Pull a rickshaw, listen to a poem at National Museum’s revamped Singapore History Gallery

SINGAPORE – In the 1970s, when the lift was still a newfangled invention in Singapore’s high-rise estates, riding it was as exhilarating and uncertain as going to the moon. Take it from writer Ng Yew Kiat’s 1976 Chinese poem The Lift: “It takes ages to arrive at one planet / where some astronauts alight”.

Some may scoff at Ng’s hyperbole, but his poem captures the awe that many kampung-dwelling Singaporeans must have felt when they first stepped into these metal vestibules to reach their homes in the sky. Were they not also early astronauts, since the first human went to space only in 1961?

Come Oct 10, visitors to the revamped Singapore History Gallery at the National Museum of Singapore (NMS) will be able to step into a restored, windowless 1970s lift from Ang Mo Kio, listen to Ng’s poem overhead and relive the technological past in its musty blue tint. Step back outside the lift and one is greeted by a nostalgic whirlwind of mosaic tiles and metal letterboxes.

“We need to realise that history is also very multidisciplinary. It’s not just a fixed way of telling the story or focusing on the objects, but also ‘How do we bring that object – which is a static display – alive?’” says NMS director Chung May Khuen, 52, who was part of the curatorial team when the gallery first opened in 2006 and again when it underwent a partial revamp in 2015.

Part of the answer in this first full revamp of the 2,230 sq m gallery, which took about 11 months, is the incorporation of more art and artists’ voices.

In a void deck set-up, visitors can read the evocative Singlish of Cultural Medallion recipient Arthur Yap’s poem 2 mothers in a hdb playground (1980). Amid culinary objects is realist master Chua Mia Tee’s mouth-watering painting of friends eating a meal served on banana leaves. You cannot touch National Anthem composer Zubir Said’s piano in the gallery, but can listen to the tunes he composed.

It is part of the museum’s multimedia storytelling approach to deepening visitors’ engagement with particular episodes in history and connection with the artefacts at hand. With sleeker and more contemporary exhibition design than the previous iteration, the revamped gallery also uses the visual language of the space to ease visitors through the massive seven-section show.

Visitors can also look forward to digital interfaces, bringing hallowed museum objects closer to lived experience. Try your hand at being a rickshaw puller with a weighted interactive display. Otherwise, take a crack at deciphering the enigmatic inscriptions of the 10th- to 14th-century Singapore Stone by zooming into the 3D renderings on a panel behind the stone.

Principal curator Daniel Tham, 45, who is supported by eight other curators, says there is also a need to make history relevant to contemporary audiences.

In the opening section on pre-colonial Singapore, interviews with eight members of the Orang Laut community and photographs of the Orang Seletar by Jefree Salim, a photographer and member of the Orang Seletar community, provide a contemporary counterpoint to a hall of boats, fish traps and shards of maritime culture that might otherwise be misunderstood as belonging purely to a bygone past.

Singapore has been wrestling more with its pre-colonial past since commemorating in 2019 the bicentennial of its founding by Sir Stamford Raffles. Tham, who incorporated interviews with members of the community discussing how the waters still constitute a big part of their identity, says: “The intention was really to connect their historical presence in Singapore’s pre-colonial history to who they are today in terms of identity.”

This revamp of the Singapore History Gallery comes a year after the first major revamp of the National Gallery Singapore’s (NGS’) permanent art history exhibition Singapore Stories: Pathways And Detours In Art. In a similar spirit of multidisciplinarity, NGS’ exhibition also expands beyond the remit of fine art, and incorporates vernacular design and popular culture into its story of Singapore art.

The Singapore History Gallery is divided into seven main sections: Fluid Beginnings, covering Singapore’s maritime past (1300s to 1800s); Colonial City, as a British free port (1800s to 1930s); Fall Of The Fortress, covering the Japanese Occupation (late 1930s to 1940s); Towards A New Identity, on the post-war struggle for self-determination (1950s to 1960s); Becoming Singapore, examining the early years of independence (1960s to 1980s); Being Singaporean, exploring the cultural expressions in the 1980s and 1990s; and Looking Global, which stretches from the 2000s to the present.

There are multiple stations in the exhibition where visitors can add their reflections in the form of audio recordings. These will be woven into an ever-transforming image of Singapore’s landscape in the final room.

From Oct 10 to 18, NMS is marking 139 years of the museum in a celebration series titled Stories Of Everyday. The opening of the Singapore History Gallery is also a prelude to the full reopening of the Level 2 Life In Singapore Galleries slated for early 2027, which Tham says will dive deeper into particular periods and aspects of Singapore’s history.

The central question the Singapore History Gallery poses is a deceptively simple one: Who are we? Tham’s answer is to gesture to the Republic’s rich and diverse histories, its openness and interconnectedness, and the waves of migration to the island across the centuries.

But another answer is perhaps found in the museum’s new mascot Stoney – a perpetually frowning anthropomorphisation of the Singapore Stone that sits as an inflatable in the field in front of NMS. Like it or not, its blase expression is strikingly contemporary for a centuries-old enigma and the stuff of ugly-cute virality.

“It points to how much we don’t know – how much is still out there for us to discover. Stoney’s disposition, I would say, reflects that search for an identity,” says Tham. “Who am I? Why am I like this? Where do I come from? I suppose that contributes to that grumpiness – which, to me at least, I find quite cute.”

Book It/Singapore History Gallery

Where: National Museum of Singapore, 93 Stamford Road
When: Opens Oct 10, 10am to 7pm daily
Admission: Free for Singapore citizens and permanent residents; $18 and $13 (concession) for tourists and foreign residents
Info: str.sg/D6wD