“What happened to old Singapore?” travel writer David Lamb once asked Tommy Koh, chairman of the National Heritage Board.

The professor, aged 72, replied, “We destroyed a lot of it. You have to remember that in the 1960s, we were a very poor country.”

That conversation took place in an interview two years ago for an article in the Smithsonian magazine, and Lamb might be a little too late for this, but a small museum here is now trying to revive old Singapore – if not in its physical sense, then at least through memory. 

The National University of Singapore Museum (NUS Museum) has embarked on a year-long exhibition entitled Constructed Landscapes: Singapore in Southeast Asia, which brings to light several old paintings that trace the island’s milieu before its intense urbanisation in the late 1960s.

But here’s a twist: not every picture truthfully depicts the country’s past setting.

“I wanted to show what could be real and what could be unreal in a landscape,” says exhibition curator Karen Lim. “You can’t come to a museum just to look at art, audiences also have to use their own discernment to understand the imagery.” 

If this all sounds like tedious work – and it is – Lim will be more than glad to guide you through the journey. 

Except, she won’t give you all the answers.

On a Saturday afternoon tour, she begins with a question, “Do you know what this landmark is?” she asks and points to an angular dome in a 162-year-old painting. The only hint I’m getting is that the building in the painting sits near a serene, airbrushed sea, which I assume is today’s Marina coastal area.

Turns out, the work is of the Telok Ayer Market, except the sea has now made way for roads and the whole Marina entertainment sector.

The author of the watercolour painting, J.T. Thomson, was one of Singapore’s pioneer engineers. In the 1840s, Thomson was employed by the British East India Company to be a surveyor and he built bridges and other public works such as the Tan Tock Seng Hospital. Today’s Thomson Road is named after him in tribute.

“These are pictures done by a person who happened to live in Singapore at that time,” Lim says. “He wasn’t an artist, but the important thing is that his paintings have become historical documents for us.”

In a city that redevelops and reinvents itself by the minute, recollection has increasingly become an important concept for architects, artists and curators here.

Lim points to a similar minimal watercolour work, this time by architect Charles Dyce who had designed the steeple of the Cathedral of the Good Shepherd. “Guess where this is,” she challenges again.

Here, there is another coastal area, another empty field… Things were certainly much less congested in the past. I earnestly remember seeing the setting somewhere… And then again I don’t quite remember. 

“Young people don’t have any memories of these locations anymore,” Lim explains after she reveals that the site is of the Padang. “Things here get demolished, they change quickly and land is being reclaimed for new things, so it’s important to look at these past perspectives.”

And she mentions the word “perspectives” for a good reason: Some of the images are mentally, rather than factually, conjured.

In a 1957 painting of the Nanyang University by China artist Ling Qingni, the bottom half is accurate – there is the Yunnan Garden that still exists in the premise today – but the upper half is of imaginary hills and mountains.

“It doesn’t look like Singapore right?” Lim says. “As much as he was mesmerised by the Nanyang site when he traveled to our island, Ling couldn’t get away from his Chinese painting sensibilities.”

Using this traditional watercolour painting method from China to compose landscapes was also common by our own pre-war artists here.

“It’s called the Nanyang Style, and painters like Chen Chong Swee and Lim Mu Hue were part of this group,” Lim elaborates on a 1968 brushwork of a rural village. “Their subject matter focused heavily on locality.”

But the more impressive works turn out to be the woodblock prints on paper. The technique originates from China and utilises a block with its unwanted areas chiseled away to reveal an image of sorts to be stamped with ink.

The series, by pre-war artists Lim Mu Hue, Koeh Sia Yong and Tan Tee Chie, features vanishing trades in Singapore’s forgotten landscapes of alleyways, puppet theatres and construction sites. In the faces of fortunetellers, prostitutes and illegal hawkers, the carvings are of tense, worrisome looks – evidence that the late 1950s were not the best times to live in. “A lot of social and cultural dilemmas in the past, such as bad housing and economic conditions, are represented in these images,” says Lim.

There is, for example, two works of the notorious Bukit Ho Swee fire and its remnants. In this 1961 incident, 16,000 were made homeless after the fire raged over more than 2,000 attap houses.

This event became a watershed period for Singapore where all kampongs were demolished and replaced with concrete public housing apartments – one of the country’s most drastic and massive changes to its landscape.

“But look carefully,” says Lim and I edge nearer to the painting. “Even kampongs do have a certain structure, order and design,” she insists, as if too little credit has been given to the old way of life.

By this time, we’ve walked through two stages of the exhibit, Engagement and Memory, and are entering the last segment – Imagination. Here, it is about spirits, ghosts and mythical aspects of an environment.

The starkest painting is one by artist Vincent Hoisington, an undated piece of work that depicts a female Pontianak. According to Malay folklore, Pontianaks are women who die during childbirth and resurrect as beautiful lady vampires to feed on human blood. Living amongst banana trees, they often terrorise villages.

“People believe and see such things in a landscape,” says Lim. In Hoisington’s painting, the vampire is naked and she rises from the soil like a phoenix – magnificent and terrifying all at once.

For the curator, this section on Imagination has been important for the exhibit as she feels that too much attention has been paid to only the physical quality of a landscape.

“But an environment is not so absolute,” she says. “It’s also about moments, experiences, beliefs, thoughts and actions.”

“All these works reveal and remind us of the different kinds of lives and personalities that define the country,” she says. “It’s now up to us to decide who we want to remember and what we want to remember.”

By stringing together up to 73 works – a massive number for a relatively small art show – it’s hard to leave the museum without a trace of a memory. Lamb had asked, “What happened to old Singapore?” Given this exhibit, not all has been destroyed — old Singapore simply lives on in good memory.

Constructed Landscapes: Singapore in Southeast Asia runs until December 2009. NUS Museum is located at the National University of Singapore, University Cultural Centre, 50 Kent Ridge Crescent.