Ask a Curator | The Ever-Changing UOB Southeast Asia Gallery

Every year, our curators refresh our two long-term exhibitions, Between Declarations and Dreams: Art of Southeast Asia since the 19^th Century and Siapa Nama Kamu? Art in Singapore since the 19^th Century, with new artworks. These exhibits in the UOB Southeast Asia Gallery and DBS Singapore Gallery debuted to the public in 2015 and are a core part of the Gallery’s identity. In this post, three of the UOB Southeast Asia Gallery's eight exhibition curators, Clarissa Chikiamco, Lim Qinyi and Cheng Jia Yun, answer questions posed to them by docents and front-of-house staff.

How many artworks are currently on display in the UOB Southeast Asia Gallery? And how often are the artworks rotated each year?

Currently, there are a total of 236 artworks in the UOB Southeast Asia Gallery, located on levels 3, 4 and 5 of the Gallery's Supreme Court Wing. On average, we rotate about 74 artworks a year. The rotation is usually implemented in four phases throughout the year.

How do curators decide which artworks to remove from display?

There are many factors curators consider when changing the artworks on display. Some works require more conservation care. For example, paper is particularly sensitive to light and prolonged exposure may damage the work. As such, we tend to change out works on paper more often. Our collections care team and conservators do periodic checks to keep us informed of the artworks’ condition.

Most works on display are selected from the collection of National Gallery Singapore, but we do have some works on loan. These works are replaced with new loans or other works from our collection when the borrowed works are returned.

We are also continuously doing research to enrich the narratives we present to develop our collection of Southeast Asian art. New acquisitions you see on display are reflective of the research we have been doing and the growth of the collection.

Some visitors form attachments with the artwork on display. How do you maintain the engagement of those who don’t see the artworks they like on display anymore?

We think refreshing the display of artworks is a way to engage recurring visitors. Some may think the UOB Southeast Asia Gallery and DBS Singapore Gallery have remained static since their establishment in 2015, as they are long-term and referred to as the Gallery’s “permanent exhibitions”. While the overarching narratives of these galleries remain the same, curators add nuance by changing dozens of works each year and adding new themes. We encourage visitors who have been here once or twice before to visit our exhibitions regularly.

To increase engagement, we are increasing the frequency of talks we conduct within the UOB Southeast Asia Gallery, which will include these new artworks as well. For regular visitors, we hope they form new attachments to the works on display! We’re often very excited to put these works up.

It has been close to four years since the Gallery opened to public in November 2015. Are there artworks which have not gone on display yet?

Yes, there are. Some works in our collection may not necessarily fit the themes and chronological order of the current UOB Southeast Asia Gallery exhibition. However, the Gallery does hold changing exhibitions throughout the year, most of which draw from our collection. These shows provide us the opportunity to put a greater variety of work on display. We also continuously acquire new works to add to our collection, so there are always artworks that are waiting to go on display.

Will the Gallery create more publications that incorporate the UOB Southeast Asia Gallery’s new artworks?

There aren’t plans to launch a new UOB Southeast Asia Gallery catalogue. Many of our current publications complement, complicate and deepen the narratives that tie the exhibition together. A list of our publications for purchase can be found here and are available for reference at our new Rotunda Library & Archive, located in the UOB Southeast Asia Gallery. We have also launched a new collections portal, which can be another source of information.

Many visitors miss out UOB Southeast Asia Gallery 12 because it’s the only gallery on level 4. Why is Gallery 12 important?

Gallery 12 spotlights three significant points in the narratives constructed through the art of Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines during the 1970s. In each of these contexts, artists came together and generated radical artistic propositions that shift from the modern and the sublime to the contemporary. They contested conventional forms of painting and sculpture by producing works that incorporated language and images from popular culture, and cheap, found materials from everyday life as subjects and mediums. These gestures rallied against the accepted conventions of artistic production of that period. Passionate debate fuelled by these acts was the basis of discourse amongst a generation of intellectual milieu. Selected excerpts from archival documents are presented in Gallery 12 that reveal artists’ active interest in diverting the course of artistic production.

The development of these points of rupture will be explored in an upcoming exhibition in the Concourse Galleries titled Suddenly Turning Visible: Art and Architecture in Southeast Asia (1969-1989). The exhibition looks at how artistic production of the 1970s can be read in relation to the developmentalist impulses which informed the formation and rapid transformation of the cities of Manila, Singapore and Bangkok.