Peter Lee wears many hats, but the Singaporean collector, researcher and curator is most animated when he is talking about the textures of everyday life — the checks in a sarong, the cut of a kebaya, the feel of a preserved house, the layered histories carried by objects that outlast the empires and trading routes that produced them.
In Karaikudi, where he had travelled to take part in the annual Chettinad Heritage and Cultural Festival, Lee found a setting that mirrored many of the themes that have shaped his own scholarship and collecting. Of Peranakan Chinese ancestry, he described himself as an Indophile and said the experience of being in Chettinad was especially resonant because both communities emerged from old trading worlds defined by movement, adaptation and exchange.
"My father and grandfather wore what we call Pulicat sarongs at home [which can be traced to the 17th-century port town of Tamil Nadu]. They are so much a part of my memories of everyday life," Lee said, recalling the textiles that formed part of his family's domestic world. For him, the connection between Peranakan and South Indian textile traditions is not merely aesthetic. He believes that the "love of checks" links collectors and communities across the Indian Ocean, revealing how port cities generated shared tastes and hybrid forms.
That idea runs through Lee's broader understanding of history. "Coming from an old community of traders with regional networks, Chettinad heritage really resonated [with me]," he said. "Art history is largely still dominated by state narratives and the works of intellectual elites. Chettinad history and material culture, like those of the Peranakan, Parsi and Armenian trading communities, are facets that contour our understanding of the past in diverse ways."
Lee has traced his Peranakan genealogy back nine generations, and his work has increasingly focused on how identity is shaped less by fixed categories than by circulation, contact and improvisation. One of the most revealing examples, he says, is the kebaya, the open jacket worn by women across parts of Southeast Asia. He had once assumed it was quintessentially Peranakan, but while researching his 2014 book Sarong Kebaya, he discovered a far more complex history.
"I always thought it was quintessentially Peranakan but the deeper I got into it [for his 2014 book Sarong Kebaya], the complexities of the cultural entanglements of its past became more apparent," he said. "We have imposed a fixed sense of race and identity on dress, and I found that Peranakan fashion can help us rethink that. Because the community resided in multicultural port cities, they did not comply with sumptuary dress codes. It spoke to me about hybridity, and made me question every object and culture and how things are pieced together."
For Lee, the Peranakan experience is a reminder that modern ideas of race, identity and nationality should not be projected uncritically onto the past. "Race, identity and nationality are all modern concepts," he said. "The past was more organic. When these migrant merchants came, they would find local partners/spouses, which led to hybrid rituals, spiritual practices and customs."
That same fascination with the maritime worlds of exchange informs his documentary work. Lee's series The Mark of Empire: Kingdoms of the Sea, available on YouTube, explores the history of four Southeast Asian empires and their influence on world history. The four-part series, produced by IFA Media for Mediacorp's global news brand CNA, recently won the Silver Dolphin award in the Ethnology and Sociology category at the Cannes Corporate Media & TV Awards, adding international recognition to Lee's efforts to bring lesser-known histories to wider audiences.
His interest in Peranakan culture also led him to a major curatorial role as founding curator of the NUS Baba House, a 19th-century townhouse that once belonged to a wealthy stevedore family. Lee described his involvement as serendipitous: he had met the house's current owner, who wanted to preserve its history, around the same time his aunt Agnes Tan was looking for a project to donate to in memory of her late father, Tun Tan Cheng Lock, the Peranakan businessman and political leader. Lee brought the two together, and the result was a museum unlike most others in the region — a preserved home with objects and interiors intact from 1929, when the house was built.
"Historical house museums can give a multi-sensory understanding of the past," Lee explained. "The subliminal effect of seeing, smelling and even feeling things is something not achievable in a standard museum."
The Baba House is currently being restored and is set to open next year, extending Lee's long-running effort to protect and interpret domestic heritage as a living archive of migration, trade and cultural mixing. In his telling, the significance of such spaces lies not only in what they preserve, but in what they reveal: that the histories of the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia were built as much in kitchens, wardrobes and family homes as in palaces, archives and official chronicles.
For Lee, the checks in a sarong and the embroidery of a kebaya are not decorative details. They are evidence of a world in which communities met, married, traded and transformed one another — a world whose complexity, he argues, still has much to teach the present.