Peacock's proud display in Peranakan Museum show

The peacock, a quintessentially Asian bird, gets its day in the sun in a new exhibition at the Peranakan Museum, a showcase of how the vainglorious creature has strutted its way into countless objects.

- Clement Yong Correspondent

Peranakan items featuring the peacock (left), as well as a birthday hanging (above) featuring Taoist goddess Magu, are on display at the exhibition Peacock Power: Beauty And Symbolism Across Cultures. PHOTOS: PERANAKAN MUSEUM

Peacock Power: Beauty And Symbolism Across Cultures features more than 100 items drawn from the National Collection and on loan from Peranakan, Chinese, Malay and Indian households.

Like the fowls themselves, this two-storey exhibition comes with a self-consciously showy element. The eye is led from gold belts inlaid with diamonds to a gold-threaded silk banner to a feathery kavadi, a canopy borne by Hindu devotees during Thaipusam.

This material shimmer is finished off with an immersive holographic experience of aloof peacocks with their families of peahen and peafowl. Stand in the right spot, and the males fan their trains to perform for the visitor a mesmerising and rhythmic courtship dance — an unexpectedly satisfying pleasure.

At the media preview on Oct 21, the exhibition’s curatorial adviser Peter Lee says the “incredible sense of wonder” people experience when they encounter a peacock in all its glory is why the bird has been chosen as the subject of the showcase.

"There’s no animal in the natural world that is more resonant for all of us. When the peacock’s fantail opens, whatever community we come from, it resonates in the same way, so it’s really about shared heritage, shared memory,” says Mr Lee.

The beautiful items on display also show how the bird has captured the imagination of craftsmen and artists, no matter their community, and the trade links that led to the motif’s circulation.