In Conversation with Peter Lee
Courtesy of Marcus Tan
Please tell us about the genesis of your devotion to art and art history. How did your family life, childhood, and past educational pursuits inform your relentless and disciplined approach to this field of inquiry and appreciation?
My parents really nurtured these interests. My father would take me to the bookshops, and I was always allowed one purchase. We had a set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica at home, and in the 60s, it published endless entries about the history and genealogy of European royalty, even really minor ones. I used to love playing this game where I would pick a random name of some royal, and chart his or her lineage as far back as I could, cross-referencing the generations of the person’s ancestors in various volumes of the encyclopedia. I particularly remember being totally fascinated by the multi-hyphenated dynastic names of the Germanic dynasties, such as that of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glückburg. So, I was a strange Peranakan Singaporean child who had an unhealthy obsession with European royal family trees.
My mother was a great lover of beautiful things, a hoarder extraordinaire, and she had this innate sense of beauty and style, which she translated into every aspect of her life. I grew up watching her collections of furniture, textiles, and porcelain grow. We were spoilt as children with the most lavish birthday parties (by 60’s Singapore standards), with fabulous floral arrangements, balloons, and always an incredible cake. As much as she loved to acquire beautiful things, she also loved to give them away. So many friends have shown me things she gifted to them, including jewelry. Her love of beautiful objects continued unabated even up the very end of her life. At a period when her strength was slipping away, and her breathing had to be assisted with oxygen support, she had requested a rosary. When I presented her with a fine 19th-century filigree example that a Portuguese friend had given me, her eyes lit up. She grasped the finely wrought item, ran her fingers along its intricate beads, and uttered a sigh of admiration at its beauty. She was so absolutely delighted with it, and despite her physical incapacities, she never relinquished this pure, almost childlike sense of wonder when encountering a beautiful object.
My paternal uncle was an architect and avid architectural historian. He had the most amazing library filled with books about early Singapore, and huge cabinets stacked with early maps and 19th-century photographs. He also kept meticulous notebooks, many bound in leather, of transcripts of colonial letters and documents, compiled during many trips to the British Library. My uncle was a very generous mentor, and I was one of the few people who had free access to his archives. All his material has been donated to the National Library of Singapore.
These three people were my mentors, whose approaches to beauty, knowledge, and generosity have been lifetime inspirations. These perspectives also ignited this curiosity that started in genealogy and has now progressed to the genealogy of things.
Textile arts clearly hold a significant fascination for you. Your “Singapore, Sarong Kebaya and Style” project draws together ideas of fashion, aesthetics, and the trajectory of the Peranakan community through time and space. Please detail what rewards and challenges this undertaking has held for you.
The best thing about the project was that it completely upended everything I understood about art, historiography, fashion, and identity. How the community emerged and evolved and even switched languages, how they created family and business networks, how they dressed so differently, and how even on a single street Peranakan families might be connected in different ways to different networks and thus practice different customs or embrace different cultural influences, all indicate a confusing, inconsistent heterogeneous spectrum of culture and identity.
How the kebaya, and by extension, any kind of fashion, rather than being a pure symbol of one race or nationality, has such a hybrid and convoluted transnational history, nudged me towards rethinking these particular themes that are central to my academic interests. The kebaya also overturns notions of fashion being purely a western concept, and of the idea of static Asian traditional costume. The challenge is that all these narratives of race, nationality, and the East-West dichotomy that we inherited, still hold sway... it’s quite hard to undo them.
Your Port Cities exhibition at the Asian Civilisations Museum was an ambitious exploration of the ways maritime centers, hybridity, trade, exchange, and novel forms of communion historically resulted in dynamic artistic attainments. Please describe your curatorial process and methodology for this illuminating project.
My interest in Peranakan objects led met to explore the ancestry of hybrid objects. It also led me to discover the masses of “strange” objects and artworks that have never fitted any current art historical narrative. Historians, perhaps because of how disciplines within museums and universities have been set up, tend to narrow down their work to so-called definitive objects that typify a culture, movement, or community. This is often at the expense of the many other things produced or acquired at that time that don’t fit the picture historians construct. I am fascinated by these “orphaned” objects, which I believe must exist in many museums, ignored or neglected because they are too strange, “impure” or “bastardized”. The culture of Asian port cities, with their free-wheeling, transient, rapacious, visionary characteristics, was the ideal breeding ground for this kind of product. The dissonant aesthetic that has seen Louis Vuitton collaborating with Yayoi Kusuma, for example, is also found in these port cities objects dating back several hundred years earlier. What we think of as being so new and contemporary, is actually just old port cities style.
I wanted to explore this style through three dynamics: divergences, convergences, and integrations. How people and things moved out, moved to the same places, and mixed together. I also wanted to express this hodgepodge mayhem visually. So for example, one of the first galleries was a costume display of the diversity of peoples in 19th century Singapore. Perhaps for the first time in a museum exhibition, costumes from across Europe and Asia were shown together without any order.
I am fascinated by the paradox of port cities culture: its diversity and heterogeneity, on the one hand, even within communities and the uniformity created by the viral demand for the same things across communities and national borders.
I also love the idea that Port Cities residents owned things from all over the world, that they often flouted sumptuary laws to commission rather unconventional objects, and that these things circulated within and recirculated across communities. I am also intrigued by the idea of itinerant craftsmen, and workshops where the craftsmen might have come from different areas, and how there was so much copying and appropriation going on, but never just in one direction. Ideas flowed in multiple directions. All this resulted in works that today are either wrongly classified or impossible to classify. But rather than this being a flaw or a problem, I think it is time to validate the idea of the “orphan object” as well as the “bastard object” of unknown/uncertain parentage.
Please share your approach to the subject of photography in the “Amek Gambar: Taking Pictures — Peranakans and Photography” exhibition at the Peranakan Museum as well as your more general fascination with historical images from maritime Southeast Asia.
The study of photography in Asia remains firmly entrenched in 19th-century historiography. It has basically been used to express the idea of how western science arrived as a marvel in Asia, and how the West depicted Asia. No one really admits that photography was a marvel wherever it first appeared. New studies still veer towards rehashing the dichotomy of Western progress versus Eastern tradition.
For example, new essays on Asian photography cannot help starting with a preamble about ancient society in a manner that Western photography studies never do. So, a study about photographic portraiture in China might first launch into examining antecedents in the Ming period, while it would be unheard of to begin a study of British photography with a prologue about the Tudor period. Many studies on Asian photography are also focused on the business careers of photographers and the minutiae of their lives gleaned through archival records. Often such studies are also based on photographs of Asia in Western institutional collections. This would be as strange as writing a history of British photography solely through collections of images taken by Chinese photographers that survive in Chinese archives.
Photographs of Peranakans in island Southeast Asia allow us to rethink the history of photography completely. Because it arrived fairly quickly, we can actually think about it as a contemporaneous global phenomenon with the same kinds of impact and response everywhere. Many of the images came from a wide variety of sources, the majority of them local, and show a highly heterogeneous network of people. The images, rather than reinforcing the sense of fixed identity, completely undermine it. They mostly depict people just being themselves, not as “Chinese” or “Chinese mimicking colonial rulers” or “Peranakans” or any other label.
It is so amazing how photography allowed people to experiment with how they presented themselves to invent new kinds of images (such as the wedding photo). They also help disperse the fog of “tradition” by showing how diverse, quirky, and unconventional people have always been.
Please tell us about your role as an ‘honorary curator’ of the National University of Singapore’s Baba House. It seems as if you have a key role in the grand mosaic of museum culture in Singapore. Is this all some sort of didactic master plan?
Actually, it was all serendipity, or synchronicity perhaps—a confluence of circumstances. I happened to meet the owner of the house, Wee Lin, who wanted to preserve it in some way. At the same time, my aunt Agnes Tan had tasked me to find a suitable project involving the National University of Singapore that she could fund in memory of her father, Tun Tan Cheng Lock. He was a prominent Peranakan business and political leader in Malaysia and Singapore. Because I had previously worked on a book on Peranakan interiors, I was invited to be the curatorial consultant for the project, and have been the Honorary Curator since its inception.
The house has several key missions. It not only aims to be a jewel of building conservation, but also a monument to its former residents, the Wee family, one of the most prominent Peranakan families in Singapore in the 19th century, and also a memorial dedicated to the donor’s father. It is also a center of Peranakan heritage and continues to be the subject of academic research in several fields, including architecture, Peranakan culture, and conservation work. The part that excites me the most is how the space can continue to hold lectures and exhibitions on a wide range of topics, including local history, the neighborhood, and the histories of cross-cultural communities, as well as the story of global goods and even kitchen utensils in 19th century Singapore.
Your recent “Mark of Empire” television serial has received widespread critical acclaim. Do you intend to produce additional episodes to continue this curated journey through Southeast Asian history?
It is impossible to plan anything concrete at the moment, with the ongoing global pandemic, but I believe the producers whom I collaborated with will have something further up their sleeves.
Watch The Mark of Empire
Singaporean curator and scholar Peter Lee explores the history of four Southeast Asian empires that made their mark on the world. Travelling from Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia to Indonesia, Peter explores ancient ruins, epic legends and vibrant traditions to chart the rise and fall of four distinct empires, and how their legacy still shapes cultures and identities in the region today.
Thailand’s Ancient Modern Kingdom | Ayutthaya
Myanmar’s Unifying Kingdom | Bagan
Cambodia’s Temple Kingdom | Angkor
Indonesia’s Spice Kingdom | Majapahit
Where will you turn your attention and intellectual curiosity next? Do you have upcoming projects underway at present?
I am working on two ideas, one for a museum in India and another for a gallery in Malaysia, both will be on textiles.
In terms of unfulfilled desires and dreams in the world of art, please share with us something aspirational. With regard to Southeast Asian art history, what work do you feel demands critical attention and care in the coming decade?
I think, in its long and insatiable demand for goods from all corners of the world, Southeast Asia has been at the center of one of the most important networks in the cultural history of globalization. Once we look beneath the veneer, and across the boundaries of the Portuguese, Dutch, and British colonial periods, you uncover a far more complex, dynamic, and multi-faceted history, one that unifies the world into one broader history.
For Southeast Asian art history, in particular, I think we urgently need to disengage it from the colonial viewpoint. For example, it was rather heartbreaking that a recent exhibition catalog on Angkor had a rather second rate colonial illustration of one of its monuments on its cover. That would be as bizarre as publishing an exhibition catalog on Michelangelo’s sculpture with a cover illustration of one of his masterpieces by an itinerant 19th-century Chinese artist.
The comments from the episodes of Mark of Empire on YouTube reflect the deep need among many Southeast Asians to access information that makes them feel proud of their history and heritage. The love of the past has to be initiated by nurturing the right emotions.
Peter Lee
Courtesy of Subject
Peter Lee is an independent researcher, and the Honorary Curator of the NUS Baba House — a historical house museum managed by the National University of Singapore.
He co-authored The Straits Chinese House with Jennifer Chen, published by the National Museum of Singapore in 1998 and 2006. In 2008, he produced Junk to Jewels — The Things that Peranakans Value, an exhibition and catalogue for the Peranakan Museum. He co-curated Sarong Kebaya, which opened in April 2011 at the same museum and a book he wrote on the subject was published in 2014. In 2018 this book was shortlisted for the Singapore History Prize. The 2013 exhibition Inherited and Salvaged: Family Portraits from the NUS Museum Straits Chinese Collection was comprised largely of portrait paintings he had assembled. He also contributed an essay to the exhibition catalogue that was published in 2015. In 2016, he co-curated Singapore, Sarong Kebaya and Style at the Fukuoka Art Museum and the Shoto Museum in Tokyo. He was the guest curator of Port Cities: Multicultural Emporiums of Asia, 1500-1900 at ACM, which opened in November 2016, and co-authored its exhibition catalogue. In 2017, he was the historical consultant for a Peranakan-themed short film launched at the Singapore Changi Airport Terminal 4. Peter was also the guest curator of Amek Gambar: Peranakans and Photography, an exhibition held at the Peranakan Museum from 2018 to 2019. In 2020, The Mark of Empire, a four-part documentary in which he features as the series’ host, was broadcast regionally by Channel News Asia, Singapore, and uploaded on YouTube.
