With its roof and walls like flowing golden curtains and pillars shaped like gigantic trees, the linking structure in Singapore’s new National Gallery binds two buildings in the neo-classicist style from the 1920s and 1930s.

Studio Milou, a French architectural firm, has joined these two unused buildings from the British colonial era with this elegant structure to create a spectacular cultural arena that has won rave reviews.

“Fantasy has no limits,” the German journal Architektur exclaimed in praise.

These walls, once the Supreme Court and the City Hall, are part and parcel of Southeast Asian history. The Japanese signed their capitulation here in 1945 and the first cabinet after Singapore became self-governing in 1959 was sworn in here under the founder of modern Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew.

Lee died at the age of 91 last year just a couple of months before the museum was opened. The foundation stone of the Supreme Court is preserved, along with newspapers and coins in a time capsule from March 31, 1937. It is not to be opened until the year 3000.

Under Lee’s firm hand, Singapore evolved over a few decades from an impoverished island into a modern high-rise metropolis with a population of 5.5 million and a per capita income among the highest in the world.

The city-state off the Malaysian peninsula has a global reputation as a financial centre and is home to the headquarters of companies from all over the world.

The government, now led by Lee’s son Lee Hsien Loong, is now aiming to set an equivalent standard in the arts.

While the gallery has thus far been noted for its architecture, the history of the buildings and its stylish shop-cum-cafe, it has high ambitions as a centre of the arts.

At 19,000 square metres it is larger than New York’s Guggenheim and Munich’s Pinakothek combined and now houses the largest collection of modern art in Southeast Asia.

Only a fraction of its 10,000 paintings on canvas, silk and bamboo, photographs, drawings, sculptures and installations are on show.

Pride of place is held by an oil measuring three metres by four by the 19th century Indonesian artist Raden Saleh showing tigers fleeing a forest fire, one of them looking in panic directly at the viewer.

Saleh painted the work in 1849 while in the Netherlands, at the time the colonial power occupying Indonesia. The painting shows the influence of the European Romantics – nature and emotion.

“We show how Southeast Asian artists adapt styles of this kind to their home context,” says Sze Wee, the director responsible for the permanent exhibition.

The gallery also shows how colonial art schools in French Indochina influenced Vietnamese artists from the beginning of the 20th century.

“The French introduced for example the idea of living models and fixed-point perspective,” he says.

Many of the artists became politicised in the 1950s and 1960s in the struggle against colonial rule. “They believed they were able to change society through the messages in their pictures,” Sze Wee says.

Freedom fighters are depicted in the works. A work by Indonesian painter Sudjojono (1913-1986) is entitled “Stand Guard for our Motherland”.

Other artists of that era rejected realism as outdated or even colonialist, turning to the abstract, as in works from the Philippines.

German Expressionism was an inspiration in the 1970s, Sze Wee says. “There were artists who believed they could express their spiritual experiences with only powerful brush strokes.”

Art has gone global since the 1970s, he believes. “You can no longer see from the pictures where the artist comes from.”

He attributes this to increased prosperity. There are more collectors paying more for art, allowing artists to dedicate themselves to art, to travel and to attend art schools. “The opportunity to confront new ideas stimulated artists to think in new dimensions,” Sze says.

And he rejects the idea that Southeast Asian art is derivative of European styles.

“Artists all over the world seek inspiration from what is different,” he says.

IF YOU GO

< Singapore’s oldest museum is a progressive showcase of the country’s history and culture. It’s open daily from 10am to 6pm (with last admission at 5.30pm).