I had my first gallery presentation last Saturday. It was a requirements of the ACM volunteers training course that I complete three gallery presentations and one tour paper (hey, do I need to a tour presentation?). It was a fun exercise - each of the seventy-odd trainees are assigned different artifacts to do research on. We are each supposed to do a five minute presentation, and a three page gallery paper on the artifacts. My artifacts were a Dayak Carved Skull and a Dayak Shield, and I was told specifically to discuss the head-hunting culture of the Dayaks. Cool huh?

I spent a Saturday at the NUS library doing research and my bed-time reading for the week leading up to the presentation was concentrated on the Dayaks and their culture. What I find more illuminating is not the Dayak culture, but the approach taken by the commentators through time. It is particularly evident in the case of the earlier Western commentators - they reacted with horror at the practice and accused the Dayaks of being blood-thirsty cowardly savages who sneaked up on their victims, who are mainly the elderly, the women and the children. They also wrote of how it was the women who egged their men on, since they refused to marry any man who had not taken at least one head, and how they danced around the longhouse clutching the bloodied head, consumed with blood-lust once a head is obtained and brought back by the men. Commentators after the colonial period are more PC and detached - they view the headhunting practice as a religious practice, since the belief is that the soul resides in the head of a person and to take the head is to add to the "pool" of souls of a longhouse. The blood-thirsty women became "priestesses" and emotive words such as "blood-thirst", "blood-lust", "savage" etc disappeared from the commentary.

I couldn't find anything regarding the practice of carving designs into the skulls though - I told another trainee that I think the whole carved skull business is a hoax, but then again, I have no evidence on that either. Sigh ...

Another fellow team-member was assigned the topic of the Vietnamese water puppets, which I found very interesting as well. Apparently, the "stage" for the performance of water puppets is the flooded padi fields, with the puppeteers standing in the chest-high water. Unfortunately, the gallery was being used for a gamelan rehearsal and my friend had to improvise on the staircase landing - it was too crowded and too noisy to do the presentation at the exhibit itself. Yours truly and another team-mate had hold up theA-Z Guidebook (our textbook, sortof) and pretended to be the exhibit . A few visitors were giving us quizzical look throughout the presentation - quite funny actually!

Other team-mates did presentations on the Dong-Sun Drum, Vietnamese block prints, jewellery etc etc. Overall, a very interesting day!

It is way more interesting here however, because this time round, there is a subject matter - the Asia Civilisations Museum - how the artifacts are to be presented, how these relate to Singapore, how the story is to be told. And the last point is perhaps the most crucial to those of us sitting in the overcrowded ACE Space in the ACM Armenian Street that rainy afternoon - assuming we complete our training, we are supposed to be weekend volunteer guides bringing visitors around the museum. Many of them will probably be Singaporeans, and of these, a significant number will be aware of the ways in which history can be twisted and turned toward political ends - does the term "National Education" rings a bell?

I always thought that it is vital that the artifacts displayed at a museum have some kind of link to the country that it is located. I was extremely bemused when I was at the Vatican City some years ago and one of the first exhibits I saw upon entering the museum was Egyptian mummies! I don't recall the Vatican City as being a colonial power exerting sway over the Middle East - what has Egyptian mummies got anything to do with the Vatican which has its own incredible history of political intrigues and its own justly-renowned collection of artworks?

So that brings us back to the original question - how are we to tell a story about the exhibits in the Asian Civilisations Museum that is nonetheless a Singaporean story, and I do not mean to use the term "Singapore story" in the National Education sense of nation building, immigrants coming to Singapore to make it their home blab blab blab. I mean it more as in how the exhibits reflect who we are, why it makes sense for these artifacts to be housed in a museum in Singapore rather than say France or South Africa or Russia. And I guess we have to look a bit deeper into this issue and ask - whose story are we telling? The story of the great men of Singapore history, the stories of the faceless immigrants who came here seeking to make some cash and go home, the stories of Western politicians? Whose stories are we telling and why?

And I think that ACM is not just about the great men, but about most of us - ordinary people who will never in the ordinary course of things appear as anything more than a statistic in the government papers or some professional papers. It is about the civilisations that we came from - not just the mother-lode - i.e. traditional Chinese, India or whatever but also how these aspects of these cultures adapt themselves to the trends of that time - traditional artistry modified to suit foreign taste, beliefs that diverge from the mainstream due to long segregation, the assimilation of practices from other cultures, tribes. And while none of my ancestors, to the best of my knowledge, had ever worn the imperial dragon robes, or carried a miniature qur'an with them for protection or blessings, or sailed the seven seas for gold, god and glory, all these form a part of me and made me who I am today - it explains why I live in a Chinese-dominated city-state in a Malay-dominated region. It explains why chicken and fish are two of the most popularly consumed meat in Singapore despite the Chinese fondness for pork. It even explains why memories of my secondary school days are forever tainted with images of me slouched over pages and pages of Chinese phrases to be memorised. In other words, the ACM is not about events that ocurred, for example, Singapore's development as a port but more about the background in which these events occurred, e.g. how the people who made Singapore into a leading port lived and died - their beliefs, their life-style, their hopes, their dreams and their fears.