State of play of museums and galleries in Singapore after Covid-19

Singapore – There is an entire ecosystem of public and private museums and galleries in Singapore, ranging from the National Museum to the Singapore Musical Box Museum at the Thian Hock Keng temple in Telok Ayer Street, and from the National Gallery Singapore to far-flung private spaces like Maya Gallery in the industrial units of Genting Lane.

All these suffered during the Covid-19 pandemic, but used the downtime to experiment with new presentation techniques. In 2021, the Intan, a private home museum dedicated to Peranakan culture in Joo Chiat, created a Peranakan digital game based on its exhibits that was free to play but required players to pay a nominal sum to buy new lives or items. The National Gallery Singapore came up with the Gallery Wellness Festival in 2022, which incorporated art appreciation with other practices like mindful walks, guided body movements and perfume making, to attract people interested in wellness who might not have as much of an affinity with art.

While the slew of public museums and galleries, typically national institutions, has remained fairly stable, the number of private museums and galleries is growing. In August,

a new museum dedicated to Malay pioneer Haji Yusoff Mohamed Noor,

a famous maker of haj belts in Kampong Glam in the 19th century, will open across from Sultan Mosque.

In recent years, The Jews of Singapore Museum in Waterloo Street and a Parsi and Zoroastrian museum in Rochor have also been set up, testament to the increasing desire to fill in the perceived gaps in representation in the Singapore story.

Private art galleries like the Straits Gallery, which opened in Ang Mo Kio in 2021, are born of a similar desire to give more space to some artists than the National Gallery can afford; in this case, second-generation master Koeh Sia Yong.

Maya Gallery in Genting Lane was set up in 2012 in part to give a boost to Malay artists, and enjoys a close relationship with Malay Heritage Foundation heritage prize winner Idris Ali.

Singapore’s institutions are not immune to calls for the return of artefacts, despite its status as a former colony. In 2015, the Asian Civilisations Museum (ACM) decided to return an 11th-century sculpture believed to have been stolen from India that it had bought from New York dealer Art of the Past, whose company manager later admitted to selling stolen Indian antiquities.

In other cases, the museums have carried out internal reviews of how certain objects have ended up in the national collection. After allegations in 2022 by Facebook page Lost Arts of Nepal that

an abstract representation of the Hindu deity Shiva had been stolen in 1999

and ended up in Singapore, the ACM said the object was acquired through established procedures, which included provenance checks at the time of purchase. In this case, it also noted that the object was not listed in the Art Loss Register, which is the world’s largest private database of stolen art.