, and covers the history of Nantah University, which existed from 1956 to 1980. During its short lifespan, it was the only Chinese-language university outside of mainland China. In 1980 Nantah University merged with the University of Singapore to become the National University of Singapore, which went on to become one of the top universities in Asia. In 1981, NTU opened on the former grounds of Nantah University. The exhibition covers a lot of this history, and includes 130 photographs from the time period. Although it wasn't all that long ago, the photographs kind of seemed like ancient history to me. They're a strong reminder of how far Singapore has come in such as short time. The artifacts were pretty neat too.

The most interesting set of artifacts included original roof tiles from Nantah University and a replica of Nantah Arch, which once marked the entrance to Nantah University. Apparently the original arch still stands at Jurong West Ave 93, and there is a replica in Yunnan Garden (opposite the CHC) at NTU. I've seen the replica before, but didn't understand its significance until visiting the exhibition.

Artifacts are a rare commodity in rapidly-evolving S'pore!

Before moving on to the next exhibition, I poked out onto the second floor balcony, which had a great view of the HSS building where I'd worked.

It's way prettier from the outside than from inside a stuffy office!

From the other side, there was a lovely view of Yunnan Garden.

Luckily the haze wasn't so bad that day!

The other exhibition was called "Chinese More or Less," and focused on the various, heterogeneous identities of mainland Chinese people, and how those identities were maintained abroad. I found this exhibit really fascinating. I've heard a lot of talk in Singapore about what it really means to be "Singaporean." National identity seems tricky when there's such a hodgepodge of cultures existing together in a small place that's always changing. But I haven't given much thought about Chinese Singaporeans and how they identify as Chinese, and how they're "Chinese-ness" differs from that of mainland Chinese, Chinese Americans, or Chinese people living in the UK, or Thailand, or Vietnam. This exhibit covered those issues around the world and across time.

There are seven galleries, and each one has a different focus. Throughout was a discussion of what it meant to be Chinese while away from China, and how cultural identities were maintained and transformed in new locations. The galleries focused on questions like "How Chinese am I?" and "What does it mean to be Chinese?"

One gallery focused on outsider perceptions of Chinese people. It was interesting to see racist interpretations of Chinese just around the corner from displays of cultural pride. The most intriguing image was an American caricature from the 1800's, depicting a greedy Chinese merchant. It was a commentary on the Chinese monopolization of trade goods production. I have thought of Chinese production as something that has only recently started to bother Americans, and was surprised to see that it was a point of contention 200 years ago.

Racism at its weirdest

The history of Chinese abroad created some strange juxtapositions - the workers at labor camps were just around the corner from the fancy colonial family.

Sidenote: Wax colonial family made me think that
CHC might make a good setting for a horror movie
about wax figures coming to life.

I poked around the CHC until about 10 minutes past closing time, when there were still no signs of the place shutting down. I went up to the third floor, which I don't recommend, since I don't think I was supposed to be there. But I was happy to see that there were lots of people around, taking in the exhibits, shopping in the gift shop, and taking pictures. It's good to see that a place like CHC generates some interest.

I think the CHC is a great way to preserve some of the history of Chinese people in Singapore and abroad, but I think more efforts should be made to protect actual local historical sites. The CHC has a short history - it's only 18 years old. Places like Bukit Brown have a long, rich cultural history but are not being afforded the proper respect, as historical preservation takes a backseat to constant "progress."

Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research

I've been dying to go to the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research. Maybe that's a nerdy thing to say, but it's true. It's a whole museum devoted to one of my most keen interests- nature and wildlife in Southeast Asia. Unfortunately, the opening hours are incredibly inconvenient: from 9-5 Monday-Friday, in the middle of when I have to work. But since I'll be switching jobs soon (back to NTU to work with the monkeys!) and have some vacation days to use up, I went ahead and took a Monday off for my museum trip.

The museum is located at NUS, which is right near Bryan's work, so I met him for lunch at Fusionopolis then took the bus to the campus. It turned out to be super easy to get there from the bus stop (there are signs to lead the way), and I was there in no time. The museum is up on the third floor of the Biology building, and admission is free. Hooray!

The museum was cool and quiet. I was the only person there in the middle of the day. At first it was really cool, but after a while, I'll admit that the dim lighting and animal carcasses gave me a little case of the willies. I felt like I was in Night at the Museum.

Cool! But also kind of freaky... a sun bear, a dhole, some kind of goat thing, a leathery turtle,
a tiger, a leopard, a pangolin, a water monitor, and a wild pig

I took it slow around the small one-room museum. There were lots of preserved specimens, many of them from Singapore's earlier days. Some of the specimens were labeled as from the 1890's or early 1900's. Many of the animals had been collected in Singapore, while others were animals that were native to S'pore but the specimens had been collected elsewhere. A lot of the animals that were listed as native were ones that I've never seen here, but would love to get lucky enough to spot.

Oriental small-clawed otter, currently endangered in S'pore

Dugong skull, collected off the coast of S'pore

A HUGE Asian softshell turtle

A rather rabid-looking specimen of the greater mousedeer

The animal I'm most keen to see in Singapore is the banded leaf monkey. They're the only type of monkey other than the macaque that still exists here. My super monkey researcher buddy Andie Ang studied them and found that there are more still living here than the 30 that were estimated to still be surviving. Way to go, Andie!

The rare banded leaf monkey

I would also very much enjoy seeing the pangolin. They're still around the island here and there, but apparently they're pretty elusive. They kind of kick butt. A lot of people mistakenly think that they're reptiles because they appear to be covered in scales, but the scales are actually made up of fused together fur. Pretty cool, huh?

One of the country's stranger residents

The pigs were interesting. Bryan and I have seen them in the wild at Pulau Ubin, but I didn't know much about them. Information posted at the museum said that the pigs were thought to be locally extinct, but they repopulated Singapore when some individuals found their way across the Johor Straits. They're now common not only on Pulau Ubin, but on the main island too, including in the Central Nature Reserves.

Wild piglets

I had known that tigers once ran wild in Singapore, and several times have heard AR Wallace's quote that Singaporean tigers were responsible for killing approximately "a Chinaman a day." However, I never knew that leopards were also local in the early 1900's, although, due to their secretive nature, they were not seen nearly as frequently as the more conspicuous tigers. While a lot of the specimens looked a little freaky or weird, the leopard had maintained its beauty even post-mortem.

Beautiful and intimidating

The Raffles Museum has chosen the common palm civet as their mascot. The plaque next to the mascot said "This animal was chosen because it is one of the few large native species in Singapore that is capable of thriving in man-made environments." That may be true, but what about the long-tailed macaque?! They're the masters of thriving in man-made environments!! If I was choosing a personal mascot, I would choose the macaque. They're resilient, adaptable, fun-loving, cute, and super smart. Civets are cool too, but I'm a macaque girl all the way.

RMBR mascot

Are you ready for something seriously creepy? Prepare yourself, because when you close your eyes to go to sleep tonight, this image may haunt you. I admit, I was all alone in that museum and when I saw this guy I started having all sorts of frantic thoughts about zombified monkeys, thirsty for human blood. It freaked me out, and I'm pretty sure this specimen could have starred in the movie Blood Monkey.

AHHH! Seriously. What. The. Heck.

Creepy specimen, compared with what a real live macaque actually looks like. Very little resemblance.

In the middle of the museum was a display of Southeast Asian animals that live outside of Singapore. There was a sweet little family of proboscis monkeys from Borneo. They were cool, but, much like the detached rhino head in the corner, it made me sad to think about how all these dead animals had met their demise (even though many of them had been dead for about a century).

Less creepy monkey specimens

A Sumatran rhino, missing a rather significant proportion of himself

I love these weird guys!! A juvenile tapir.

After spending an inordinate amount of time ogling Southeast Asia's interesting mammals, I moved on to inspect some of the local specimens of birds, fish, and reptiles.

King cobra...another one I've never seen! Maybe that's lucky!

Keeled rat snake

Black & red broadbill in front, green broadbills in back

That's a LOT of dead birds!

Massive orange-spotted grouper

It was pretty neat to see the crabs. I've had trouble identifying some of the ones that we've seen in mangrove areas and along the beach, and there they all were, laid out neatly with orderly labels under each one. Perfect!

Coolest name = Dana's Eyes-Wide-Apart Crab

Coolest crab is definitely the hairy crab!!!

You know what else was pretty fascinating? The collection of insects! We'd seen some of them before, most memorably the giant forest scorpion (Pulau Ubin), the giant millipede (Bukit Timah), and the atlas moth (Sungei Buloh). Have you heard that the atlas moths wing tips supposedly look like snake heads in order to ward off predators? Look closely and you'll see the similarity.

BUGS!!!!!!!!

Despite scaring myself silly by thinking about all the animals coming to life and attacking, I really enjoyed my time at the museum. I highly recommend checking it out for yourself. If you're a nature buff I'm sure you'll love it and even if you're not, you don't have much to lose - admission is free!

Singapore Art Museum

One Friday, Bryan and I decided it was probably about time we visited the Singapore Art Museum. Admission is free every Friday from 6 to 9 PM, so we thought that would be the best time. Before heading to the museum, we got some dinner at Chijmes, a funky historical building that's been converted into a hip hangout full of bars and restaurants. The 130-year old religious complex has been gazetted as a national monument. I don't know much else about the history, but we had dinner at one of the bar/restaurants, and they made delicious pad thai!

Chijmes

Stained glass window inside

More pretty stained glass

After dinner, we walked over to the Singapore Art Museum (called SAM by the artsy crowd). It felt funny just to stroll past the reception desk without paying an admission fee (FYI, admission is usually $10).

Bryan and SAM

The first exhibit we saw turned out to be one of my overall favorites. In a small room, the white walls were covered with black bungee cord, creating a power line feel, and there were two giant black sculptures in the middle of the floor. The sculptures were reminiscent of chess pieces, and Bryan and I both liked them a lot.

They were about 10 feet tall!

*Ahem* I don't know much about art. So my artistic opinion isn't very sophisticated and mostly consists of "I like that one," "I don't like that one," and "That one looks like a giant chess piece." Mostly I feel like a prat when I try to speak intelligently about art, since I don't know much about it. If you want me to say something coherent, ask me about literature or animals. Anyway, my apologies if you're big on art and don't feel that I fully appreciate the genius of some of the pieces in the SAM's collection.

The next thing we encountered was the moving image gallery, where a bunch of chaotic, bizarre films were showing. The overarching theme seemed to be deviance and sexuality. It was kind of awkward and we didn't hang around, scooting along to the next exhibit, by Filipino artist Louie Cordero. The placard on the wall said that the exhibit was inspired by a spate of killings in the Philippines, in which people were murdered after singing Frank Sinatra's My Way at karaoke bars. Bryan and I were a little skeptical of this seemingly outrageous claim- did that really happen?!- but a little digging revealed that this did apparently happen (see this NY Times article). The exhibit was very striking, full of neon colors and freaky fiberglass bodies, with karaoke renditions of "My Way" croaking out of a videoke machine in one corner.

Creepy shadow

Love the toilet brushes

We didn't stop to admire every piece. The next one that really drew my attention was a set of three pairs of angel wings created by a husband-and-wife pair, also Filipino. The wings were constructed out of an unusual medium: flip-flops! The flip-flops were used, collected from Singapore prisons.

The Aquilizan couple's wings

Apparently I'm drawn to the creations of Filipino artists, because the Heritage Tunnel, a piece by Briccio Santos from Manila, was one of my favorites in the whole museum. It was a circular bookshelf with mirrors mounted in the top and bottom so that when you peered up or down, it looked like the books went on forever- like a dream come true!

Endless library

As we climbed the stairs to the second floor, we began to encounter signs warning parents that the upcoming section of the museum might be inappropriate for children, as it contained graphic images. When we entered the room that we'd been warned about, it was immediately apparent why parents had been cautioned. The first thing we saw was a squirrel-skin garment of some sort, displayed on a dressmaker's dummy. I didn't like it. All those dead squirrels made me want to cry. When I realized that the two dummies next to it were wearing snakeskin and goatskin, it just made it worse. I turned around and was confronted by a series of images by Manit Sriwanichpoom. The photos were taken during unrest in Thailand and contained dead bodies, one of which was shown, very graphically, hanging from a tree. A smiling man next to the corpse was winding up to hit him with a folding chair. A crowd was watching, some laughing, and some looking positively horrified. As if all that weren't haunting enough, a creepy middle-aged man in a garish pink silk tuxedo was edited into the black-and-white photo. He was standing next to a neon pink shopping cart, and watching the horror with a smirk. The other photos were in a similar vein, all with "Mister Pink" edited in, and I found them both repulsive and captivating at the same time, perhaps for the first time understanding the expression "It was like a trainwreck - I couldn't look away." We didn't photograph the images but if you're interested in them or the artist, you can see more here.

Adjacent to the Mister Pink series was another provocative piece by Thai artist Vasan Sitthiket. The piece was called "Committing Suicide Culture: The Only Way Thai Farmers Escape Debt." The eerie mood of the room containing all these unsettling pieces was amplified by the fact that it contained another artist's (Suzann Victor, a Singaporean) piece which consisted of lightbulbs connected by cords to a bar that was rhythmically moving up and down. As they moved the bulbs clanked and jangled discordantly against mirrors placed on the ground, creating a jarring soundtrack to the already bizarre mood in the room.

Way out of debt

We were almost out of the eerie part of the museum, but there was one more freaky display. As I walked past a recess in the wall, I saw a painting of a man pointing. Instinctively I walked into the recess, which turned out to be a small hallway, and looked where he was pointing. The focus of his attention was another painting of the same man, this time putting a knife into his own mouth. Overall it was disturbing, but I liked the effect of using one painting to get you to notice another. I thought about how much I would freak out if I was spending the night in someone's house and got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and saw these paintings. Yikes. Unfortunately, I didn't take note of the artist's name.

Suitable decor for a haunted house

After all the creepy stuff, we entered a more low-key part of the museum. Some of the pieces there (like Nindityo Adipurnomo's "Hiding Rituals and the Mass Production II") were underwhelming, and I had a hard time understanding how they'd attained a spot in a museum. Bryan pointed out that the Singapore Art Museum features mostly art by Southeast Asian artists, and there are likely fewer artists in the developing countries around Singapore than in places like Europe or the U.S. Drawing from a smaller pool of talent might result in sometimes displaying somewhat unimpressive pieces alongside higher quality ones.

We left the second floor and went down the stairs, passing Heri Dono's Flying Angels along the way. The Flying Angels reminded Bryan of the flying monkeys from the Wizard of Oz, but made me think of characters out of something darker, like a Neil Gaiman novel.

Dono's Flying Angels

We zipped by an interesting piece by Malaysian artist Bayu Utomo Radjikin. It was interesting, as was the fact that the installation in the background appeared to be a bunch of boob-shaped beanbag chairs.

Lang Kacang

Indonesian artist Jompet Kuswidananto was behind one of my favorites of the evening, "Java's Machine: Phantasmagoria." The piece took up an entire room, and consisted of a ghostly army of soldiers (really just their clothes). Some of the soldiers were holding drums, and were motorized to strike the drums at seemingly random interval, which repeatedly startled me. There was also a movie projected on one wall, and the movement and loud noises created a multi-sensory experience.

Ghostly army

I also liked the adjacent exhibit, for which I do not have any information, except that it's supposed to be a statement on gender roles. The figures are all male and are wrapped in brocaded cloth. Mostly I liked them because, with the wires running out of the tops of their head, they made me think of (NERD ALERT) the cylons that powered the ships in Battlestar Galactica.

Cylons!

Bryan really liked this sculpture, by Singaporean Jason Lim.

Into the River I

And with that, we were done with our first trip to the Singapore Art Museum. I highly recommend going on a Friday night between 6 and 9, when admission is free. The museum is small enough that you can cover it in that time, and you can't beat a night out for free!!