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.

The issue of environmental sustainability is a thorny one. What is sustainable for you, may not be sustainable for me. A tree-hugger’s definition of sustainability is different from an urban planner’s.

Hence it is no surprise that the designer for the Sustainable Singapore exhibition gallery at the recently opened Marina Barrage is keen to define its theme. The gallery suggests that a small and highly urbanized city-state is only sustainable when there is clean air, affordable water, and quality living environment for its inhabitants over generations.

The first gallery describes the world today. The colour of the gallery pulsates between blue (the original beauty of our world), red (the world in distraught) and green (human intervention and remedies).

It is in this context that sustainability is sought. How is Singapore placed in a world like this?

The second gallery is built in the shape of the Singapore River, and tells the story of the river: a polluted commerce center to a clean water source. The story of Singapore River nicely mirrors the environmental story of Singapore: how it evolves from its early days of survival siege mentality, to its present eco-city state of mind.

The third and forth galleries feature water initiatives. ABC (active beautiful and clean), which redefines the roles of water canals in Singapore’s habitat, and the Marina Barrage, which turns most of the city area into a rain collection basin. After all, the paymaster for the gallery is Singapore’s water resource agency, PUB.

The fifth gallery is packaged like a jewel box. This is where sustainability is looked at from different angles: industrialization, waste management, housing, commerce, and nature. A little heavy on the mind, but useful no less.

What I like about the gallery is not the heavily scripted content, but the different moods throughout its journey. Sit down and contemplate under the organic tree; take a peek (or leak?) in the interactive and soundscaped toilet area; and enjoy a walk under the installation like light boxes. Overall, the Marine Barrage gallery makes a pleasurable visual journey.

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.

FusionWorld is Singapore’s  Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) corporate visitor centre at Fusionopolis.

Since A*STAR’s research portfolios span micro-electronics, material science, chemistry, computer sciences, info-comm, data storage and manufacturing, one would expect that content materials are aplenty for designing a corporate visitor center.  But the answer was not so simple.

To showcase 100+ R&D within a targeted 15 – 30 minutes visit is improbable; to explain values of a particular fundamental research in a short time is almost unachievable; while to showcase something that is not conveniently visible, or even built is near impossible. The strategy was to focus on lifestyle payoffs (and Chris led workshops with A*STAR to devise the interpretive strategy for MET Studio’s design), and A*STAR’s strengths of being able to integrate different disciplines into solutions. Where research advances were not “showcase-able”, custom AV explanations were incorporated in the form of avatars.

A 3D face-capture, RFIDed, sign-in booth greets visitors by name. This is followed by a 4K digital, panoramic movie that you watch, up-close – like 5 m away, from the screen. FusionWorld is zoned according: home, work, medical, transportation and lounge.

In each “semi-virtual” zone, visitors find exhibits with built-in technologies. Like gesture-based menus, dialogue with AV avatars, a bed that detects tiny changes in pressure, brain-caps, biosensors, and a kitchen cabinet that tells you what to cook with what you have.

To cap the experience, visitors are treated with a ride on a motion-controlled bike and a stereoscopic video of Singapore in the future, which is then followed by a free-play on the multi-touch table, light-draw, and robotic butler in the lounge.

Even if visitors are not impressed with the technologies, the overall positive experience at FusionWorld will still speak volumes for where A*STAR, and Singapore, is heading.

FusionWorld is still a work-in-progress. The success of FusionWorld lies in its ability to continually update its content with real, cutting-edge technologies that will demonstrate A*STAR’s research strength, because today’s future, may quickly become yesterday’s fad.

Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong opened a major new visitor centre for A*STAR (Agency for Science, Technology and Research) called Fusionworld this week. I must declare an interest here – I worked on the concept with MET Studio Design Ltd last year. The challenge was to try to integrate the wide range of diverse and cutting edge technologies under A*STAR’s research umbrella into one coherent visitor experience. I shall see to what extent it was a success when I visit it next month. I’ll try to be objective – honest.