March 21, 2025

World Puppetry Day is celebrated worldwide on 21 March. Across Asia, shadow puppetry is an art form traditionally associated with the high culture of Hindu India and has proliferated as a form of entertainment in various contexts. Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum (ACM) exhibits over 700 shadow puppets (wayang purwo), with most scholarship focusing on the genre’s dramaturgical features. In ‘Curating Shadows: Malayan Shadow Puppets in Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum’ (Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 2022), Associate Professor Irving Chan Johnson (NUS Southeast Asian Studies) and Darryl Lim (Asian Civilisations Museum) examine the origins and features of Malayan shadow puppets. Their work showcases the otherwise hidden associations between power, politics, and art in the British colonial era, and contains numerous pictures that showcase the ACM digital collection.

Wayang siam, a traditional form of Malay shadow puppetry from Kelantan, is characterised by its vibrant oil-based pigments. Having examined the museum records from the Raffles Library and Museum (RLM), researchers found that Malayan puppets are underrepresented in the Asian Civilisations Museum (ACM) – only 9 out of 132 have been accessioned by the RLM as donated by Tengku Khalid.

The peak period of puppet performances and collections in Kelantan during the 1930s contributed to the complex array of wayang siam figures in the ACM today, a time when many tutelage opportunities were available. Among many puppets with unknown origins, there is a noticeable overrepresentation of fanged ogre generals, animals, and monkey generals. The researchers, through detailed analysis of the puppets’ iconography, propose that Anker Rentse, a Dane with a keen interest in Kelantanese culture, likely played a significant role in building this collection.

Interestingly, the ACM’s collection lacks certain figures such as Dewa Panah (gods holding bows) and Tok Peran Hutan (forest clowns), yet includes other rare characters, reflecting shifts in the popularity of specific characters over time. The presence of puppets resembling Thai nang talung puppets also indicates a once-existing genre of Kelantanese Thai shadow puppetry, now replaced by southern Thai performances featuring translucent hide puppets.

The researchers conclude that the colonial approach to curating the ACM’s Malayan puppet collection in the early 20th century was marked by a disregard for the subjecthood and agency of the creators. Instead, the focus was on displaying exotic art pieces to celebrate the colonial status of the Unfederated Malay States. Key donors like Tengku Khalid and Rentse, embedded in elite Malay and British socio-political circles and the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (MBRAS), influenced this collection approach. The researchers advocate for viewing these puppets not merely as entertainment artefacts but as cultural objects that can provide deeper insights into local histories and contemporary knowledge systems.

Read the article here.