The National Heritage Board (NHB) presents The World of Heritage Conservation: Sneak Peeks into Safeguarding Singapore’s National Collection, a new travelling exhibition that brings visitors into the often unseen world of the conservators at the Heritage Conservation Centre (HCC) who care for these treasures. The exhibition features case studies of how items in the National Collection are conserved in four fields – paintings, textiles, objects and paper alongside displays of a conservator’s tools of trade.
The World of Heritage Conservation: Sneak Peeks into Safeguarding Singapore’s National Collection is the 13th and latest addition to NHB’s ongoing Heritage on the Move series of travelling exhibitions, that bring different aspects of Singapore’s heritage closer to Singaporeans.
The exhibition, which took 10 months to put together, also profiles four of HCC’s conservators, each specialising in one of the four conservation fields, to demonstrate the process of interventive and preventive work on artwork and artefacts in our National Collection. The exhibition also includes interactive features such as a large puzzle and a panorama flip board, behind-the-scenes videos, and a display of 14 key tools that are used in the conservation process.
The four artefacts highlighted in the case studies include a 19th-century painting of an opium clipper at sea against the backdrop of the Singapore waterfront; an orange floral lace cheongsam from the mid-20th century; a toothbrush used by a prisoner of war during the Japanese Occupation; and a panorama of Singapore’s cityscape hand-drawn on paper from memory.
The World of Heritage Conservation: Sneak Peeks into Safeguarding Singapore’s National Collection will be on display at the Central Public Library from today till 30 September, before it travels to different locations across the island as listed below:
● October 2021: Bishan Public Library
● November 2021: Jurong West Public Library
● December 2021: Marine Parade Public Library
● January 2022: [To be confirmed]
● February 2022: Tampines Regional Library
For more information on the travelling exhibition, please visit https://go.gov.sg/nhb-travelling-exhibitions.