The Rise of Private Museums and Heritage in East and Southeast Asia: Understanding Memory and Transformation

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The 'Asian museum boom' is characterised by a wave of new museum building projects together with wide-scale heritage designation programmes on national, regional and local levels. At the same time, there has been renewed scholarly focus on the shifting socio-political landscape in which museums, memorials and cultural preservation practices are embedded, and questions of power and authority in relation to the nation-building and the state. Consequently, issues around commemoration and governance have become dominant genres for the framing of studies of Asian cultural heritage.While much research has been dedicated to analysing state museums and national narratives, there exists a gap in current knowledge of the growth phenomenon of private sector involvement in heritage, museums and commemoration in East and Southeast Asia. This is despite the fact that over a relatively short period of time, there are significant numbers of museums and heritage sites financed and run by ethnic communities, entrepreneurs, corporations, and families in East and Southeast Asia, and where in China alone, private museums are expanding at a significant rate each week of the year.This project will address this oversight by generating new knowledge of the impacts of the private sector on the heritage and museum boom in Asia. In recognising that memory often attaches itself to heritage in diverse and contested ways (and so may be at odds with official histories), this research will produce new insights into how heritage technologies are used by the private sector as a means for the recognition of suffering or the creation of a better future. Examining the memorialising tactics and strategies driven by the private-sector expansion will enable museum and heritage professionals in the UK and Asia to better understand the opportunities and constraints under which the industry is operating.East and Southeast Asia are ideal regions to situate such an investigation as communities are still grappling with the legacies of war, genocide, revolution, political upheaval, or devastating natural disasters within living memory. This network will provide the necessary framework to explore these factors in relation to the following questions. What memory politics emerge in the context of private museums, heritage sites or commemorative practices and would remain otherwise hidden or repressed by paternalistic states? In what ways are technologies of heritage appropriated to give expression to trauma or suffering and how are these expressed? How does liberal reform and the expansion of the private sector offer a space for counter-memory to emerge and flourish, particularly in late socialist states like China, Vietnam and Laos? A key concern will be to ask how recent phenomena related to the production of public memory and historical consciousness challenges official and accepted histories, and to understand what mobilises people to recover and re-evaluate memory and give prominence to grievances and loss or future hopes and aspirations. In examining the types of memory-work that emerge in private museums and heritage sites in contemporary Asia, this research will develop an understanding of the conditions under which the sector operates, and the political, economic, and cultural challenges faced. The main components of this research are two international events, one at Bristol and the other in Leiden, which allows participants to present their written findings and share them with a larger audience. These written drafts will form the basis of a co-edited book. Dissemination activities include a website and blog, an online joint classroom between Bristol and Leiden / Dutch students, and a series of news articles for the museum and heritage sector. A key output is a briefing paper setting out results and recommendations aimed at the museum and heritage profession in the UK/Europe and Asia - and circulated through networks in the UK, Europe, and Asia.