Events

CHAIRPERSON

Prof Kenneth Dean, Asia Research Institute and Department of Chinese Studies, National University of Singapore

PROGRAMME

ABSTRACT

The region of Asia has been experiencing a major boom in museums and museum-like institutions in the past three decades. Despite the flourishing museum landscape in Asia and an emerging interest in non-Western museum models, academic exploration of these museums remains surprisingly scant. Notwithstanding a growing body of anecdotal evidence alluding to the different contexts, contents and politics that museums in Asia operate in, the subject remains surprisingly under-theorised.

While the museum concept has colonial origins, when adopted in Asia, the idea of ‘the museum’ often takes on vernacular appropriations to suit local contexts and contemporary needs. In the process, they enmesh with local museum models and manifestations to become sites of cultural hybridisation, while also sideline local practices and perspectives to reinforce Western conceptions of cultural heritage preservation.

In this roundtable discussion, we draw on critical Inter-Asia discourses to unpack common issues of power and politics shaping Asian museums. We examine how Asian museums adopt and respond to their prevailing economic, political, historical and socio-cultural contexts at different scales, how they resist and vernacularise Eurocentric approaches or how they adopt Indigenous knowledge forms and local practices. By engaging critically with their contemporary politics and poetics, we seek to develop a decolonial praxis for museum theory and practice in Asia.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Yunci Cai (PhD in Museum and Heritage Studies, University College London) is Associate Professor in Museum and Heritage Studies and Director of Education at the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester. A critical heritage and museum studies scholar, she specialises in the cultural politics and museologies of Asia.

Chin Siew Ang/Eiselt (PhD in History, Nanyang Technological University) researches on the ideological, historical, social, cultural, and epistemological issues that former colonies and the non-West encounters when engaging with museums. She is writing a book that reads the Raffles Museum as an artefact of British colonial rule of Singapore.

Roslynn Ang (PhD in East Asian Studies, New York University) is an educator and scholar with the Sapporo Upopo Hozonkai, an Indigenous Ainu performance group in Japan. Her research interests include performance and media, decolonising methodology, indigeneity, representations of race and nation, and Japan’s global colonial history.

Tim Winter is Leader of the Inter-Asian Engagements cluster, and Senior Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute (ARI), National University of Singapore. He moved to ARI from the University of Western of Australia, where he was Professor and Future Fellow of the Australian Research Council. He is a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His latest books are Geocultural Power: China’s Quest to Revive the Silk Roads for the Twenty First Century (University of Chicago Press, 2019) and The Silk Road: Connecting Histories and Futures (Oxford University Press, 2022). He is now working on the book The Metaverse: Lessons from History.

Hamzah Muzaini is Associate Professor at the Department of Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore. He is a cultural and historical geographer with a strong interest in social and spatial theory, particularly as it relates to heritage, memory, and remembrance. His primary research area focuses on how heritage associated with the Second World War is currently (and historically) commemorated in Singapore and Malaysia. His research is conceptualised around postcolonial theory, materiality, cyber-memorialisation, transnational deaths, the immanent past, and practices of power and resistance in everyday spaces. His latest project examines the history and heritage of the Southern Islands in Singapore, specifically aiming to recover the lost narratives of St John’s Island (Pulau Sekijang Bendera), Lazarus Island (Pulau Sekijang Pelepah), Seringat Island, and the various islands that constitute present-day Jurong Island.