ArtScience Museum in Singapore

The ArtScience Museum at Marina Sands in Singapore features a permanent ArtScience exhibition and hosts international travelling exhibitions. I learned about the museum through a newspaper review of the current exhibition "Shipwrecked: Tang Treasures and Monsoon Winds".

The review by Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop ("Ancient shipwreck yields secrets of moment in globalization", International Herald Tribune) explains that the exhibition reveals the extent of sea trade between Tang China and Iraq. A 9th century Arab dhow was discovered in 1998 next to the island of Belitung in Indonesia, and contained large quantities of mass-produced pottery as well individual masterpieces.

An exhibition such as this involves art and science at many levels - by revealing the state of technical and artistic skills at an earlier period in human history, by displaying the methods and results of modern archaeological science, and by using technical and artistic skills to prepare a large museum exhibition. The museum itself is also a notable example of modern architecture and engineering combined with artistry, as the building has been designed to resemble the shape of an open lotus flower.