SPM’s New Permanent Galleries

Posted by angela under Museums/Heritage Galleries
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This Thursday, the Singapore Philatelic Museum (SPM), Singapore’s only stamp museum, opened its new permanent galleries. Built around the theme “Stamps as Windows to the World”, their target audience are families and children. But anyone can have a fun time there - I certainly did.

The galleries were officially opened by Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts, Dr. Lee Boon Yang.

The permanent galleries consist of 4 rooms.
The Orange Room introduces the visitor to the world of philately (stamps), the Purple Room details the stamp production process, the Green Room talks about competitive stamp collecting, and the Room of Rarities showcases the museum’s most prized artefacts, worth a total of approximately S$1.5 million!!

Visitors can choose to guide themselves round the galleries through a process called letterboxing, whereby visitors guess the location of several rubber ink stamps from stamp trivia in the museum passport (which can be purchased from the SPM store for only $1). At the end of the day, you can take home an interesting souvenir to remember your journey into the world of stamps.

One interesting feature found in the Orange Room is this Language of Philately exhibit, where certain philatelic jargon are explained. For example, the term “Cinderella”, which reminds most of us of the fairy tale, refers to a stamp with no actual value. Since they are without a value, Cinderella stamps aren’t real, just like the fairy tale.

The above artistamps are created by Singaporean Sandra Kong.
Similar to Cinderella stamps are artistamps, which have no real value either. Artistamps are the work of artists who have chosen stamps as a canvas. This form of art was, curiously enough, supposedly invented at a Nazi Camp, when a German communist reportedly inked 27 hand drawn stamps.

Another interesting feature of the SPM is visible storage, an innovative, space saving way to display the museum’s vast collection of stamps. With such a method, it is no wonder that the SPM has performed the feat of displaying 80% of its collection at one time (usually museums only display about 20%).
Singapore’s stamps are stored chronologically, while foreign stamps are stored by country. With so many panels, one could be poring over these stamps forever!

However, the most not to be missed exhibit can be found in the Room of Rarities. This is the only known cover with all four 1854 Indian stamps used in the Straits Settlements. It was last auctioned in 2000 for a cool S$200,000!

While at the SPM, one should also check out their temporary exhibitions, such as “It’s a Dog’s Life”, featuring all dog-related philately to commemorate the Chinese Zodiac Year of the Dog.

The newest temporary exhibit is the Sea Mammal exhibit, which is my personal favourite.

Extremely kid-friendly, this gallery has cute cushions with some of the sea mammals featured on stamps, such as the Dugong and the Pink Dolphin. There are also puzzles of sea mammal stamps:

With the SPM offering free admission tomorrow (21 May), as well as a Stamp Discovery tour (2-3pm) and several fun-filled workshops, do drop by and pay them a visit.

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