Singapore Government Press Release
Media Division, Ministry of Information and The Arts,
MITA Building, 140 Hill Street, 2^nd Storey, Singapore 179369
Tel: 837-9666

Your Excellencies

Distinguished guests

Ladies and gentlemen

June is a month of many delights. School is out, the Great Singapore Sale is on, and the Singapore Arts Festival beckons. There is so much to do.

I am therefore delighted that so many of you have come this evening to witness the opening of this exhibition of Chang Dai-chien’s paintings at the Asian Civilizations Museum.

Chang, as you have all heard from Dr Khoo, was a Picasso of the East. His genius and his spirit lives on in his works, and we are grateful tonight to the owners of the Banshan Fang and the Jingyu Tang collections for sharing these works with us.

The tempo of arts activities in Singapore has picked up. In the visual arts, both the SAM and the ACM have played a key role in promoting the arts to a wider audience, and I am glad to say that Singaporeans are slowly but surely showing greater interest.

The key to arts development is to make the arts more accessible.

One aspect of this is to have sufficient physical space for museums to present programs that the public can identify with and learn from. Although the Internet has become one more channel to view and access art, being able to see the original masterpiece, to experience it as "paint on canvas" is still a far more enriching experience.

The project to convert the Empress Place Building into the flagship of the ACM is nearing structural completion. By the end of this year, some facilities at Empress Place will be open for business. The grand opening of the galleries will be in the second half of next year. By then, the ACM will more than quadruple its current gross floor area of 4,000 sq m, to a total of 18,000 sq m in two locations.

Likewise, the SAM will also be expanding to the proposed Queen Street Gallery in the next few years. This new gallery will focus on our local artists and will also house an artists-in-residence program.

I hope that with these enhanced facilities there will be more exhibitions, and more people will be drawn to appreciate the visual arts.

But space is only one small part of making the visual arts more accessible.

For example, we also need to have a good collection of art to put on display. Here again, the museums have been working hard. The SAM, for example, has a collection of more than 5,000 pieces of 20^th century modern and contemporary South East Asian Art, arguably one of the largest collections in the world. ACM has also expanded its collection of art and heritage material significantly in recent years, to provide some representation of the diverse cultures of our forefathers.

But museums cannot, by themselves, collect the wide range of works that an artist creates in his lifetime. Many of the masterpieces by important artists are in galleries and private collections. We therefore need to have close collaboration between museums, galleries and private collectors.

At this point let me express my thanks once again to the two collectors who have shared their collections of Chang Dai-chien’s paintings with us. This exhibition is only possible because of their public spirit and willingness to lend.

I hope their example will encourage others to also share their collections with our museums. This is a symbiotic relationship.

Collectors can benefit by having their collections shown. By working in collaboration with museums, these works and artefacts can be more thoroughly researched, and presented in a wider context together with material from other private collections, galleries or museums. This allows all of us to have a better understanding of the artist or the subject, and a deeper enjoyment of the art.

The ACM has long been collaborating with overseas collectors, bringing prized collections to Singapore that our public would otherwise have no opportunity to see. Singapore welcomes overseas collectors to do more with our museums, and to base more of their collections here.

At the same time, I urge local collectors to also step forward, and play an active role in developing Singapore as a global arts city for Asian art and International art. You can loan your works for temporary or permanent exhibitions. Outright donation of your collections, needless to say, would be enthusiastically welcomed.

You might recall the exquisite snuff bottles, and a series of exhibitions from the Yeo Khee Lim family collection of Chinese paintings and calligraphy shown at ACM. These were all exhibitions drawing from local private collections of a museum standard.

Tonight’s exhibition is another excellent example of what we can achieve by such collaborations. I look forward to many more of such efforts.

Finally, let me say a word of thanks to our sponsors, who also play an essential role in making exhibitions possible. Many have supported tonight’s exhibition generously, and in particular I would like to thank the principal sponsor, Mees Pierson of Fortis Bank.

I also congratulate Dr Kenson Kwok and his team, particularly Chen Jiazi, for putting together this inspiring exhibition of Chang Dai-chien for all to admire.

Now, I have the pleasure in declaring the exhibition open.