My NUS Jaunt Part I

Posted by angela under Museums/Heritage Galleries
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Building Site/Samsui Women (1951) Liu Kang

Yesterday, I paid a visit to 2 museums tucked away in the vast NUS campus. The first stop - the NUS Museum. It’s my second visit there, and I found the exhibits vastly changed. While art isn’t really my forte (I STILL draw like a four year old), I liked the way the NUS Museum’s Southeast Asian exhibition chronicled some events and milestones in our country’s history, as well as the distinctive culture of Southeast Asia.

Paintings such as the one above, Building Site/Samsui Women by renowned local artist Liu Kang, pay a tribute to some of the first construction workers in Singapore - the Samsui Women. Originating from the Sansui province in China, these hardworking, tough women could be identified by their red headgear and dark blue shirt/pants. While all the samsui women I’ve ever seen or met were very old (we’re talking 80 or 90 here), this painting brings me back to a time before mine.

Fire (1961), Oil on board

by Lim Yew Kuang, Woodblock print
Two paintings also depicted the disastrous Bukit Ho Swee fire of 1961, where the entire squatter of Bt. Ho Swee settlement was razed to the ground. Singapore’s version of the Great Fire of London, it stuck in the minds of many due to its magnitude. While the artists used very different media and styles, both captured well the devastation caused by the fire.

Indian New Year

There were also more jolly paintings such as the above, depicting a scene during Deepavali, the Hindu Festival of Lights. With robust colors, the artist captured one of the notable festivals in this part of Asia.

And then there were the abstract paints, which I endeavored to understand:

Scholarly Gathering (1966/67) Tan Teo Kwang
Such as the above, done in an Abstract Expressionist type of style, with broad strokes and pure colors. I saw people in this picture, although I’m not quite sure if I was supposed to.

And this figure, which I never quite understood, and looked to me to be made up of, among other things, coconut parts. :S
But hey, art is free for interpretation.

My favorite in the Southeast Asian collection was the bright piece below:

Baba Family by Redza Piyadasa (Malaysia)

I liked the bright colors and interesting style used by the artist in his rendition of a Peranakan family portrait. The Peranakans, an ethnic group unique to Southeast Asia (primarily Malacca and Singapore), are the descendants of early Chinese immigrants and their local Malay wives. Their culture is an elegant mix of both Chinese and Malay.

In the gallery below, the NUS museum was having an exhibition entitled Responding to the Divide - David Kwo, The Artist. His works comprised a variety of landscapes, figures, flora and fauna, done using traditional Chinese brush techniques. Kwo’s are perhaps some of the most lively and unique Chinese ink works I’ve seen. Such as the work below, calligraphy of a poem by renowned Tang Dynasty poet Li Bai (李白）. It’s definitely the first time I’ve seen the use of so much color in calligraphy.

Small Animals
Kwo is most renowned for his works featuring small animals, particularly dogs and cats, and looking at the works on display, I can see why. Though I’m not much of an animal lover, I liked the bright colors and lifelike depictions.

Liu Bei
Also another interesting piece, Liu Bei is one of Kwo’s depictions of Chinese opera masks. This mask is presumably for the character of Liu Bei, a powerful warlord during the Three Kingdoms era in China. I liked the way Kwo’s artwork fuses Chinese techniques with Western colors, creating works that blend East and West.

All in all, despite being neither an artist or an art critic, I enjoyed my time at the NUS Museum, and I’d say it’s definitely worth a visit. More on my experience at the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research later this week.

Responding the Divide - David Kwo, The Artist runs till 1 December 2007, and Highlights of the Southeast Asian Collection runs till 31 December 2007. The NUS Museum is located at the University Cultural Centre, 50 Kent Ridge Road, NUS.

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