Things Gain Value as They Disappear
By Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng
July 2019 EDITORIAL
What did heritage conservation look like or sound like in the pre-modern age when things changed slowly, and conservatism was not an ideology but a social default; when great changes that eradicated what we would today call tangible and intangible cultural heritage came only through war, conquest, natural disaster or sickness?Granted that this understanding of life in the past is highly biased, and changes were probably more normal than we moderns for our own purposes wish to believe, the point still remains that the idea of conserving and...
Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng
is the Executive Director of Penang Institute. His latest book is Signals in the Noise: Notes on Penang, Malaysia and the World (Singapore: Faction Press) Homepage: wikibeng.com.
