Personal stories are at the heart of two new exhibitions we designed at Asian Civilisations Museum

Not your typically curated exhibition!

Curators normally play the lead role in the selection of the artifacts from a museum's collection to be displayed in a gallery. Imagine our delight in bringing this exhibition to life - one that allows people involved in and connected to the Asian Civilisations Museum (ACM) to have a hand in choosing items!

Opened Dec 23, 2020 and available until Feb 28, 2021, Faith, Beauty, Love, Hope - Our Stories, Your ACM spotlights the people behind the museum through their stories of faith, beauty, love and hope. Inspired by the best of ACM’s collection, staff and stakeholders of the museum personally selected 60 objects from their heart and imagination.

Visitors can discover artefacts through intimate insights shared by the contributors. The exhibition hopes to provide visitors and staff alike with an opportunity to reflect on and celebrate our strengths in this time of challenges and disruptions. It also reflects the voices of the many diverse groups of professionals and supporters who work at or with the museum, behind-the-scenes, to bring exhibitions and programs to the public.

Find out which artifact GSM staff selected to exhibit in our case study to be published soon here.

Our team provided the following services to the ACM: exhibition set design, graphic design and technical direction. GSM Project and ACM have a valuable and continuing collaboration for multiple exhibitions, such as the most recently awarded-exhibition Guo Pei: Chinese Art and Fashion (2019 Best Design by GFFA) and Raffles in Southeast Asia: Revisiting the Scholar and Statesman, both presented in 2019, and Angkor: Exploring Cambodia's Sacred City in 2018.

Bringing a collector's passion to life.

From showcasing the personal stories of many in the Asian Civilisations Museum community in the first exhibition, GSM, in the second exhibition, was engaged to create a compelling showcase to highlight the perspective of the collector - his passion and legacy of collecting.

Opened on the same date and available until April 25, 2021, the exhibition thINK: Chinese Calligraphy, Connoisseurship, and Collecting seeks to not only present, but to evoke personal responses, to provoke dialogues between the past and present, through time and space. Visitors can get acquainted with the art of the brush and reflect on issues such as how we communicate, and what we choose to hold dear.

Adopting an archival approach, the exhibition displays historical objects from the Ming and Qing Dynasties (1368-1912) within an intimate, contemporary setting. Visitors are invited into the life of Hong Kong-Canadian collector Mr Yuan Shao Liang, who collected the objects.

For this exhibition, our team imagined a contemplative experience, playing with the impression of depth and layers of ink. Scenography and graphic design embrace each other to guide seamlessly visitors through the different sections, like a series of rooms revealing their secrets.

Eager to know more about the exhibits? Visit ACM’s website.