Exhibition by Founders’ Memorial honours Singapore’s founding leaders who contributed to the nation’s path to independence

Semangat yang Baru: Forging a New Singapore Spirit, a pilot exhibition by Founders’ Memorial, showcases challenges faced by the country’s first-generation leaders during the nation-building years from the 1950s to 1970s.

Co-presented with the National Museum of Singapore, it runs until Oct 29 at the museum’s Exhibition Gallery 1. Expect artefacts (including a daching pig weighing scale), films, lectures, and group activities. Some artefacts will appear at the Memorial’s integrated gallery and gardens experience at Bay East Garden.

The exhibition has five sections, including “How do we move forward?”, which describes how the founding leaders stepped forward to embody and express the new spirit; and “Difficult Moments”, a wall installation where visitors can share their thoughts on the sacrifices, hurts, and difficult trade-offs of Singapore’s early years.

Director of Founders’ Memorial, Wong Hong Suen, said: “In building a new nation, our founding leaders were confronted with pressing questions such as: What do we stand for? How do we survive? They did not have a blueprint and there was uncertainty. How they forged ahead to build our fledgling nation with the people, and the values and priorities they stood for, became foundational to what Singapore is today.”

As a test for the Memorial’s future interpretive gallery, the exhibition examines multiculturalism, integrity, resilience, and openness, and invites Singaporeans to consider how they remain relevant.

Cloud infrastructure and 5G connectivity enable personalised storytelling and virtual Character Companions share policy decisions. It even has multimedia kiosks for you to identify your founding values.

Singapore’s founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, who would be 100 this year, is commemorated in a digital trail throughout the exhibition and in the post-war Singapore section of the Singapore History Gallery. Visitors are able to discover more about his legacy, the values he embodied and how his ideas and actions shaped the path of the nation.