Chinese culture, all jazzed up

Posted by Tym under Explore Singapore 2006, Explore Singapore!
(4) Comments • (8200) Reads • Permalink

I went to a Chinese primary school, but learning about Chinese culture was never very fun: mostly loads of memorising dry, meaningless facts and phrases that seemed completely removed from day-to-day life.

At the Chinese Heritage Centre’s Sunday Playday this past weekend, though, there was a whole different range of possible cultural explorations at hand. For kids, this went way beyond basic origami and crooked Chinese calligraphy. How about a little Papyrus Kraft-ing to assemble a cheerful little bookmark?

Papyrus Kraft-ing, it seems, involves taking little bits of coloured, er, papyrus (though I don’t think the ancient Egyptians would recognise it as such) and packing it onto a template to create pretty patterns and pictures, without using any glue or paint or other substances that might create a sticky, smelly mess. Once the papyrus bits dry, which they do fairly quickly, they stay fastened to the template and make a fairly solid collage-like art piece.

Then there were the ang pow lanterns, which were a far cry from the ones we used to cobble together for last-minute Chinese New Year decorations in school. Whoever originated these ang pow lantern sets was a genius, because each set takes something so common, colourful and evocative, and uses it in a simple arrangement to make something that looks so fancy.

Kids’ workshops aside, the Centre also had some great exhibitions that I hadn’t seen before. Photography wasn’t permitted inside the galleries, so I don’t have any pictures to show for it, but the exhibition on “The Chinese Overseas” was really stunning. It begins with a vision-teasing array of mirrors that you have to walk around and past — assuming you don’t get confused and stuck inside — while surrounded by images of the overseas Chinese in the last century, as they saw themselves and as others (typically Westerners) saw them. That gallery alone is worth popping into the exhibition.

Subsequent galleries talk about the overseas Chinese in terms of the different generations that settled overseas, the different types of work they took up around the world, how they were caught up (or not) in the politics of China’s nationalism, and finally the impact they’ve had on world culture at large. That last gallery was fascinating too, with large projection screens, one devoted to an auteur in a particular field, e.g. I.M. Pei for architecture or Ang Lee for film. Very contemporary without trying too hard to be hip or anything.

Then there was the other more humble and certainly heartfelt exhibition, “Nantah: A Pictorial Exhibition”, recounting the history of Nantah’s founding and history. While it focused chiefly on the university’s early years, and as expected it glossed over certain more dramatic years in the 1960s, it still told a vivid and gripping story. I’m easy sometimes, I suppose — just stick a bunch of evocative black-and-white photos on a wall and I’m happy. Looking at pictures of how ardently the Chinese community in Singapore and Malaya collected funds to start Nantah makes me wonder, as I do once in a while, if people today would still have the heart to put that much behind a brave new venture.

One way or another, the Chinese Heritage Centre’s certainly tapped into different approaches to make Chinese culture and history come alive. Way better than what I used to get in school!

See Flickr: Explore Singapore!.

Tags: explore singapore, Chinese Heritage Centre, National Heritage Board, Singapore, Papyrus Kraft, Singapore, ang pow

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