Patron Of Heritage Awards 2014: Snapshots of the past

For the past two decades, art historian and author Peter Lee has been collecting old photographs related to Peranakan culture from Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. He has found them in all sorts of places, from eBay to antique shops and even flea markets in Europe.

From collecting these precious images, some of which date back to 1861, the 52-year-old Lee — the brother of musician Dick Lee — eventually decided to donate more than 1,000 images to the Asian Civilisations Museum (ACM), under his parents’ name, Mr and Mrs Lee Kip Lee.

There is still some paperwork to be done regarding this gargantuan donation, but tonight, Mr and Mrs Lee will be recognised for a separate donation of 35 photographs — they will be one of the 69 individuals and organisations honoured at the National Heritage Board’s (NHB) Patron of Heritage Awards 2014 ceremony held at the ACM.

Last year, over S$8.5 million worth of contributions to the heritage sector were noted, comprising S$4.4 million in cash and S$4.1 million worth of artefacts and in-kind donations. It is a drop from the S$20.5 million worth of contributions by 108 recipients in 2013, which NHB attributed to an influx of loans that year as well as the introduction of a new category that included donations below S$50,000, which was the previous minimum donation criteria.

Lee and his parents have made it a regular habit to donate works to Singapore institutions. They have previously donated an impressively huge collection of garments to the Peranakan Museum.

His relatives have also been quite generous, too. His aunt, Agnes Tan, has also previously donated funds to both the NHB and to the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) Baba House, where Lee is also a guest curator. This year, Tan will also be recognised for donating various artefacts to the NUS Museum’s Straits Chinese Collection. The family of Lee’s late uncle, the architectural historian Lee Kip Lin, had also previously donated a sizeable amount of photographs of old Singapore to the National Library Board. A book titled Through The Lens Of Lee Kip Lin: Photographs Of Singapore 1965-1995 will be launched at the National Library today as well.

“I’ve always found that we don’t have enough visual resources to study our own history. And in this digital age, it’s even more important to make these sorts of resources available not only to historians, but to anyone personally interested in mining the past. I hope they can be digitised and made available online,” said Lee, who sees donating as a logical next step.

“Collecting only to amass material has no sort of deeper motivation. To be a good collector, you need to have a bigger mission. If (a collection) forms a kind of resource that anyone can use and share, it adds to the whole civic and cultural picture of what people can do to help Singapore as a country. And to me, visual heritage is one that shouldn’t be ignored.”

For Lee, who guest-edited the Singapore edition of the Louis Vuitton City Guide and is working on an exhibition with the ACM at the end of the year, photographs are as important as more conventional museum artefacts such as fabrics or porcelain.

“We can appreciate an object from an aesthetic or socio-historical point of view, but images would help support these kinds of studies. For any kind of researcher, to see the evidence in photographs helps in understanding the past. They provide the most objective evidence of a certain period or a place,” he said.

To ramp up efforts in cultural philanthropy, the NHB launched the Founders’ Circle at the National Museum of Singapore (NMS), which hopes to facilitate closer links between patrons and the museum. Similar to the ACM’s Directors’ Circle, which was launched last year, the Founders’ Circle currently numbers 28 and the NMS is targeting 50 donors by this year.

Meanwhile, it was also announced that S$60 million worth of applications for the Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth have been received to date. The fund, worth S$200 million, was launched in 2012 to encourage philanthropic efforts in the arts and heritage sectors.