The Hull Museum of Southeast Asian Craft and Belief

The Museum has over 3,000 artefacts, only about 400 of which are on display in the museum. These range from everyday items to items used in performance and ritual. Most have been collected since the 1960s. Many are very beautiful.

What does the museum contain?

The collection focuses on the craft skills and ways of life of the rural, coastal and tribal peoples of SE Asia. The artefacts on display demonstrate the deep bond between humans and the tropical environment in which the people of this region live. They show how nature shapes both daily life and spiritual beliefs in the region.

The collection includes:

Costume and textiles including batik, ikat, embroidered cloth and gold-threaded songkok
Basketry and plaited ware
Decorative silver, jewellery and brassware
Material culture related to hunting, fishing, agriculture and food preparation
Weaponry, including Malay and Javanese keris and headhunting swords
Amulets, and artefacts used in shamanistic healing
Tobacco and opium pipes, betel-chewing equipment and equipment for brewing rice beer
Musical instruments such as gongs and bamboo xylophones
Wooden sculptures including sculptures used for healing rituals
Indonesian and Malaysian shadow puppets, Vietnamese water puppets, masks, toys and games

Indonesian puppet

Museum location

The Museum is on the First Floor of the Wilberforce Building in the Roy Bruton Room.

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Opening times

The museum is open to all students, staff, and members of the public.


	Museum opening times
Monday - Friday	9:00am-5:00pm

The museum will be closed on Bank Holidays and university closure days.

History of the museum

The collection on which the museum is based was started as a teaching collection in the mid-1960s, when the Centre for SE Asian Studies was created at the University of Hull. It began with the donation of the collection of Prof. Mervyn Jaspan, the first head of the Centre for SE Asian Studies. Since then the collection has expanded through collecting by staff and students of the Centre, who purchased in local markets in SE Asia, were given objects or gifts, or commissioned objects to be made for them. Further objects have been donated from outside the university. Donations continue to be made regularly to the museum.

In 2007, the collection became a museum, when a substantial financial donation to the Centre from Dr Roy Bruton enabled the collection to be relocated to a first-floor gallery in the Wilberforce Building.

The museum is now a public-facing institution, which aims to be accessible and relevant to a wider public in the Humber region, as well as being oriented towards research. The function of the museum as a teaching collection has become less important with the closure of the Centre for South-East Asian Studies in 2003.

The curatorship of the museum

In 1972 Lewis Hill, Lecturer in the Social Anthropology of South-East Asia, became the curator of the collection and later the museum. He continued to serve in that position after his retirement in 2000, until 2022. Sadly, Lewis Hill died in March 2023, after many years of service, both on behalf of the study of South-East Asia at Hull and through his curatorship of the collection and then the museum.

The position of curator has since been taken over by Dr Monica Janowski, who was awarded her MPhil at Cambridge and PhD from the London School of Economics under the supervision of the eminent French anthropologist Professor Maurice Émile Félix Bloch; she is a specialist in Borneo anthropology and has considerable expertise in material culture and museum studies.

Her deputy is Prof. Victor T. King, who had been supervised for his PhD in social anthropology at Hull by Mervyn Jaspan and who was Professor of South-East Asian Studies and Head of the Centre for SE Asian Studies at the University of Hull until it closed in 2003.

Curatorial consultants for the Museum are Dr Fiona Kerlogue and Dr Andy West.

Exhibitions

The Museum has occasional exhibitions. Past exhibitions included:

Costumes of the Golden Triangle (1987–1989), a touring exhibition in the Humber region based on a donation of costumes from Dr Robert G. Cooper, a Hull graduate who spent two years carrying out field research (1973–1975) among the Hmong in northern Thailand and Laos
Textiles and Embroidery of the Ethnic Minorities of South-west China (1991), an exhibition in the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull.
Art and Religion in Bali (1993), an exhibition in the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull
Sumatran Textiles (1990s and early 2000s), a display in the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull based on the collection made by Dr. Fiona Kerlogue.
Precious Cargo (2010–2011), made possible through funding as part of the Cultural Olympiad, which included a number of wayang shadow puppet shows and puppet-related performances and workshops, bringing in schools, drawing on puppets in the collection and involving the Department for Drama and Music at the University of Hull and local puppet companies in East Yorkshire.
Heroines, Heroes and Cosmic Power in Southeast Asia (2023), an exhibition in the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull supported by a grant from the Ferens Education Trust, featuring some of the work of the Borneo artist, Stephen Baya together with objects from the collection.