Stamp Collecting

In Stamp Collecting, (2020), Grace Tan reflects on the established museum practices of collection and curation and the transformational process by which specimens and objects are elevated into cultural artefacts. Placed into a “cabinet of curiosities”, Tan’s creations made from ordinary mould-made plastic tag pins and cable ties examine the intrinsic relationship between objects and their display spaces, where the pleasing arrangement and decontextualised presentation of such pieces facilitate visual observation and the exchange of scientific or cultural knowledge. The work also explores how the organisation of specimens into a collection creates a larger “cosmos”, where the relationship of each piece in the collection enhances the educational, and perhaps even the commercial, value of the entire set.

While the work strongly references Natural Science specimens, it also suggests that all collections ultimately reflect the socio-political and cultural contexts of the institution, or individual, that produced them, as evidenced by the decolonisation debates that continue to rage regarding the repatriation of artefacts whose acquisition and accession into museum collections was justified by colonialism in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The wall installation is part of the artist’s series that expanded from an earlier work, n.355 – natural progression, (2019), originally commissioned for the exhibition, Raffles In Southeast Asia: Revisiting The Scholar and The Statesman at the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore, in which Tan examined the concepts of order and progression and the blurring between the natural and artifice in the context of colonial botanical science.