Peter Lee | S5E3

I mean, you mentioned not working in the civil service because you have worked as a guest curator instead, right? And this is included like Asian Civilizations Museum, Perenaka Museum and elsewhere, I know.

What have been the highlight exhibitions for you and what makes you particularly proud of these exhibitions?

well yeah you know all of them have been wonderful and different I think that's that's the amazing thing you know like from Rumah Baba 1998 um Yeah, never been done before.

So the excitement has always been in putting together something new for the audience.

So we recreated these spaces and talked about social history within the spaces of the house.

And the history museum slash national museum had been renamed the Singapore History Museum for a short period.

had already developed an amazing collection of Pranakan art so it was easy to assemble the things for this exhibition so that was really satisfying and then actually there was a long gap and then it was Junk to Jewels in 2008 that was for the opening of the Pranakan Museum and that was also very fun the idea behind it was to do the not the pranakan museum exhibition so it was called junk to jewels things that pranakans own or things that pranakans treasure i think so i wanted to show things that were not necessarily what would be considered collectible or pranakan among sort of curators and private collectors.

So I wanted to show things that meant a lot to Pranakans that were not Pranakans.

So we even had things like the late Goh Keng Swee's golf club.

He was an avid golfer.

We had things like jigsaw puzzles from the 30s.

We... of course also you know sarong kabaya but just a whole lot of everyday things and so that was a fun aside you know because it it was the temporary exhibition next to all the the wonderful um art in the main galleries you know so we wanted something stimulating and different and emotional um we we had all these little objects with actually it was not very it was with anecdotes we just had anecdotes attached to each object and it was wonderful because the feedback from visitors was they often sometimes didn't really remember the object but they remembered the story you know so for example we had we borrowed some Kweku moulds, the Angku Kwe moulds from this lady and there was a story how she actually salvaged them from her, I think she salvaged them from a brother or something who had just chucked them away so she went to the bin you know like in her HDB block to recover them or something so It meant a lot to her.

And her mother was famous as a kweku maker.

So these things were very valuable to her.

But you know, it was just a big wooden block.

To some people, it might not be, you know, of course to the chefs, it's something important.

But you might mistake it just for some, you know, junk you might find in an antique shop.

So, you know, that kind of story.

Yes.

So, yeah, it was, I love that.

So...

And then in 2011, we had the Sankabaya exhibition.

So I really thought there was nothing much to study for that because, you know, it's the iconic Pranakan, you know, ladies sort of... what I understood to be a traditional costume.

But the deeper I got into it, the less it became Pranakan and connected to other histories.

And rather than being kind of disappointed, I got even more excited because, I mean, basically Pranakan is about connections and shared heritage and isn't it wonderful that nothing really we can claim as our own because it's a whole kind of spectrum of things that are connected to other communities too.