5th Asian Museum Curator’s Conference: Independent & institutional curators from across South East Asia and Japan share their responses.

Following our post on Penang Toy Museum, I thought I’d share with you legendary director Hayao Miyazaki’s (Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke) ‘manifesto’ for the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, Japan.

His vision is so simple: ‘put together as if it were a film’, yet profound: ‘a museum that makes you feel more enriched when you leave than when you entered!’. If our museums were guided by such ideas, maybe they would seem more like places for the living than the dead. In fact, alot of the following would apply well to curating art exhibitions, IMHO.

Official Ghibli Museum site here.

by SHARON CHIN

When I was in Penang last year, I stumbled across the Toy Museum along Tanjung Bungah Road. My first reaction was: whoaaaaa. It remains one of the strangest, most fascinating places I’ve ever been in.

The Museum itself is a shop lot of about 650 sq ft, located beside Copthorne Orchid Hotel. It feels suspiciously like an old night club with a bad ‘Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt’ theme: gilt fibreglass statues and fake hieroglyphs abound. Inside, rows and rows of shelves house over 100,000 figurines, collectibles, models and toys from a mind-boggling span of western popular culture. It was like walking into a dragon’s hoard, only instead of gold, this dragon preferred toys.