by Tng Ying Hui
The New York Times, May 11, 2014.
John N Miksic, Singapore and the Silk Road of the Sea, 1300-1800 (Singapore: NUS Press, 2013).
Melody Zaccheus, “Indiana Jones who Pieces Together S’pore’s Past,” The Straits Times, Feb 24, 2014,
http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/indiana-jones-who-pieces-together-spores-past
The Silk Road of the Sea, The Economist, November 29, 2013,
http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2013/11/14th-century-singapore
Interviews with Prof John Norman Miksic and Derek Heng,
via email, in July 2015.
Prof John Miksic
United States of America, b.1946
Milenko Prvacki
Making Art School More Rigorous
Former Yugoslav Milenko Prvacki is one of Singapore’s foremost arts educators. While heading the Faculty of Fine Arts at LASALLE College of the Arts, he introduced a formal course structure to teaching the arts and has helped groom a generation of Singaporean artists.
In his 10 years as dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts in LASALLE College of the Arts, Milenko Prvacki has enriched the local arts scene and helped to further arts education in Singapore. He introduced rigour into the fine arts curriculum at LASALLE, training students to be independent, critical thinkers and have the confidence to explore and be experimental in their work.
Born in Vojvodina, Yugoslavia, in 1951, Prvacki graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in painting from the Institute of Fine Arts in Bucharest, Romania. He came to Singapore, carrying a little luggage and three bottles of Schnapps, in September 1991 at the invitation of a German design company. His first impression of Singapore was that of a Potemkin Village—a phrase used to describe a fake portable village that has been built only to impress. “It was fantastic and clean,” he said. Prvacki was hired on a two-month contract to build sets for Sentosa’s Maritime Museum. But after completing his contract, he did not return to his homeland. Civil strife was brewing in the former Yugoslavia and as it faced disintegration, Prvacki’s wife Delia and daughter Ana quickly joined him in Singapore. The couple has been living here ever since. Ana is working in Los Angeles.
In 1993, Prvacki held a joint exhibition with his wife at the LASALLE College of the Arts. It was there that he met Brother Joseph McNally, founder and president of the art school, who persuaded him to teach at LASALLE. When he began teaching in 1994 at the School of Fine Art, he realised that the Singapore education system emphasised rote learning. The students he came into contact with then lacked initiative and expected to be spoon-fed, he said.
Thus he set up individual tutorial and group critique sessions as part of the fine arts curriculum. The one-to-one tutorials forced students to think critically about their work and formulate opinions to explain and defend it. But Prvacki had another shock. He said, “These 27-year-olds were crying when they were criticised.” He realised the students felt that they had “lost face”. He assured them that the criticisms were not personal and as artists they need to have an inquiring mind. After a year of working with his students, Prvacki saw great improvements in it. He said, “Most kids are talented and teachers need to apply the right methodology to groom them.”
Prvacki joined as a senior lecturer at LASALLE’s School of Fine Art, which was under the Faculty of Visual Arts, and when the school set up its own faculty in 2002, he became its dean.
As dean, Prvacki reduced the formal curriculum hours from 26 hours to 22 hours a week for first-year students and to 18 hours for graduating students. This was met with vehement protests from parents. “They would say, ‘we pay more and you teach less’,” said Prvacki. But he felt it was necessary to give students more time to practise what they had learned in class and translate it into their work. Even as he urged them to be committed in their pursuit of art, he would tell his students that they had more reason than those in other professions to be exceptional. He would say in jest, “If you are a bad doctor, you may still have a lot of money, if you are a bad lawyer, you may still have a lot of money, but if you are a bad artist, you commit suicide or you become alcoholic.”
Prvacki took his own words seriously and devoted time to honing his craft, even as he played the role of administrator. Beyond the necessary formalities of his role as dean, he would spend two days of the week on his art. His former student Tan Wee Lit, who now heads the Faculty of Visual Arts at the School of the Arts Singapore (SOTA), described him as an artist-teacher. “Prvacki is supportive and always encouraged his students to work hard,” said Tan, adding that Prvacki opened doors for students by connecting them to prominent artists he knew. Prvacki has groomed many young notable artists, like Jeremy Sharma and Ye Shufang.
As an administrator, one needs to have ambition to implement changes, but “I’m primarily an artist” , said Prvacki, who stepped down as dean in 2012. He is now a senior fellow at the college and attends group critique sessions with Master of Fine Arts students. He enjoys being a teacher more than an administrator because teaching stimulates him to keep learning. “I can’t tell students what I don’t know,” he said simply.
One of Prvacki’s most famous works is The Ultimate Visual Dictionary (1997), which was inspired by the dictionaries he had used when learning new languages. Prvacki speaks German, Romanian and English, among others. Dictionaries, he said, contain words which are placed together, but not because they are part of a single narrative. “That was my idea to put things in my paintings, to combine things that were not related, but they stay there,” said Prvacki, who refers to himself more as a conceptual than as an abstract artist.
Prvacki and his wife Delia, a sculptor, have also collaborated on a mosaic and ceramic art piece as part of the Land Transport Authority’s Art in Transit programme, which integrates art into Singapore’s network of MRT stations. Their work is permanently displayed at the Dhoby Ghaut MRT station. Prvacki and Delia became Singapore citizens in 2002. Their daughter, Ana, too, is a conceptual artist. In 2012, Prvacki was awarded the Cultural Medallion for his contributions to Singapore’s visual arts scene.
References
Corrie Tan, “The Life! Interview with Milenko Prvacki,” The Straits Times, August 27, 2012.
Interviews with Milenko Prvacki and Tan Wee Lit, via email, in March 2015.
Milenko Prvacki
Yugoslavia, b.1951
Mary Turnbull
A Nation’s Historian
When UK-born historian C.M. Turnbull’s A History of Singapore, 1819-1975 was published in 1977, it quickly achieved recognition as an authoritative account of Singapore’s history. An earlier book she published in 1972 on the Straits Settlements, which Singapore had been a part of, was cited at the International Court of Justice hearing on Singapore’s and Malaysia’s sovereignty claim to the island of Pedra Branca.
Born in 1923, Constance Mary Turnbull grew up in Coventry, England, and was often sent away to stay with different relatives because her parents faced financial difficulties. She was still a student when World War II erupted. Despite the difficult circumstances, she obtained straight distinctions for her School Leaving Certificate and went on to pursue a degree in History at Bedford College, University of London.
After the war, it was difficult to find a job. One day, she simply walked into the office that handled public service appointments and asked, “Have you got something exciting a long way away where the sun shines?” At a staff’s suggestion of Kuala Lumpur, Turnbull exclaimed, “Well that sounds perfect!” It was only after she agreed to take up the job as an Administrative Officer in the Malayan Civil Service that Turnbull started to search for Kuala Lumpur on the world map.
Turnbull was among the few women to have served in the overseas colonial service. In fact, it was after her posting that the practice of dispatching women to serve in the Malayan Civil Service was cancelled. The chief secretary of the Federation of Malaya, Sir David Watherston, realised that it was culturally unacceptable for the locals to work under a woman. Turnbull,
too, found it tough to work in the civil service where promotions were limited for women. Thus, when her civil service duties were completed in 1955, she left for an academic position at the University of Malaya in Singapore. Many of those whom she taught became civil servants here.
Turnbull was also present when Singapore was experiencing turbulent times. The late 1940s and 1950s were times of political and social upheaval—unemployment was high, living standards were low, and strikes and labour unrest were common. There was a growing Communist threat and the desire for independence from the British gained momentum. Under the Rendel Constitution, which came into effect in 1955, Singapore achieved self-governance in 1959. When Singapore became part of Malaysia in 1963, Turnbull was doing a brief stint at the university’s campus in Kuala Lumpur. She returned to teach at the Singapore campus in 1964, which had been renamed the University of Singapore. What she had witnessed inspired her to delve deeper into a study of Singapore’s history.
In 1971, Turnbull left the University of Singapore to head the History department at the University of Hong Kong, where she started working on a manuscript which would become the first edition of A History of Singapore. She chronicled Singapore’s growth from a small British port to a major trading and financial hub within the British Empire, and the political and social changes that had propelled it to being on its way to a modern city-state.
Historian Kevin Blackburn, in an essay, Mary Turnbull’s History Textbook for the Singapore Nation, published in 2012, said that Turnbull’s book “traced the development of Singapore, not as part of Malaya, but as a distinct nation with its own history separate from that of Malaya”.
Turnbull, too, explained the need for her book in a 1978 The Straits Times interview, “Up until the time Singapore became independent, histories of Singapore have been written as part of Malaya or Malaysia—Singapore was not taken alone.” The University of Singapore and Nanyang University had in the early 1970s begun introducing first-year Singapore history courses, but they were linked to Malaysian history.
In January 1980, Minister for Trade and Industry Goh Chok Tong said during a PAP 25th anniversary event that “the history of Singapore in the last 25 years should be written and then taught in schools.” His statements sparked off a public debate about the need to change the history curriculum. When the Ministry of Education decided, later in the year, to write a new history textbook for lower-secondary classes, the writers of the curriculum used A History of Singapore as a guide.
Turnbull’s book was updated in 1989 to include contemporary political developments like the 1988 General Election. She also wrote The Straits Settlements, 1826-67: Indian Presidency to Crown Colony, a book which the Singapore team used in its representations to the International Court of Justice in 2007 to argue that Singapore should have sovereignty over the island of Pedra Branca.
Even after retiring in 1990 from the University of Hong Kong, Turnbull continued writing books. She explained in a 1978 The Straits Times interview that history helps put things in perspective, “Remember the past, so you will know just how far you have come,” she said.
Turnbull eventually returned to the UK but died suddenly of heart failure in 2008—merely days after revising the third edition of A History of Singapore. Singapore and Malaysia always had a special place in her personal history. She said in the same 1978 interview, “Those 19 years I spent in Singapore and KL were the 19 most exciting years to be in the two countries.”
References
Albert Lau, “A modern History of Singapore, 1819-2005,” The Straits Times, October 1 2010.
Constance Mary Turnbull, A History of Modern Singapore 1819-2005
(Singapore: NUS Press, 2009).
Edwin Lee, “The Historiography of Singapore”, in Singapore Studies: Critical Surveys of the Humanities and Social Sciences, ed. Basant K. Kapur (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1986).
“Goh Chok Tong: Teach Lessons of Past 25 Years in Schools,” The Straits Times, January 28, 1980.
Kevin Blackburn, “Mary Turnbull’s History Textbook for the Singapore Nation,” in Studying Singapore’s Past: C.M. Turnbull and the History of Modern Singapore, ed. Nicholas Tarling (Singapore: NUS Press, 2012).
Liaw Wy-Cin, “Expert on S’pore History Dies at 81; Mary Turnbull, Author of A History of Singapore, Died last week,” The Straits Times, September 11, 2008.
Nancy Byramji, “Remember the Past—so you’ll Know Just how far you have Come,”
The Straits Times, March 19, 1978.
P. J. Thum, “A key Role in Telling the S’pore Story,” The Straits Times, October 6, 2008.
Mary Turnbull
United Kingdom, 1927–2008
Prof Wang Gungwu
Iconic Scholar, Inspiring Educator
Professor Wang Gungwu is widely acknowledged as the most influential scholar in the study of the Chinese outside China, and the Chinese migratory experience. His devotion to research and erudite writing shaped scholarship on East Asian and Southeast Asian civilisations and history in Singapore.
Professor Wang Gungwu was born in Surabaya, Indonesia, and grew up in Ipoh, Malaysia. In 1953, he was amongst the first batch of graduates of the University of Malaya. He majored in Literature, Economics and History. In those days, graduates either joined the civil service or taught in schools after they had completed their studies. But Prof Wang said that the idea of working in an enormous bureaucracy was never attractive. He was a “university man”, as he put in the NUS centennial publication Imagination, Openness and Courage in 2006.
Prof Wang pursued his master’s at the University of Malaya, Singapore, where he was involved in fighting for an independent Malaya as president of the University Socialist Club. He later described himself as a socialist and an anti-colonial nationalist who was opposed to the use of violence in politics. To him, history was not merely an academic subject; it was real, as he saw and took part in the historical shifts that were occurring. The socio-political milieu of decolonisation and nationalism in the 1950s fuelled his passion for the study of history. His master’s thesis was a seminal work written in 1954 on the characteristics and dynamics of trade between China and maritime Southeast Asia. It became one of his most cited and well-known papers and was published as The Nanhai Trade: A Study of the Early History of Chinese Trade in the South China Sea. Given the lack of documentation of Southeast Asian history in China, no researcher till then had dug deep into ties between the two. For Prof Wang, his thesis initiated a lifetime of first-rate scholarship on China’s history. After completing his PhD in Medieval History at the University of London in 1957, Prof Wang returned to Singapore to teach at the University of Malaya’s campus in Singapore for two years before moving to its division in Kuala Lumpur.
While earlier events inspired him to study history, the tumultuous political climate of the 1960s encouraged his exploration of nationhood and ethnicity in newly-independent Malaya and the new nation-states of Southeast Asia, with special emphasis on the ethnic Chinese communities there. The historical context was crucial to understanding the present day, Prof Wang felt, for as he put it, “as we debated about the future we found ourselves talking a lot about the past”. He rejected communalism and believed in a society built on cultural pluralism and multiracialism, and up till the 1960s, he would give radio and television talks on those topics as a means of public service.
In 1968, Prof Wang took up the position of professor of Far Eastern History in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies (RSPAS) at the Australian National University and in 1975 served as the director of RSPAS. In 1986, he became vice-chancellor of the University of Hong Kong. He continued to travel frequently to Singapore, participating in conferences where he spoke about his ideas of Sino-Southeast Asian historical relations and the Chinese temporarily living abroad, the huaqiao.
After his retirement from the University of Hong Kong in 1995, Prof Wang was invited by Dr Goh Keng Swee to take over his chairmanship of the fledgling Institute
of East Asian Political Economy (IEAPE), located on the Kent Ridge campus of NUS. The IEAPE was originally founded as the Institute of East Asian Philosophies in 1983 for the study of Confucianism. Prof Wang’s task was to steer the IEAPE towards the study of political and economic developments in contemporary China. The IEAPE was renamed the East Asian Institute (EAI) and many young scholars interested in China’s past and present came to Singapore to work with him. According to Professor Ezra Vogel, a China expert at Harvard University, Prof Wang has contributed greatly to the understanding of major issues facing China by writing “crisp clear reports that inform not only scholars but government and business leaders around the world”.
Prof Wang is also the chairman of the board of trustees of the recently-renamed ISEAS—Yusof Ishak Institute. In April 2010, he donated his books on Southeast Asia and private archives—comprising more than 1,200 books and over 440,000 pages of document, among other things—to the institute. These are housed in a permanent collection entitled Wang Gungwu: Historian, Humanist and Public Intellectual. Prof Wang is also chairman of the governing board of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, NUS. In 2007, he became the third person to receive NUS’ highest academic accolade when he was conferred the title of University Professor, which is bestowed only on a small number of tenured faculty members. In 2008, he donated $150,000, which was matched by the government dollar-for-dollar, to set up the Wang Gungwu Award which, recognises research achievements of graduate students in the Natural Sciences, and the Social Sciences and the Humanities.
Prof Wang sees a different mission for the university now that it is rooted in a world which, through vastly different from the political upheavals of the 1950s and 1960s, is no less uncertain. “There is a fresh challenge that has gone beyond nation dreaming and nation-building. It is about how to see the local in global terms and how to bring the global into the local,” he said in a 2007 speech. Prof Wang was awarded the Meritorious Service Medal in 2013.