| Singapore To Exhibit Artefacts From Southeast Asia |
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By Zakaria Abdul Wahab
SINGAPORE, July 23 (Bernama) - The exciting journeys and adventures of explorers and collectors who travelled all over Southeast Asia from the late 19th century will be featured in a new exhibition at the Asian Civilisations Museum (ACM) here from Friday.
The exhibition "Hunters and Collectors: The Origins of the Southeast Asian Collection" will feature more than 300 artefacts, including an Iban Dayak war-coat made of bark and fish scales from Sarawak.
In a statement today, the ACM said the exhibition which would be on until Sept 21, would also feature a recreation of Singapore's first museum - the Raffles Library & Museum - along with its cabinets of curiosities, rich ethnographic collection and natural history specimens.
The ACM said the collectors featured in the exhibition 'hunted' down the objects that later found their way into the collection of the Raffles Library & Museum, and was later inherited by it when the Singapore national collection was dissolved to start new national museums in the early 1990s.
"This exhibition gives us the opportunity to share a little bit of the history behind our collection and how artefacts come to be in the collections of museums," ACM Director Dr Kenson Kwok said, adding it also helped further the understanding of the indigenous people of this region.
The exhibition will be in two parts, with the first focusing on six independent collectors, ranging from explorers and naturalists to businessmen and missionaries, their adventures, passions and personalities, and the second, on institutions such as museums.
One of the collectors was American naturalist William Louis Abbott (1860 - 1936) who travelled around the world before arriving in Southeast Asia in 1896, collecting animal specimens and ethnographic objects, and gave them to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
The Raffles Library & Museum received part of his collection from the islands of Indonesia and Borneo, particularly his collection of baskets from Borneo which have the weaving techniques that have become a dying art.
-- BERNAMA
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