At the heart of the hull and the rig exhibition at the NUS Museum lies a fascinating convergence of artefacts and contemporary art, offering a unique lens into Southeast Asia’s maritime heritage. The display showcases boat models originally commissioned for Singapore’s now-defunct Maritime Museum in the 1970s, alongside evocative works by Singaporean artist Charles Lim. Together, these objects illuminate the deep yet often overlooked connections between the region’s maritime traditions, island heritage, and modern state-making.
Crafted by Southern Islanders and vocational artisans, the boat models carry stories of boat-making traditions passed down through generations, embodying a vibrant maritime culture. Once exhibited at the Malay Heritage Centre, their journey to the NUS Museum speaks to the institutional histories, shifting ownership, and the enduring resonance of these vessels. Lim’s works, meanwhile, capture the sea’s fluid role as both a resource and a realm that is often tightly governed, inviting broader reflections on water as a shared space.
Curated under the Museum’s innovative prep-room framework, the project is as much a research platform as a display, drawing on multidisciplinary collaborations between the worlds of art, curation, and academic scholarship. In this interview, Sidd Perez, the NUS Museum’s Curatorial Lead, delves into the artefacts, their histories, and the ongoing relationship between maritime cultures, watery geographies, and living communities.
Tell us about the boat models displayed in the hull and the rig. How did they become a part of the NUS Museum collection?
The boat models are quite particular [compared to] our regular donations because they came as a transfer from our colleagues at the Malay Heritage Centre (MHC). Like most cultural centres, MHC builds up a new narrative or a new set of research every five to ten years, and a lot of the permanent displays from their previous iteration would need to be refreshed.
The NUS Museum was approached for a couple of reasons. One of them is that we have a lot of maritime-centred exhibitions and projects, and a few of these feature Eric Alfred, who coincidentally commissioned the making of these boats for the Maritime Museum, [which opened in 1975].
Who is Eric Alfred?
Eric Alfred is whom we call, in the museum field, the first local curator of the Raffles Museum (now known as the National Museum of Singapore, while its scientific holdings [became] the seed collection of the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum). The Raffles Museum and Library has a colonial history, with most directors coming from the British Colonial Office. Eric Alfred was the first Malayan-born curator, and he set up the Maritime Museum of Singapore (now defunct) in Sentosa, then known as Pulau Belakang Mati. In the hull and the rig, Charles Lim’s video work Polymath captures his interview with Eric Alfred, where Eric spoke about that history. That’s how we know that it was he who commissioned these boats.
These boat models appear to be at the centre of these institutional histories.
Yes, I love exploring the histories of institutions in Malaya-Singapore, because we discover that the objects move between them, get reassembled into different typologies and collections — retaining a very ambivalent status that enriches their object biographies. Sentosa went through several entities: PSA (Port of Singapore Authority), MPA (Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore), Mapletree, and the corporations under these agencies. What stands as complicated ownership of these models makes the study of these objects very interesting. Nobody knows who “technically” owns them. We could return the models to affiliated organisations, but we might never see them displayed or treated like subjects again.
What was your reaction when you first saw the boat models?
These boat models materially represented a specific period. The making of the boats is exemplary, executed only through local knowledge systems.Even the materials of the sails, the wood, the thread, and the fabric are no longer commonplace things you can get off the shelf. They are beautiful objects, and they are abandoned objects.
The institutional ambivalence and the hazy ownership of the boat models had an exciting potential. They came into being through a museum that is no longer here, and felt, for me, like witnesses of a specific time. But they also materialise a way to understanding our interface with island knowledges [in] the present, by pointing us to the big cultural community where boats are at the heart of life. Boat-making and boat-racing are ongoing activities in the region, but are being gradually pushed out of Singapore’s social consciousness. This collection of boat models is an axis of all these things.
Who are the makers of these boats?
That is where it gets a little hazy and a little fun! Unlike regular museum collections that are often donated or acquired, these boats were made to populate the Maritime Museum. From Charles Lim’s interview with Eric Alfred, we know that two islanders from the Southern Islands, Ahmad and Ali, were commissioned to build these artefacts. The islanders have very specific boat-making traditions, often passed on through rule of thumb. We cannot pinpoint exactly who did what, because artisanal authorship is governed by different identification and systems of labour.
We also found out through other archives that some of these models might be made by the Baharuddin Vocational Institute, which is now defunct. Artists, like Iskandar Jalil, were teaching there. We know that these are the groups of people who’ve had a hand in this work, and they revealed to us that boat-making is a very distinct genealogy of knowledge.
What’s the boat racing culture like in the region?
There are still a lot of racing activities in the Southern Islands. The two kinds of racing are kolek and jong racing. Kolek are manned vessels that we see in Charles Lim’s work Stealing the Trapeze. There are usually seven to nine people racing one boat.
Jongs are almost the same size as these models. They’re small unmanned vessels. It’s amazing when you see them launched into the water. Even bumboats with engines can’t outrun them, they’re that fast! There is still a lot of kolek racing around the Riau Islands, and this happens mostly on Indonesian National Day in August. Singapore used to be a big representative at these races, especially at Clifford Pier during colonial times. Johor, Singapore, and Riau took turns hosting these races.
What was some of the other research that took place while curating this display?
The archival materials are quite dispersed. For collection research, we often start with the materials themselves and look at the functions or reasons they were conceived. We found few archival photographs of the boat models in exhibition histories.
However, there was an opportunity to engage with their naming. We replicated the captions and boat names from the Malay Heritage Centre. During installation, our expert Fawzi pointed out that the names were inaccurate!1 So we started to go deep into studying boat anatomy, which unlocked so many other considerations in taxonomy. Ultimately, it’s between the Western and the local frameworks of naming. In the West, the rig [the boat’s mast, sails, and rigging] determines the boat typology. But in our region, the hull [the boat’s body] determines what it’s used for. Eric Alfred named this problem in his thesis on boats, The 20th Century Malay Perahus of Peninsular Malaysia, Singapore and Southern Thailand (2008). Among all the written conventions on boat naming, there’s little convergence. That’s part of the research potential — to consider forms of study through boat-makers and museology.
At some point in our research, we discovered small rivers in mainland Malaysia and Thailand because these boats were said to have passed through them. When the maps don’t show smaller bodies of water, the boats lead us there and teach us about the watery geography of the region.
How did you conceptualise these two groups of work in parallel, and what kind of conversation do you hope to spark through this convergence?
The gifting of these two sets of works (the boat models from MHC and Charles Lim’s works) came simultaneously. Charles’s work has revolved around the sea as a field and resource of the state, though this is nuanced, not pointed out literally. Meanwhile, the boat models have always been presented as artefacts or ethnographic indices.
When we put Charles’s evocative works together with the boat models together in a space, the scope of the relationship shifts from the state to the larger, borderless water region that binds cultures across nation-states. Together, these two sets of objects and artworks facilitate new interpretations.
What does “prep-room” mean? What are some of the curatorial approaches under this prep-room framework?
The prep-room is a curatorial modality in the NUS Museum. On the one hand, it is an incubation space that exposes how the NUS Museum develops collections. On the other, it’s also a holding room for experimenting with different knowledge bodies, that allows thinking with people. Unlike our temporary and permanent exhibitions, it’s ongoing and not bound to be an exhibition display.
What it does first is to release a set of objects or artefacts out of the fixed sets of interpretations within museology and other specific disciplines. When the boats came to us, they were still in an interim status between the MHC and NUS Museum. So I also played with the administrative boundaries of museums in exhibiting these boat models for interpretation and study.
How has this curatorial process inspired your relationship with the watery world?
I was inspired to think in the space of the watery world instead of my usual landlocked perspective. It’s like learning to follow a river of thought, which seems to exist or materialise itself in a different way that is emergent [in] museology. But the curatorial’s relationship to “watery” subjects changed the way I think about objects, people, and time.
So much of curating in a university museum is based on the historiography of thought, practice, and objects. I’m inspired to rethink and see if there are other ways to “display” multiple modes of the curatorial. There’s always this dialectic of the creative and the scholarly, also present in the hull and the rig. It’s still within the bounds of ethnography and of the museum discipline, but it’s also more than that.
Another thing I want to bring up is different forms of regionality across time. There was a point in national histories when “Southeast Asia” reckoned with “mother civilisations” and a post-colonial, post-Cold War fallout. We want to show the connections beyond the landlocked borders of the region. We also want to highlight living communities that are with us, and consider their connections across nations.
For a person interested in knowing more about local maritime culture, what would you suggest them doing as a start?
Get close to the waters. Go South! There’s something I learned from the artist ila through her short stories. ila spends a lot of creative time at the shore. Her works show that water is not as still as we think.
There are things to be found on the beach; there are ceremonies that people do at Changi Beach. Be around water — you will find your own stories. And get on intertidal walks and tours! The tours are good because you have islanders or former islanders as guides. Go straight to the source!
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the hull and the rig runs at the NUS Museum till 31 March 2025. Find out more at museum.nus.edu.sg.
1. Fawzi Nasir works in jong making and has kolek boat making and racing lineage. He is also the boat racing representative for Singapore, involved in administering sailing competitions. Fawzi has been an integral informant and collaborator for this prep-room.
Responses have been edited for clarity and style.
Header image: Gallery impression. Bedar, sampan, and East Coast boats. Image courtesy of NUS Museum.
