National Museum of Singapore shows its funny side: Hello Kitty, plastic bags and MRT misery

[SINGAPORE] Hanging on a wall of the National Museum of Singapore is a wedding card from 1975, containing the sort of advice one might expect from a particularly stern aunt.

“Girl, bear in mind always,” wrote a certain Mr and Mrs Jeffrey Wong. “One is fine. Two is a burden. Three is a crowd. Please stop at one – Elaine’s Law.”

Who was Elaine? A self-appointed authority on family planning? An overbearing matriarch? In the 1970s, when Singapore was urging couples to “Stop At Two”, Elaine seemed to think even two was too many.

Half a century later, with Singapore’s total fertility rate at a record low of 0.87, a woman who raises three or more children is practically a national treasure. 

Elaine’s Law has aged badly. But the wedding card itself has made it – against all odds – into a museum.

Yes, of all the objects that might tell Singapore’s story, the museum has chosen to display this discoloured piece of paper in the new Singapore History Gallery, which opened on Oct 10 after a three-year restoration.

What deviance is this? When did Singapore’s oldest history museum get so cheeky? Have the curators been replaced by meme-loving Gen Zs?

Just around the corner, there is an entire display devoted to supermarket plastic bags, painstakingly flattened and arranged with the care usually reserved for ancient manuscripts.

The story behind them is oddly touching. A woman who worked as a supermarket cashier spent years collecting pristine bags in a biscuit tin. After her death, her daughter passed the collection on to the museum.

Today, FairPrice’s plastic bags are a drab recycled grey. Their colourful predecessors, however, have acquired the unlikely distinction of being historical artefacts.

One can appreciate the importance of preserving everyday life. But one still has to wonder: Did I really come to the National Museum to look at FairPrice and Cold Storage plastic bags?

Only in Singapore

And if plastic bags seem a little too modest for a national museum, fear not: An entire lift from Ang Mo Kio has also made the cut. 

For five decades, the lift ferried residents between floors until it was decommissioned in 2024 during an upgrading exercise. The museum promptly gave it a second life as one of the gallery’s largest exhibits.

Of course, lifts have transformed high-rise living. 

But it takes a special sort of curatorial nerve to ask Singaporeans to stop and admire something they can casually see when they step outside their homes.

Elsewhere, the curatorial cheekiness continues. There’s a T-shirt emblazoned with “I Am Running Because I Give A Shit”, produced for a fundraising run organised by the Singapore-founded World Toilet Organization. 

There’s a special corner where visitors can follow the mass aerobics routine of the Great Singapore Workout, launched in 1993.

There’s a pair of Hello Kitty plushies to remind everyone of the great McDonald’s frenzy of 2000, when Singaporeans queued overnight – and even got into fights – for the stuffed cats offered with Extra Value Meals.

And there’s a wall of Edwin Khoo’s photographs capturing Singaporean commuters crammed into MRT trains, looking at best resigned, and at worst, thoroughly miserable.

Laughing at ourselves

Taken together, these exhibits hold up a wonderfully unflattering mirror to Singaporeans – our obsessions, eccentricities, frustrations and occasional lapses into collective madness. 

In a country where the national story is usually told with serious emphasis on progress, resilience and cohesiveness, the business of poking fun at ourselves has largely been left to social media. 

How refreshing, then, to find a government-funded museum joining in the joke – and reminding us that laughing at ourselves is also a way of understanding who we are.

Of course, not every section of the Gallery has humour: There’s the section devoted to the Japanese occupation of Singapore (1942 to 1945), which includes the tragic Sook Ching massacre.

There’s the solemn multimedia recreation of Lee Kuan Yew’s televised press conference announcing Singapore’s separation from Malaysia.

There’s an elegant installation of the Strohmenger grand piano used by Zubir Said to compose Majulah Singapura.

But once you enter the sections on modern and contemporary Singapore, the exhibition starts to loosen up.

The grand narrative of nation-building gives way to the small, idiosyncratic objects of everyday life, like the various government posters encouraging Singaporeans to do one thing or the other, a massive coffee roaster from the Ho Tit Coffee Powder Factory, and Zouk’s strange-looking “Septagon” chair that can seat seven people.

There is something liberating about a museum that gives Zubir Said’s piano its rightful place in history – then makes room for a biscuit tin full of supermarket plastic bags.

A museum that can be a bit silly is surely a museum that has come of age.