Based in the converted century-old Lei Yue Mun Fort, this Museum complex consists of two main areas – the Redoubt and the Historical Trail.

The Redoubt, built by the British in 1887, was one of the largest fortifications of its kind in the Territory. It now forms the core display area of the Museum and the open courtyard that was at its heart has been covered by a specially designed tensile structure.

This houses the permanent exhibition  which traces the 600-year history of coastal defence in Hong Kong from the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) to the present-day Hong Kong Garrison of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

The Historical Trail allows visitors to wander amongst the conserved underground magazines and batteries on the promontory around the Redoubt.

On a hot day this can be quite strenuous, but you will be rewarded with some great views across to Lei Yue Mun on Kowloonside.

Reviewing the Hong Kong Museum of Coastal Defence from a purely museum design perspective it would be easy to be dismissive of the conventional display techniques …

… the tired audiovisual displays in need of an upgrade …

… the sometimes outmoded interior design …

… or the, frankly, less than convincing dioramas …

But this would be missing the point. The fact is, it works. Designed over ten years ago (by John Dangerfield?) it was opened to the public in July 2000. It stands out amongst museums in Hong Kong in combining a museum experience with an exterior heritage experience – making it ideal for kids. It is also distinguished by being one of the few places in Hong Kong where you can find out about the brave members of the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps who were involved in some of the bitterest fighting during the Japanese invasion in 1941.

Like the fort itself, the concept behind the museum has stood the test of time. All-in-all a highly recommended place to visit.

Admission costs HK$10. Open 10am – 5pm daily except Thursdays.

There’s no doubt that Sun Yat-sen got about a bit. It is hard to visit a major city in East Asia that he did not at some point live in, visit or have a cup of tea in. And of course there is something of a tug of war between nations to claim him as their own.

Now, I’ve been to a few of these memorial halls and they range from austere mausoleums to more informative visitor centres. Thankfully, this one in Taipei finds itself towards the latter end of the scale.

The exhibition component is divided into two main rooms. To the East are displayed documents relating Dr Sun Yat-sen’s founding of the Republic of China and to the West are the documents related to his visiting of Taiwan. I spent most of my limited time in the West rooms.

This is an extremely conventional exhibition distinguished mainly by the elegance of the display furniture design. There is also little accommodation of overseas visitors in terms of language or interpretation.

There are some quite successful examples of incorporating display into the overall environment.

And some simple but popular forms of interaction that make me wonder why they did not try to include more of this in the gallery itself.

The mind-bogglingly big National Palace Museum in Taipei, Taiwan is a great example of the adage that when you have a collection of great, authentic objects you can let them speak for themselves. For instance, who can argue with a jadeite cabbage?

So the exhibits here are very much conventional art gallery showcases with text-dominated graphic panels. And none the worse for that. However, I was intrigued to find that one of the most popular exhibits is the spectacular scroll Along the River During the Qingming Festival (traditional Chinese: 清明上河圖; simplified Chinese: 清明上河图; pinyin: Qīngmíng Shànghé Tú).

But rather than display this in the rather traditional way that the vast majority of other exhibits are presented in the museum, they have provided some very effective digital animations at a number of key points along its length. Some are simply beautiful (flying in and around regal pavilions), whilst others are amusing (an old man gesticulates wildly at a boat passing beneath a bridge). I’d like to think that I may have had a small hand in inspiring this exhibit as when I was at MET Studio Design and coming up with ideas for the Hong Kong Wetland Park we designed an exhibit which did exactly this.

As you move the screen over hotspots on the scroll it triggers digital animations and information related to wetland themes. It is one of the favourite exhibits I have worked on.

These four galleries on the subjects of Fashion, Film, Food and Photography are a delight. Each take a very different interpretive direction but share a commonly refreshing and visually stimulating approach.

‘Fashion – Shopping for Identity’ is characterised by colourful swathes of cloth as a backdrop to exploring the shifting identities of Singaporean women from the 1950s to 1970s. You can touch the fabrics and admire the intricacies of embroidery on a Kebaya.

Walking into the ‘Film & Wayang – Scripting a New Life’ you feel like you have wandered into your new favourite cinema. Comfortable sofas allow you to enjoy some iconic early films choreographed across three screens.

Beyond this area you can explore the connections with the development of Chinese opera and cinema as popular entertainment in Singapore.

Without resorting to pastiche or unrealistic recreations of street food stalls, ‘Food – Eating on the Street’ makes exploring Singaporean food fun. Working with the colonial interior, a series of large plinths carry mixed media about some of the favourite dishes of the city state and how to make them.

In the next room, you can explore the individual ingredients and spices that make Singapore cooking so special.

You can even sniff them.

The last of the four galleries – ‘Photography – Framing the Family’ – is by far the most emotive and once again proves the power of ordinary people’s stories.

A series of portraits greet you as you enter a stately room whose windows are draped with muslin – as if the owners of a country house have left for the winter. But you need to look behind the portraits (literally) to find out more.

Here, one screen per portrait focusses on a social aspect of Singapore’s social history. For instance, there is a lovely account of the challenges of an early interracial relationship between an Australian woman and a Singaporean man.

Another screen focusses on the ‘Black and White Amahs’ and one British man’s touching recollections of the woman who looked after him when he was a boy.

In the next room, you can explore the development of photography in Singapore and how it helped record family life.

All in all, the Singapore Living Galleries in themselves make visiting the National Museum of Singapore worthwhile and rewarding … and that’s even before you get to the cafe in the bright, expansive atrium, the museum shop and the Singapore History Gallery.

The National Museum of Singapore is at 93 Stanford Rd and is open 10am – 8pm daily. Admission is S$10 for adults and S$5 for seniors, children and students.

First of all, it must be said that this gallery in the National Museum of Singapore has ambitions. It takes a bold approach in trying to present Singapore’s history from the 14th century to the modern period over 2,800 square metres with the minimum of text. In fact, I can’t remember actually standing in front of a graphic panel to read text once during the whole visit. This means that it relies heavily on its portable audio system.

This is almost like your own portable interactive terminal. It provides commentary from ordinary Singapore citizens (for instance, cleverly filling in the time it takes to make the long walk around the audiovisual drum that carries the introductory show), as well as the more authoritative voice of the museum. It allow you to make choices along the way of what to listen to, with the information broken down into chapters. It has the obvious advantages of being available in various languages and so does away with the need for extensive text on the walls in several languages. It also carries some atmospheric pieces of audio such as an American woman tourist visiting a 19th-century opium den. On the down side, it is heavy. I was carrying a camera and camera bag, and felt at times like an inquisitive pack horse. Also, it becomes a bit tedious typing in numbers to get information and in the end I gave up (and I’m supposed to be super-interested!).

The visit to the history galleries begins with a 360 degree audiovisual show housed within a large drum. Walking across a bridge you are surrounded by a kaleidoscope of images of Singapore backed by a soundtrack drawing on a fusion of modern and traditional music. I imagine the intention was to provide an impressionistic overview of Singapore but I have to say that it came across as somewhat corporate and, to me, didn’t really convey the visual richness of the place that you can experience by just walking through Little India, for instance. It could have been artistically more arresting and emotive – especially given the scale and technology employed. Also, I can’t help feel that the bridge-across-the-drum audiovisual experience is a little hackneyed.

After a brief overview of very early Singapore, the visitor is able to choose whether to follow a personal or events-based path through the gallery. This is another nice innovation and gives a sense of being able to exercise preference in the way you use the gallery. It is also good that it is easy enough to access either path if you want to switch, and it is not a problem to see the content of both strands.

At points through the exhibition loosely grouped objects provide a tableau as context for a display case or key object.

It seems obvious that from an early stage in the design that lighting was seen as almost a historical character in itself. The entire gallery is a black box space and you move from one beautifully (but dimly)-lit scene to another. You feel almost as if you have stumbled onto the set of a particularly depressing play. And just when you thought it couldn’t get any more melancholy …. the Japanese invade.

Here however, the audio guide really comes into it own and you can listen to the recollections of ordinary people caught up in the turmoil of war, such as the women trained to be soldiers by the Japanese.

As you reach more modern times, I was surprised that the unrelenting gloom did not lift. If anything, one’s surroundings become more Brutalist and you listen to Lee Kuan Yew speech announcing the separation from Malaysia in an area that feels like a building site project hut (maybe that was the point). And how many times have I visited a chronologically-organised exhibition where ideas (and, dare I say it, money) just seem to peter out. Clients and designers should make sure that at every other meeting they discuss the gallery in reverse so that the end of the visit receives as much attention and creative energy as the beginning. Or perhaps the closer we get to our own times, the less they capture our imaginations. It was with some relief that I handed in the brick-weight audio guide and emerged into the light.

The Singapore History Gallery at the National Museum of Singapore is a laudable attempt to bring something new to historical interpretation. There are some innovative approaches here but, however dark the spaces, it is hard to disguise that the displays themselves are quite conventional. Despite the attempt to avoid didacticism, I had an overall feeling of having spent an hour wandering through a 3-dimensional lecture by a depressive professor. Here, the past is not only a foreign country, but also a place where no one seemed to have had much fun.

The National Museum of Singapore is at 93 Stanford Rd and is open 10am – 8pm daily. Admission is S$10 for adults and S$5 for seniors, children and students.

Once again technology has led one columnist to declare the death of the museum. GoogleEarth and Madrid’s premier art museum The Prado have teamed up to digitise 14 of collection’s masterpieces at a resolution of about 14,000 million pixels (1,400 times more detailed than the image a 10 megapixel digital camera would take). This project allows users to see details of brush stroke and expression online that would be impossible in a gallery environment.

In The Financial Times of 16th January, in a column entitled ‘Galleries, who needs them?’,  Christopher Caldwell’s enthusiasm for a joint project between Madrid’s Prado Museum and GoogleEarth led him to write:

“Should there be museums? Of course. But if we subject them to the same hard-headed de-mystification to which we subject, say, fox hunting, men’s clubs and smoking, and if we exclude social, traditional, moral and mystical justifications as somehow illegitimate, we will find it hard to make a case for them. Art museums will join the list of institutions – newspapers, for example – that are withering in the hot light of information technology, no matter how indispensable to civilised life they may once have seemed.”

There are a number of things wrong with this statement. Firstly, over the last couple of decades many museums around the world have taken great lengths to make themselves and their collections more accessible – even to the point of laying themselves open to the accusation of ‘dumbing down’. Art museums, admittedly, have been a step behind the general trend in museums to become more visitor-friendly but even that has been changing over the last decade.

Secondly, it is a brave man that heralds new technology as fundamentally changing the way we do things. I cannot tell you the number of technology showcases I have worked on in the last 17 years that have featured a fridge that orders your food automatically or a remote control that draws your curtains. We still go shopping and heave ourselves off the sofa at dusk. I suspect that in 50 years’ time we will still be reading books and newspapers, and still be visiting museums.

Tellingly, Mr Caldwell asks rhetorically: “Is the high-quality digitisation of the Prado’s collection not an improvement on the museum in every respect?” The answer to that is simple – “No” – because it ignores two of the most fundamental apsects of museum-going that the public fully understands; authenticity and a sense of a shared experience.

The notoriously snobby Louvre is the most visited art museums in the world, setting an attendance figure of 8.5 million last year, and the majority of people go to see the Mona Lisa. They suffer the queues and poor viewing conditions for one reasons – to be in the presence of a piece of great art. No amount of digitisation can replace that, I’m afraid.

And it has long been recognised that museums are social spaces that build and enrich communities. A bigger screen is not the only reason we still go to the cinema rather than watching DVDs home alone. Museums and art galleries have always been places to promenade, to see and be seen. It reminds me of the Victoria and Albert’s best-known advertising campaign of the 1980s – “An ace café with quite a nice museum attached”.

Subtitled ‘160 years of Hong Kong-French common heritage & perspectives’, this temporary exhibition at the Hong Kong Heritage Discovery Centre looks primarily at the influence of French architectural style on the city’s built heritage.

Designed by Marc & Chantal Design, the exhibition is divided chronologically into three sections – 1840-90s (Arrival), 1900-45 (Expansion) and 1945-2008 (Renewal) – and is physically arranged using rectangular plinths. These carry graphics panels, architectural models and object showcases.

At high level, a rectangular tensile structure delineates the three periods below and acts as a projection surface for historic images.

The rear wall of the exhibition acts as a backdrop, with a series of graphic images and a map showing the urban spread of Hong Kong through the eras, and the concurrent expansion of French architectural influence.

At this point I must confess an interest as I edited the exhibition text based on the research done by Professor Ho of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

If I were to have one criticism of the exhibition it is that, whilst it does a good job in tracing the existence of French-influenced buildings in Hong Kong, it feels like a missed opportunity to give a sense of how the two communities interacted. In other words, it gives a good survey of French bricks and mortar in Hong Kong, but not of what is surely the real cement of that relationship – the way French and Hong Kong people worked and socialised together.

The exhibition continues until the 1st January 2009 at the Hong Kong Heritage Discovery Centre, Kowloon Park. Admission is free.

China’s achievement in conducting its first walk in space is a milestone in the nation’s manned space programme. So it was with high expectations that I lined up with other members of the public to visit the special exhibition on the event at the Hong Kong Science Museum.

First impressions were disappointing. Walls upon walls of photographs promised a didactic, flag-waving experience. If these photographs had been treated as a proper photographic exhibition with images selected for their aesthetic quality that would have been one thing. But wall to ceiling images of average artistic merit told a blow-by-blow account of the mission. An introductory film telling this story would have been so much more engaging.

Then came the objects, poorly displayed in drab showcases.

But then things started to pick up. I defy anyone (or any male, anyway) not to be excited by a real space suit – however it is displayed.

The re-entry capsule acted as a centrepiece for the final area which included the parachute.

Seeing a real object that has been key to a major event always produces the thrill of authenticity which is hard to replicate.

In the end, the low-key nature of the displays was actually rather endearing. I came away feeling like I had been transported back to an exhibition on the 1970s Apollo mission. And it was none the worse for all that. The exhibition continues until the 15th December.

The 2nd Singapore Biennale 2008, which finished on 16th November, took ‘wonder’ as its theme this year. Following the success of the inaugural show in 2006 that included 95 artists and attracted over 883,000 visitors, this year was a more tightly curated affair with 66 artists and art collectives from more than 35 countries and regions – including an impressive smattering from Iran, Kyrgyzstan and Palestine. Spread over five venues, I was only able to visit one of the sites – City Hall.

This landmark building has been at the heart of Singapore both physically and politically since 1929. It was here that Admiral Mountbatten accepted the surrender of the Japanese in 1945, here that Singapore was proclaimed a city by Royal Charter in 1951, and it was here that Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew declared Singapore an independent republic in 1965. The City Hall itself is slated to become the National Art Gallery in 2013. For the moment, giant maggots roam the corridors.

It was rather endearing to wander around the former courtrooms and legal chambers being my own judge of the artwork that now occupied these somewhat musty but historic spaces. Some of it was distinctly art-schoolish, and some of it was extremely accomplished. Here are my own, very personal, highlights.

The large, rather formal, wood-panelled Chamber Room complete with coat of arms was the location for Wit Pimkanchanapong’s Singapore, 2008 installation. As a metaphor for nation-building, it allowed visitors to place their own mark using messages on stickers on a wall-to-wall Google Earth satellite image of Singapore. One couldn’t help wondering how this free-form of interaction with the city would go down if it was genuinely turned translated into real-life action.

In another darkened room, a book floating in a tank kept constantly in motion by invisible currents presented a memorable image. In the incomprehensibly titled Bachelor – The Dual Body, the artist Ki-bong Rhee “wanted the dream-like image to be dominant over the meaning or material.” A pity then that the catalogue entry goes on about the book being Wittgenstein and that “perhaps it shows Europe, with its ideological history, is bewildered about the future,” and other such claptrap.

Lee Yong Deok’s I‘m Not Expensive uses relief plasterwork within what appears to be a flat painted scene to create a Mona Lisa effect – certain elements follow you wherever you going in the room, changing perspective as if they were 3D objects (which of course they are).

Sergio Prego’s Black Monday presents an event (the explosion of a flare and the resulting smoke cloud) recorded from a 360 degree array of cameras. The resulting images are stitched together and accompanied by a disorientating electronic soundtrack and projected in the very room that the explosion took place. It was almost like watching a weather system developing. I liked the fact that when I was there an older lady got it first time when she said “Ooh look it was filmed here”.

Amongst all this earnest endeavour, it was nice to come across some humour in the form of knitwear. Taiwan-born E Chen makes everyday objects (if you can call a Vespa and a Toucan “everyday”) from woollen yarn. The knitted ivy growing up a lamppost was particularly effective. It was hard to resist the urge to touch the exhibits.

And so back to where we started with Desiree Dolron’s hauntingly arresting photographic images, reminding us of the continuing power of portraiture amongst the bells and whistles of contemporary art.

The Singapore Biennale deserves to be a success and, whether or not it achieves its aims of making art part of people’s lives in the resolutely staid city-state, it cannot be faulted for trying.

Once in a while, it can be an interesting exercise to play “fantasy museums”. With the last two large Wall Street investment banks – Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley – forced to become bank holding companies in September 2008, the investment banking industry as we have known it has been relegated to history. For many Asian cities, the investment banker has been a mainstay of the economy, especially when it comes to the trickle-down effect of the expense account. So, is it time that we have a museum dedicated to this recently most hunted of creatures that appears to have gone the way of the Dodo?

We could begin with an immersive 360 degree audiovisual show that expresses the breadth of the investment banker experience. A brief history of the rise of the merchant bank would follow, from middle ages Italy, through the European houses of the 18th and 19th century to the post-war dominance of Wall Street. Dioramas could provide key moments in the story of the development of the industry with merchants discussing the price of commodities in 15th century Lombardy piazzas, traders debating in Lloyd’s Coffee House in 17th century London, jobless queues during the Great Depression and a typical post-war scene on the New York Stock Exchange floor. A final tableau could be ex-CEOs of the major investment banks testifying in front of the Congressional Committee and justifying inflated remuneration packages and bonuses.

Visitors could play games along the way including Burst the South Sea Bubble, Be A Bond, and Bail-Out Bonanza. They could play the role of an ordinary investor and try to decide which of the complex products being sold to them by a virtual sales person is likely to actually make them money or lose their entire life savings. A Products Gallery would explain modern financial instruments such as Credit Default Swaps up until the point that they cease to have any logical meaning (depending on whether we can find anyone who still remembers what they are). A final gallery will look at “Where are they now?” and positive stories of how investment bankers have overcome adversity, such as setting up an organic olive farm in Tuscany with their last remaining bonus etc. The gallery will be staffed with former investment bankers as explainers who, having retired at 29, want to do something meaningful. They will reminisce nostalgically about the cocaine-fuelled excesses of their heyday to older audiences. The public spaces will be organised in such a way so that visitors move through the galleries as if guided “by an invisible hand”, unless they are wealthy VIPs in which case they can wander wherever they want.