Singapore: July 25: The Colonial Core and Many Museums

The day began with me lugging my bag on a long, mostly indoor trek to yet another new hotel. (I couldn't remain in the old one at a reasonable rate.)

After dropping my bag off, I grabbed a backpack and camera and ventured out for my first full day of exploration. And full it was--I did a lot. I also took a good number of pictures this day.

I began by exploring downtown / the colonial core. Among other places, I visited the four-star Raffles Hotel. It turned out to be more a shopping complex with countless high-end stores nestled in courtyards and plazas around the hotel than a hotel itself. Although I didn't get to see the supposedly splendid restored interior rooms, I did get to visit the attached little museum of historic memorabilia about the hotel, which includes items such as one-hundred-year-old travel guides.

After some exploration, I had lunch to dodge the rain, and split the rest of the afternoon between additional sightseeing outdoor and viewing museums indoors (to avoid the heat and the occasional rain). Perhaps this is a good time to mention that in the morning, whenever I left a building, my glasses fogged up, a clear example of Singapore's heat and humidity.

My first museum was the Singapore Art Museum. The museum, which frequently rotates exhibits, had displays in a variety of formats: photographs, paintings, calligraphy (sometimes on scrolls), sculpture, and ink (again sometimes on scrolls). I liked their modern art section and liked even more their special exhibit, Post-Doi Moi, on Vietnamese modern and contemporary art (i.e., post-1990). It occupied half the museum. (I couldn't find a description of the exhibit on the museum's web site, so I linked to a very good description I found elsewhere, putting the exhibit in the context of Asian art, modern art, and Vietnamese politics.) My reaction to the special exhibit really surprised me: I felt the pieces were generally very good and showed a sentiment, a liveliness, a creativity, a lack of irony, and a visual appeal that I rarely see all at once in Western modern art. As photography was prohibited in the museum, I wrote down the names of pieces I especially liked in hopes I could look them up online later to find more details and a picture of them. After much difficult web searching, I present:

• The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains by Xu Beihong. A large ink and color painting: picture, one essay about the work, another essay.
• The Dictator by Le Quang Ha. A scary ink drawing: picture, article in Vietnamese containing the picture, English translation.
• Missed Connections by Rich Streitmatter-Tran. I believe I liked this short video because of the way the museum described it.
• Traditional Family. This may have been by Streitmatter; I'm not sure. Regardless, whatever it was, I also liked it because of the description by the museum telling the viewer what to get out of it.
• Living Fossils by Vuong Van Thao. The artist makes and encases models of Hanoi's old buildings in resin. Novel work, neat architecture, and a strong statement (scroll down for the "artist statement"). Also, here's an article on this series of work.
• Human Making Love to Sovanmachha by Chin Sothy.
• Song of the World by Abdul Wahab bin Hj Jaafar. From the name, this clearly isn't the Vietnamese exhibit. But if I'm reading my notes correctly, it's something I liked.
• Golden Monks (23 Monks) by Min Wae Aung. In the Burmese section of the museum. A line of yellow-robed monks walking across a desert.

Next came more downtown explorations, during which I found CHIJMES, a colonial-era convent that's now a retail complex. It felt much like Raffles Hotel: a historic site surrounded nicely by shops.

After more downtown, I entered the Peranakan Museum. Peranakan is the mixed ethnicity that resulted from the merging of the Malay and the Chinese; men are called babas and women are called nonyas. The museum shows Reranakan history and culture, especially through weddings, upbringing, religion, clothing, and pottery. I appreciated that the museum has good descriptions of everything. There was also a neat special exhibit, "Junk To Jewels," in which Peranakan families displayed family heirlooms. Some items were brought to life through the quotes on plaques, as families explained how and why the item is important to them.

A more substantial museum, the National Museum of Singapore, followed. I began by taking an audio tour through its largest exhibit, the History Gallery. The exhibit has two paths: the events path, which takes a historian's perspective, and the personal path, which takes the perspective of an average person on the street. I tried both paths at times, getting an interesting counterpoint between views of the same events. There was, however, way too much info and I found that I didn't have enough patience. Nevertheless, I should mention the gallery was very well done, with many objects, pictures, and more. (For instance, I learned that William Pickering, an early governor of Singapore, quelled riots with bagpipes.) The audio tour was entertaining as well, with lines such as, "hey, you found the number on the floor. great!" I couldn't tell if it was sarcastic or self-mocking or something else. Also, I was impressed that audio-tour device automatically triggered the movie displays in the gallery.

The museum also had five other galleries on photography, Indians, food, film/theather, and fashion. The food section included delicious details; you can see by the number of pictures I took how excited I was. The film/theater section also covered Chinese opera and puppetry. One exhibit was high-tech--I don't recall which one--with lots of videos and touch screens and ambient sound.

As dusk fell, I explored Fort Canning Park. It's a moderately-sized park on a hill with a bunch of history. I like the fact that it has plaques/explanation of its history scattered around. The spice garden has even more plaques explaining spices and herbs and describing their uses and cultural context. Most of the content in the general plaques were names and dates: boring stuff.

As I the left the park, I happened across the Singapore Philatelic (stamp) Museum, which, due to the Singapore-wide night festival, happened to be open and free. I'd previously decided to skip it, though I took this fortuitous encounter as a sign I should enter. The museum includes exhibits on rare stamps, designing & printing stamps, famous stamp designers, and famous collectors. It has all stamps issued by Singapore over the years, providing a neat glimpse at how the country's sophistication and themes have changed. It also has stamps that were issued from when Singapore was a colony until its independent statehood a hundred years later. And, of course, there are many international stamps on display.

Oddly, the museum also had an (out-of-place) special exhibit on Vietnam where I learned about water puppetry, saw many pretty Vietnamese postcards, and saw Chinese stamps before, during, and after the communist and cultural revolutions.

For dinner, I first headed to Hong Lim food Complex but discovered it was too late at night and all the eateries on my recommended list were already closed. Instead, I detoured to a local chain, Jumbo Seafood, that's said to make a good examples of Singapore's national dish: chili crab. As is often the case, the details are in the pictures.