MALAYSIA'S NATIONAL MUSEUM: DESIGNING DISASTER

Based on a series of research visits, this paper will critically examine the museological design of the newest gallery in the National Museum of Malaysia. This ill-conceived and ill-starred ‘designer baby’ was brought into being in the twenty-first century. Yet, the conceptual design could have sprung, albeit anachronistically, from the era of the colonising ‘museumising imagination’, as theorised by Benedict Anderson, whose analytical insights will be extrapolated to contemporary museumising activities.

The gallery is deceptively labelled ‘Faces of Malaysia’ but, in reality, it is a crude materialisation of races of Malaysia. Ironically, the taxonomy of race — an indispensable instrument of nineteenth-century British colonial rule — has been brought out of cerebral storage, dusted off, and rejuvenated with contemporary display techniques. Despite the passage of fifty years of independence, the post-colonial ‘museumising imagination’ cannot imagine citizens: it can only reconstruct races — serialised, segregated and stereotyped.

The National Museum’s perverse plotting of race, as well as its implied evolutionary hierarchy, in the grid of nation has dire consequences in view of the fact that many political commentators identify the divisive issue of ethnicity as the greatest potential fault-line in the country. Hence, the gallery manufactured by the National Museum will be investigated as a national disaster in its ill-omened design of national identity.

Museum design is not apolitical and museum interpretations — contrary to institutional faith — are not divine decrees. The National Museum considers itself, and is considered, not only the nation’s paramount authority on heritage but also the source of all enlightenment for other museums in the nation and, therefore, the repercussions of the permanent gallery will be both grievous and far-reaching: the propagation of design disasters by means of a racial template. In addition, because permanent galleries in the National Museum tend to a lifespan ranging between 20 and 40 years, generations of Malaysians will be exposed to, and become the casualties of, the museum-made disaster.

Once the nation has been redesigned under the influence of ‘an unfavourable star’ (the etymological origins of ‘disaster’), the unfavourable and inextinguishable star will squint like an evil eye upon the faces of yet-to-be-begotten Malaysians.