Thinking through alterity with NUS Museum, External Assessment Summer School, and The Artists Village
By Mary Ann Lim

Fyerool Darma, ‘After Ballads’, 2018, prep-room installation view. Image courtesy of NUS Museum.

The emergence of alternative pedagogies in the last few decades has been simultaneous with decolonising responses to educational systems. With the arts community championing the cause for decolonial frameworks, it is important to acknowledge how art has also been creating sites for alternative pedagogies, nudging into shape the ways we share, produce, and consume knowledge in Singapore.

This essay traces some of the key discourses and practices that have emerged in Singapore, from para-institutional endeavours, to those working independently through self-organisation. Recent projects include the National University of Singapore Museum’s prep-rooms led by curator Siddharta Perez who negotiates the institution’s strictures from within, the experimental External Assessment Summer School run by artist and designer Vanessa Ban, and one-off ventures from the Post-Museum and The Substation. There are also programmes with longer pedagogical thrusts that dip into Singapore’s art history, particularly The Artists Village with its Art History Klub and ‘S-23’ series, co-initiated by artist and curator Woon Tien Wei. While the examples cited graze merely the tip of an iceberg of efforts that push for alterity in an otherwise linear society, these works have significantly contributed to an ever-mutating landscape of knowledge circulation and production.

Rethinking education

Lina Adam, ‘Culinary History of Singapore Performance Art’, 2023, ‘S-23’ Performance at Lasalle Singapore. Photo by Syaza Nisrina, image courtesy of The Artists Village. — Lina Adam, ‘Culinary History of Singapore Performance Art’, 2023, ‘S-23’Performance at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore. Photo by Syaza Nisrina. Image courtesy of The Artists Village.

The modes of education that pervade Singapore to this day stem from inherited colonial school systems. On the one hand, a systematised process of teaching and learning, moving through various stages of primary, secondary, and then tertiary schooling may allow new generations to grow and develop, paving the way for a country’s advancement. On the other hand, educational processes are gate-kept within classroom settings, or in some cases, behind paywalls. Further, immaterial forces such as teacher-student hierarchies that fail to recognise students’ autonomies, or institutional biases tend to skew in favour towards those in power. In this manner, important questions about Singapore’s current education system and their inverse implications loom large: who has access to the production and consumption of knowledge, ergo, who is left out? What counts as important enough for formal transmission while other types of expertise are deemed inferior? In a neo-liberal capitalist society, the answers to these questions privilege certain values of productivity, efficiency, and commodification, which often run counter to or ignore other collaborative, indigenous, and everyday exigencies.

These principles also seep into the ways Singapore approaches art discourse, where art is often couched in terms of its use-value rather than foregrounding its diversity of ideas. T.K. Sabapathy wrote in “Contemporary Art in Singapore: An Introduction” that, “When art enters public discourse, or rather official discourse, it is customarily framed in political or economic terms, that is, to ornament regional, bilateral alliances and compacts, to boost the tourist industry, and to create in Singapore regional or international markets for transacting art works as commodities to generate revenue.” Art in this sense is mere commodity, its complex worlds disregarded to fuel various state agendas. This truncates both the critical insights and conversations that art and its spaces can hold.

Another aspect to look at is how education also coagulates with state pedagogy. Singapore’s education policies are derived directly from the British system, and its General Certificate Assessments (GCEs) continue to be assessed by the University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate. The country’s colonial legacies are further embedded into the framework of the nation’s ideologies and therefore the worldviews of its citizens. As Ato Quayson and Ankhi Mukherjee note in ‘Decolonising the English Literary Curriculum’, “the beginning of British colonial rule continued to be the undeniable fulcrum around which the national narrative was construed.”

As such, bringing art into the fold of traditional schooling produces a curious, contradictory result. Dr Suhail Malik wrote in an essay commissioned for the Taipei Biennial 2010 that “contemporary art is the opposite of schooling, and at its most provocative, even seeks to eradicate schooling.” He proposes that art inherently resists colonial and capitalist mechanisms since its interests are in transformation and criticality. Artistic practices can only be sustained when embracing both the porous boundaries of knowledge, as well as the autonomy of each individual to interpret and bring to the table their own tapestry of contexts and personal idiosyncrasies. The necessarily democratising impetus of art thus eludes the exclusionary hand of the schooling system.

Locating alterity within institutions

A general view of the Main Gallery in the University of Malaya Art Museum from the 1959 Guidebook to the University of Malaya Art Museum. Image courtesy of NUS Museum.

Due to the paucity of research and writing on alternative pedagogies in Singapore, its historical biographies are difficult to uncover without first looking at institutions, particularly because Singapore’s art education is deeply intertwined with various established modes of schooling. At a tertiary level, art education is often rooted in art history, where specific artists and modes of analysis that fit within a canon are produced and consumed. For instance, the University of Malaya Art Museum was established in 1955 as a teaching museum specifically for students in the History of Art course.

However, the museum’s recent endeavours in pedagogy are worth examining as a way through which alterity can emerge through the tensions and slippages in the institution. Against the backdrop of Singapore’s independence which propelled the formation of the National University of Singapore (NUS), the University of Malaya Art Museum now presents itself as the NUS Museum. Further, with the dissolution of the Art History Programme in 1973, the NUS Museum has found creative ways to negotiate the need for discursive pluralities amidst its evolving contexts. Standing at the curious crossroads of academia and art, their exhibition-making posits the museum and its collections as an “interpretative field where all components have some sort of manifestation”, thus moving away from a typical didactic form of teaching.

Siddharta Perez (far right) in the NUS Museum’s Resource Library showing museum archives often deployed in the prep-room. Image courtesy of NUS Museum.

Curator Siddharta Perez herself similarly occupies two roles: that of curator and teacher, the former a gatekeeper of how the museum’s collections can be interpreted, but the latter allows her to open up its access and analysis to a wide variety of students, researchers, academics and beyond, from a whole host of disciplines. As such, her pedagogy lies in straddling what she calls “two fields”: working with and trying to align the vagaries of the intellect, alongside the volatility of creative energies. She also points out that a lot of these negotiations come through the museum’s prep-room and its attendant programmes. Conceived as an “unbounded space where anything can happen”, the prep-room makes accessible the exhibitionary process to both the public’s gaze and influence, resulting in an open-ended format that does not reach for a specific educational outcome.

Artists Marvin Tang and ila run Session 3 of the ‘currents’ masterclass series.

Installation view of the ‘currents’ prep-room display at the NUS Museum. Images courtesy of NUS Museum.

In this spirit, the educational materials and personnel filtered in from the university undergo a process whereby their work and knowledges are subject to what Perez calls “ambivalence”. She adds, “I watch out for ‘soft’ places in their research and teaching material that inadvertently fall through the cracks as their works manifest, because that’s where creativity can be found. It is in these places that other things can be coaxed out: imagination, instinct, other senses, and intuitive knowledges that will help us to find some answers.” These pedagogical endeavours have recently culminated in the museum’s recent prep-room, ‘currents’. Bringing together works from participants who attended two weeks of masterclasses by artists like ila, Charles Lim, and Marvin Tang, alongside academics like Hamzah Muzaini, and Wong Zihao, the display reflected their disciplinary diversity while engaging in cohesive conversation. Revolving around the themes of governance and infrastructure of islands, images, videos, and sounds were shown, as well as objects considered unruly within the contexts of an art museum: archives, text, and in-progress works.

Conservator Kate Pocklington’s programme ‘The Buaya Trail’ conducted as part of the prep-room ‘Buaya: the making of a non-myth’, 2018. Image courtesy of NUS Museum.

Justifying the existence of, and therefore, sustaining this pedagogical method within a university is not without its challenges. Perez notes, “It is difficult for institutions to accept an interface with a highly charged interpretative field whose impact cannot be measured immediately.” She cites previous programmes such as New Curriculum for Old Questions, a three day camp and think tank to explore how knowledge can be produced and imparted critically, or former prep-rooms like artist Fyerool Darma’s ‘After Ballads’, and conservator Kate Pocklington’s ‘Buaya: the making of a non-myth’ as examples. The pedagogy imparted at the museum trickles into breakthroughs, research papers, and sustained practices years after their tenures at the museum have ended - a stark contrast to the instantaneous accomplishments and learning objectives that institutions demand.

Schools beyond schools

Group photo with Vanessa Ban (front row, second from left) from the 2019 edition of External Assessment Summer School at DECK. Image courtesy of Vanessa Ban.

Many artists and curators have also found ways to form independently run schools that circumnavigate the strictures of institutions. External Assessment Summer School (EASS) began in 2018 as an alternative educational platform by artist and graphic designer Vanessa Ban who also runs her own design studio, and adopts a week-long teaching model consisting of lectures, workshops, making, and sharing. Similar to Perez’s projects, the EASS also does not offer any formal certifications or grading systems. An interdisciplinary initiative, it was conceived to fill what Ban perceived as a pedagogical gap in the industry. “EASS started a few years back when I realised I wanted to explore a different pedagogical model that involved a more expansive curriculum. I’d been teaching design in a few universities, but felt that students would benefit from exposure to different subject areas like anthropological research, art history, curation, architecture and so on.”

Participants get ready for pin-ups during the first edition of EASS 2018, at Goodman Arts Centre. Image courtesy of Vanessa Ban.

Since its inception, EASS has had four iterations, each one built on ways to probe participants to reflect further on triangulating their practice within a larger cultural ecology. For instance, their 2019 iteration titled ‘Practice’ focused on navigating the bounded systems of cultural production by thinking of design methods that enable collaboration, while their 2021 iteration pushed this ongoing research into considering global moments of heightened precarities and indeterminacy. These concerns draw from Ban’s own design practice that has always resisted easy categorisation. “The school is a place for people who have a more expansive practice, or whose practices do not necessarily fit in,” remarks Ban. “It helps them to find a learning model that could just allow them to stay receptive to these porous boundaries, or for those who realise that practices can be more than what is institutionally prescribed. Schools often focus on what students can make outwardly, but less so on getting them to think deeper about their own practices.”

While Ban hopes to sustain this for the long-term, some schools choose to exist as a one-off format, reacting to various interests or contexts of the time. For instance, the School of Uncommon Knowledge was initiated by The Substation in 2016 under its programming theme of ‘A Home for the Arts’. It was set up as an open school to celebrate the exchange of skills that are typically undervalued or overlooked, while providing a common space where hierarchies between teachers and students are blurred. Classes ran the gamut of niche topics like ‘Flu remedies & hacks from a punk’ to ‘Lindy Hop reexamined’ offered by artist Loo Zihan. As the school was open to the general public to sign up and offer classes, the programme not only facilitated the exchange of valuable knowledges, but provided an educational space where personal histories and the vernacular of the everyday could be foregrounded.

The School of Questioning run by Post-Museum also similarly sought to challenge conventional notions of education through a two day camp for children. Held just last year in 2024, it approached learning through a pedagogy of play and curiosity, which provided a solid scaffolding for the participants to ideate on the topic of climate futures. The programmes were led by 4 independent educators that Post-Museum collaborated with, covering simple activities and topics like diorama-making, exploring electronics through sound, and examining bio-alternatives to plastics. Similar to other modes of alternative pedagogies, the School's reverberations are intangible, performing merely as a catalyst for the students to start adopting the simple act of asking questions.

Discursive, artist-led spaces

The roots of alternative pedagogies might also be intertwined with the histories of artist-led spaces and societies, some of whose grassroots initiatives and public educational programmes continue to this day. Art societies like the Angkatan Pelukis Aneka Daya and the Equator Art Society were crucial in providing a space for the artists to hone their practice, as well as organise public exhibitions that shone a spotlight on the artists and their communal or civic activities. Education here takes an informal turn, leaving the idea of a “school” behind to embrace discursive, open-ended, or other format possibilities.

The Artists Village (TAV), Singapore’s first art colony, was founded in 1988 by artist Tang Da Wu whose public practice was informed by his own particular brand of pedagogy, stating that, “An artist should introduce to others what he sees and learns of something.” Throughout their tenure as an official art society in the 90s, they actively organised events to encourage public participation and dialogue. Their ‘Second Sculpture Seminar’ for instance included studio visits and public talks, while ‘Post-Ulu’ marked their departure from their original space at Lorong Gambas, and functioned as a questioning of their practices and methodologies for both old and new members through workshops, exhibitions, and forums.

Woon Tien Wei (back row, second from left) with the current The Artists Village members. Image courtesy of White Room Studio Pte Ltd.

More recently, their endeavours have continued to build on this reflexive way of creating and learning art history. Woon Tien Wei is an artist and curator whose large body of work spans across many key organisations and events in Singapore’s art history. In the early 2000s, he co-founded tsunamii.net, a media art collective in the early 2000s which marked a pivotal moment in Singapore’s early internet art and research-based practices, and was also the former president of TAV in 2001, co-artistic director of The Substation in 2020, and is a current active member in TAV. His work tends towards collectivity and community, making sure to always stay responsive to the times. This philosophy seeps into the way he approaches art history, “Art historical practice right now needs to be flexible, even playful,” says Woon. “Practitioners themselves are not always afforded the time to think about art history, so the work must begin now with continuously responding, researching, and writing to what’s going on out there.”

Isabelle Desjeux, ‘Wild Bread’, 2023, ‘S-23’ performance at Lasalle Singapore. Photo by Syaza Nisrina, image courtesy of The Artists Village. — Isabelle Desjeux, ‘Wild Bread’, 2023, ‘S-23’performance at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore. Photo by Syaza Nisrina. Image courtesy of The Artists Village.

The Artist Village Singapore and National Gallery Singapore, ‘S-24: For a night, we are all a village’, 2024, Mountain Coffee. Photo by Veronyka Lau, image courtesy of The Artists Village. — The Artist Village Singapore and National Gallery Singapore, ‘S-24: For a night, we are all a village’, 2024, Mountain Coffee. Photo by Veronyka Lau. Image courtesy of The Artists Village.

One of the programmes he cites that champions this pedagogy is S-23. Created in 2023 as a site-specific work, the title plays on the S-11 old-school coffeeshop that used to reside near the old National Library and The Substation. It harkens back to the 90s, where the arts community would come together in semi-translucent and social spaces like these. “Art history is fixated on the artworks, but it misses a wider view of the art world”, he observes. “We can also make art history by looking at ecosystems and broader contexts - this changes the structure of how we can read history.” Through artworks, artist talks, performance art, and communal eating sessions, the work enacts conversational spaces as a starting point to doing art history, while cementing cultural memory and community as important facets in its practice. The popularity of this programme has also spurred on annual iterations, with S-24 and S-25 in 2024 and 2025 respectively, using the coffeeshop and community as site and method.

Another on-going programme at TAV that spurs on conversations about art history is their Art History Klub. It started out as a group inquiry into current art exhibitions and practices, and takes on various accessible formats that encourage casual opinions, resource sharing, and reviews of art developments in the region. Some of their activations have included ‘anyhow talk’ where practitioners like Weiqin Chay and Gertrude Tan have shared about their artistic research in an informal setting, while ‘thesis delibs’ encourages scholarly jest through the sharing of research by individuals who may not necessarily have had formal experience in academia. They have also convened book clubs to collectively unpack readings around artworks and theories, and as part of their S-25 work, hosted an Art History Quiz at the National Gallery Singapore. Woon’s primary concern is with what he calls “citizen art history”. He hopes that with such initiatives, they can slowly nudge and initiate non-professionals or “outsiders” into being comfortable with responding to art and art history.

Sustaining alternative pedagogies in the long run

Despite all the substantial work done with the Art History Klub, Woon is uncertain about its future. It is a shared concern across various spaces that have worked with alterity. In my research on Singapore so far, most of the alternative pedagogical initiatives have been transient, whether by choice or other prevailing factors. One of the concerns that practitioners or spaces might have is being able to secure long-term or substantial funding for such initiatives. Perez recalls ‘Pulau Something’, a self-organised, online peer-to-peer study to experiment creating cross-border solidarities. She worked on this with soft/WALL/studs, a collaborative project between various researchers and arts practitioners. She says, “The project eventually simmered out because it felt like we were just chasing after the grant at some point.” She cites the strict deliverables and timelines that grants in Singapore tend to have, which are unfeasible markers to meet if one’s practice or work is not instituted in this way already.

Another hurdle for alternative programmes may lie in the difficulties of navigating bureaucracy that does not yet have the language to understand or accommodate alterity. Woon speaks to how a lot of organisations or policy-makers cannot grasp pedagogy as an experimental pursuit, and that may pose difficulties in securing funding or permits. However, he proposes using the community as an important aspect of securing money and goodwill, highlighting that a lot of community-driven projects over the years give a good spectrum of alternative ways to work and endure through the years.

Participants arrive at the Wakare Market in Majalengka, Indonesia for the External Assessment Summer School 2023 on Southeast Asian Futurism. This iteration of the School was held across 3 Indonesian cities and was supported by the ASEAN Foundation.

A middle-ground can also sometimes be reached, especially if the right institutions are approached for support. For Ban, seeking funding from institutions was a necessity to keep costs affordable for participants from beyond Singapore, and so they have found a good model of working with institutions that provide funding by ensuring that the curriculum and expectations are aligned right from the beginning of negotiation. “We’ve been fortunate that getting funding from institutions has not impeded on our autonomy so far,” observes Ban. “Right now, it's about how the curriculum is framed and positioned, with a responsibility to any of our past and future funders. I foresee it will be a big help to get a sense at the beginning to avoid any miscommunications and make sure expectations are aligned. Ultimately, the goal is to have all parties benefit together from the programme.”

One possible thread to consider are alternative pedagogical models within the Southeast Asia region which display robust frameworks and more sustained practices of alternative pedagogies. Perez muses that an enduring communal desire might be the key to their success, “My understanding of the alternative has always been rooted in my work in the region. For example, the spaces and collectives of my peers in Phnom Penh. Some of the workshops I have done with them are so resonant with thinking about the needs of a community that is becoming. In the different provinces across Southeast Asia, there is essentially that energetic camaraderie through which collectives form, because there is simply no central infrastructure that can support multiple practices and perspectives.” Perhaps looking beyond Singapore for contexts and ways of working might provide crucial clues into how practitioners in Singapore can function. At the same time, this will allow pedagogical models to move beyond the silos of geopolitical boundaries, thinking through and participating in our shared collective future.

About the Writer

Mary Ann Lim is Programme Manager at A&M. She conceptualises programmes and content for external projects, while contributing to writing and media assignments for the platform. With her practice rooted across programming, writing, and research, her interests lie in alternative knowledges, ecologies, and thinking through interdisciplinary practices. She writes short stories and poetry in her spare time.