Having studied sociology and completing his Masters at the National University of Singapore (NUS), Daniel Tham has studied and researched on post-war Singapore. As a curator with the National Museum of Singapore, Daniel focusses more on the colonial era of Singapore’s history. Curated based on the concept of a garden, he offers a different perspective to approaching some of the pieces found in The William Farquhar Collection of Natural History Drawings. Speaking of curating exhibitions, we find out from Daniel about his dream exhibition.

Briefly run through the curatorial process for The William Farquhar Collection of Natural History Drawings exhibition.

It has a lot to do with being familiar with the collection really. We started sometime in January with 477 drawings. With so many artworks, it’s quite impossible to show everything at the same time, so we had to make a collection. So, knowing what the drawings are about and researching on the historical context were some of the things that I needed to do in order to be familiar with the drawings. More work had to be done in working out the historical context because there are no specific documentations on these artworks. We don’t exactly know how William Farquhar commissioned the artists or how the drawings were done. The curatorial process also involved understanding the artistic context like the kind of styles present in the drawings, which helps in piecing the collection together.

Was there a lot of missing information before you pieced everything together?

The information is always there. There have been other researchers that have been doing work on this collection and also other similar collections elsewhere. So I think it’s more of getting hold of all this information and putting it together to having something coherent. Once I better understood all these things, I started to conceptualize the storyline, deciding what I wanted to focus on and balancing a few other things as well. On one hand, I wanted to have a good selection to would give people an idea of the collection as a whole, and not to be specifically focused on any one thing, especially when it’s the first selection. On the other hand, I wanted people to go beyond seeing the paintings as they are. On one level, the drawings give a good indication of the biodiversity of the region, which nature lovers will almost naturally identify with, so I wanted to keep that; and another level, I wanted to people to ask questions like ‘What kind of colonial world did these paintings come from?’,  ‘What does this context tell us about these drawings?’, and even ‘What can the drawings themselves tell us about the context?’.

So can we be almost certain that the curatorial direction of the exhibition will change year after year?

I’m very open to that; but that’s one of the things that I’m not so certain about yet. I think its difficult to keep to one fixed storyline because it can be quite boring; and its not very possible either. For example, if you have a certain storyline and you need to have certain highlights or anchoring pieces that help you to tell you story, you may limited by conservation issues where you can only show each drawing for about a year and then let it rest for four or five years. So once I use a painting, I can’t touch it till five years later. With that in mind, I had to ration my highlights. I mean, obviously all the drawings are interesting, but there are some that are of a particular interest; that help to tell certain stories. So it was a little frustrating at first, because it was I really wanted to show so many things, but I also had to think long term.

So its got to do with strategic planning too.

Which can be quite painful at times.

What is one thing during the process that public aren’t usually aware of?

People tend to associate curating with the actual curatorial work of deciding upon a direction; a certain perspective; and a certain way of presenting a set of items, artwork or historical artifacts, which involves the academic and conceptual input. But what people usually fail to realize is the limitations that have to be considered. If you compare writing a paper or curating an online exhibition, that may have its own challenges; to an actual exhibition, you’re very limited by what you really can show based on the type of artifacts that are available. Part of it is of course, trying to source for artifacts as well, that are relevant to what you want to talk about.

Another challenge is balancing different interests. In terms of the curatorial perspective, I want to put forth a certain message, or I want my visitors to ask certain questions, or get something out of it. But I also worked very closely with exhibition designers who think a lot more about the aesthetics. So there are a lot of negotiations that take place on that level. I also had to work with my conservators who are of course, primarily interested in the well being of the artifacts, how well they are taken care of and what kind of conditions are best for them. Conservation is so important to these drawings and the reason why they are still so vibrant, is because they have been well preserved throughout the years. I believe we have a strong part to play in maintaining that, but at the same time, I really want people to see the drawings and to appreciate them. So I worked with my conservators to strike out a balance. It’s the act of balancing all these different things together that is really quite tough.

There is still quite a large group of people that do not find the museums or art appealing. How would you interest them to visit your exhibition?

When you talk about art, there’s all sort of art. But if we look at this particular collection, it’s a collection of natural history drawings and a collection of colonial era drawings that were done by local artists. When you see it in that perspective, there’s a lot to draw people into. I think people still tend to feel a bit intimated by art because they think that there’s a fixed way to appreciating art, where you need to know your art history, the various periods and movements and artists. So I guess there’s that distance that people feel. But I think it’s a lot more accessible for natural history art and you can even interact with this art on a non-artistic level. There are fruits like the rambutan and durian that anyone here can relate to or identify right away.

Another thing about this collection is that there are so many other stories that lie beneath the drawings, so it’s not just about the artistic style. Although, there’s even a story behind each style, like how certain artists worked under a colonial supervisor, the constraints they had to work under and that could even give the viewer an idea of the world that the artists were living in at that time. I think when people start thinking about these things; the exhibition becomes somewhat more accessible.

I mean it’s also the collection by William Farquhar and most people would remember him from our schoolbooks.

William Farquhar was known to be a humble man. Based on the research you have done, what kind of person do you think he was?

It’s actually quite hard to know exactly that much about him because we don’t have any memoirs by him; he never wrote one; which I find quite strange actually. At that time, a lot of his peers would have had their own memoirs, dairies or recordings of what had happened and what they did. So it’s a bit hard to get a good picture of him, especially when we have Raffles’ side of the story; which doesn’t cast him in very good light. Farquhar always seems to be the underdog, the guy who’s not really credited for a lot of things. Although he was very instrumental in the actual building up of the settlement in Singapore for the first couple of years, you would usually think of Raffles a lot more. Farquhar also isn’t quite recognized for his contributions for discovering certain species. These things make me want him to get a bit more credit. So maybe I’m a little bit more biased in that way, but all of us are in the certain way.

He does strike me as someone who cared for the people – the residents in Malacca and Singapore. He was very much concerned with the daily affairs of the people. Records that we do have about him, talk about how he was willing to sit down and address the concerns of the people, whether rich or poor; and that speaks a lot about his willingness to be in touch with the people. That’s one impression I have of him; that he was always well loved by the people.

They threw him big farewells when he left Malacca and Singapore. People would make it a point to send him off and they would make a lot of gifts for him as well. When he left Singapore, the Chinese community made him this large silver epergne, a large ornamental bowl that people put on their coffee tables to contain fruits.

Something about William Farquhar that we weren’t told about in school was the fact that he had a lot of pets. He had a 6-month-old tapir, quite a number of monkeys and birds.

Yes, he did. He was actually the one who discovered the tapir but because of a delay in publication, he was not quite recognized for that.

He did have a tapir in his own residence. We know this from the account that was eventually published by the Asiatic Society of Bangore, where he gave his scientific account of the tapir and at the end; he talked about having one himself. If I remember correctly, he mentioned that the tapir was quite and that it liked to go to his dinner table to eat bread and cakes.

The story Hikayat Abdullah, written by the scribe, Abdullah bin Abdul Kadhir, is probably one of the only accounts that talks about what Farquhar has in his own residence. It mentions that he had a lot of monkeys, gibbons, macaques, porcupines, a leopard, a cassowary and all sorts of animals. We also do know that he had a particular love for birds, so he had a lot of them too. He had a tiger cub where he had keeper who specifically took take care of it. But when it grew a bit older, it blinded a carpenter it was put down after that. There’s also something else about him wanting to collect elephants and him offering rewards to locals who caught them.

There’s a tension between William Farquhar and his demands from the commissioned artists and the aesthetics of these artists. What are some of the things that we can look out for at this exhibition?

That’s actually one of the main themes that I want to highlight and I guess that comes down to his relationship with the artist. To begin with, there was already a power inequality because Farquhar commissioned these artists. He probably wanted something similar to the other scientific drawings of the day like that of William Curtis, who set out to do the drawings of all the plants in the ten mile radius of London. The drawings were quite three-dimensional and they tried to show perspective, zooming in on the important parts of the plants, especially the fruit or flowers, dissections; basically things that would be important to help scientists identity the plants. So that was Farquhar’s demand and it’s interesting to see how well the Chinese artists did that. Once you look at how the animals are placed in a certain environment, the perspectives look slightly wrong, and there’s a certain flatness to the drawings. Some of the proportions are also not quite right like in the drawing of the dark handed gibbon whose face is smaller than the mangosteen that it is holding.

On one level these artists were being commissioned, but at the same time, you can see their distinct styles. These were supposed to be scientific drawings but yet you can see that the artists couldn’t help but inject their own storylines.

How sure are you that the drawings were done by Chinese artists?

Because of the historical convention at the time, we do know that they often got Chinese artists to do this sort of work although some of the styles do not look very Chinese. There are elements that aren’t typically Chinese, like the short and stunted roots, the use of colours or gouache that is a lot darker compared to the naturalistic colours that blend with each other. There could be an Indian influence too. That’s what makes this exhibition and interesting and endearing in that sense.

Out of all the pieces being exhibited, which was the one that jumped out at you?

It’s very hard to decide. But the one drawing that did jump out at me was the pied triller, a black and white bird that is flying downwards attacking a caterpillar that’s one of the leaves of a durian tree. In this selection at least, it’s the only one that captures that animal mid flight. This one seems to be the most dramatic where you have the bird swooping down.

If you go back to how Chinese artists were trying to inject some kind of storyline into their drawings then this drawing is a very good example. It’s a nicely composed piece where you have the bird on one side, the caterpillar, the leaf, the durian and then the flower at the bottom – a picture that almost certainly never appears in real life. You know what it’s trying to capture, you know what it’s trying to say but yet at the same time, this is something that was clearly a product of the artist’s imagination. Scientists will tell you that for the durian flower usually points downwards, not up; and it’s also very rare to see both the flower and the fruit at the same time but you see both here. The pike triller does eat caterpillars and worms, but it usually does so when stationary, not flying. So again, that’s something that is imagined.

There’s that intersection and tension between what is supposed to be realistic and the product of their imagination, and that makes it one of my favourites.

What’s one exhibition that you hope to be able to curate one day?

I’d really love to do an exhibition on the modern history of Singapore music. How much of it is derivative from existing forms and trends, and amidst all of that, how can we see a distinct Singaporean flavour emerging from it? I would definitely feature the local indie (or independent) scene, which I feel is a significant development in music here over the past few decades. I think it’ll be great to bring out the connection between Singapore’s changing social and political landscape with the kinds of independent responses from various musicians and bands in each era. Apart from musical style itself, that’s what sets bands like the Oddfellows and Force Vomit and musicians like Leslie Low apart from others overseas, and I feel they are truly part of Singapore’s heritage even if you’d never find them mentioned in school textbooks.

If there was one artist that you could meet, whether dead or alive, who would it be and why?

This is a really difficult question. I’m not sure if I’d like to meet all the artists I admire. It could be rather nerve-wracking, and what if they turn out to be horrible people? Regardless, I would really love to meet Banksy. I guess he’s the kind of artist people either love or hate, and I think the best kind of art is divisive, generates debate, or at the very least provokes some kind of response from people. The worse has to be stuff that people just view and say “that looks alright”.

Perhaps part of my choice has to do with his enigmatic identity, which he has smartly kept under wraps for most part. How nice to be one of the few who know who he is! But this has to be secondary, since anonymity is either a whole load of hype or a means of forcing you to look at the art and not the artist. Whichever way you see it, I guess. Along those lines, I think I’ll be more interested in tagging along when he’s at work than actually talking to him about his art, since the art itself is quite self-explanatory and it doesn’t take very much to figure out what he’s saying through it. And of course, along the way, I’d love to hear from him on what he’s got next up his sleeve. That would be quite a treat.