Past Forums

Prof. DU Pengfei

Tsinghua University Art Museum

Not just a Teaching Museum: The Practical Road of Tsinghua University Art Museum

As a young, 2-year-old university museum, Tsinghua University Art Museum has held nearly 30 diverse exhibitions since its opening. It has carried out a large number of public education and professional education activities, attracting nearly 1,000,000 visitors, garnering increasing reputation and extensive attention from all walks of life. We have an ambitious vision to be the best and world-class university museum in China.

With this vision, what attempts and efforts have we made in the past 2 years? What experiences and lessons have been learned? In the specific historical context of cultural globalization, where should we go in the future? What are the key factors that constrain our growth? As a museum deputy director coming from a non-professional background, how do I reconcile the conflict between environmental engineering professional education and museum management? I will share with you the growth practice of Tsinghua University Art Museum. I also look forward to receiving guidance and help from peers and seniors in the industry.

Dr. Qin CAO

National Museum of Scotland

Collecting and Displaying China at the National Museum of Scotland: Opportunities and Challenges

The last 150 years of collecting from China have resulted in a sizeable collection with many outstanding pieces at the National Museum of Scotland. More recently, a number of contemporary acquisitions have been added to the historical collection. Its first dedicated East Asia gallery opened in 1996 and a new East Asia gallery is currently in development as the final stage of the Museum’s fifteen-year transformation and renovation. The new gallery will present a display of Chinese, Japanese and Korean collections from past to present across four themes, in addition to some new acquisitions specially made for the gallery. Despite all these exciting developments, we have also faced many challenges. This presentation will share my own experience as a Chinese curator in collecting and displaying Chinese collections.

Dr. Ching-Ling WANG

Rijksmuseum

The Challenges and Opportunities of Exhibiting Chinese Art in the 21st Century: A View from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

With a history of over 200 years, the Rijksmuseum has been dedicated to collecting and displaying Chinese art. This presentation showcases the display of Chinese art in the Rijksmuseum in the past, present and future. The presentation is in 3 parts: (1) the collection history of Chinese art in the Rijksmuseum and its past exhibitions; (2) the current display and exhibitions after its reopening in 2013; and (3) the future plans and directions of the Rijksmuseum. The limitations and challenges of displaying of Chinese art and exhibition curating will also be discussed.

Dr. Birgitta AUGUSTIN

National Museums in Berlin

Chinese Literati Art and Culture – A Local Idea and its Global Impact

So-called literati art (art by cultured men, wenren, or men of letters) is one of the highpoints of Chinese cultural life. Outside of China, in areas with a large Chinese speaking diaspora, substantial collections exist that contain not only valuable objects which were sought after and collected by those cultured men, but, more importantly, also a significant number of paintings and calligraphy, the latter of which considered the pinnacle of literati art. In Europe, the situation is different, and the approach to introducing literati culture to the general public may be more challenging.

In this talk, I will follow my personal experiences and approach to wenren culture to describe aspects of foundation, transculturality, and globalization of the ideas of the men of letters: first, by laying out presentations of literati art and culture in some of the places of my studies and work in Europe, Asia, and the United States; second, by focusing on my own field of research, the Yuan dynasty wenren and Daoist Zhang Yu (1283-1350); and third, by addressing aspects of contextualization of literati art in various museums, before concluding with a brief introduction of the future gallery of Chinese literati art and culture at the Museum für Asiatische Kunst of the National Museums, which will soon reopen in the Humboldt Forum on the Museum Island in the cultural center of Berlin.

Ms. JIN Jingzhi

Shanghai Museum

The Influence of Chinese Arts and Culture on Japanese Edo Period Paintings

Even before entering the Edo period (1603-1867), Japan had already been influenced by the Tang and Song dynasties of China; as time went on, such distinct cultural and artistic influences gradually became integrated into Japanese culture. By the start of the Edo period, Japan also began to be influenced by the cultural ideologies of the late Ming and early Qing dynasties. By that point, Japan had been governed by the Tokugawa Shogunate for nearly 300 years, and was seeing rapid development both in terms of societal stability and economic prosperity. During this time, therefore, Japanese paintings, ceramics, crafts and arts more generally all saw similar growth: in which older, more uniform styles were rejected, and various new artistic genres were allowed to compete and flourish.

Due to the rapid development of the publishing industry, Edo period Japan was quickly introduced to the contemporary painting styles and artistic theories of the late Ming and Early Qing, which became highly prized by Japanese artists. The art of Japanese painting thus attained new heights in this time. Many Japanese intellectuals began diligently imitating what they considered the “ideal” lifestyles of Chinese literati, which in turn led to the birth of the school of “Japanese Literati Painting.” Conversely, this period also saw the rise of the Kyoto school of Rimpa. Compared with literati, the affluent merchants who comprised the Rimpa movement’s early supporters they focused on the quality of life: and thus Rimpa artists moved away from the literati style and began to feature the lives of regular Japanese people as subject matter. This talk will thus aim to discuss the artistic and cultural influence of traditional Chinese culture on the Edo Japanese painting style, using the diverse painting styles of the Edo period as examples.

Dr. XU Zheng

China National Silk Museum

Abecedarian Exploration into the Silk Sutra Covers Collected by the Philadelphia Museum of Art

The sutra covers（經面Jingmian）commonly known as the 經皮子（Jingpizi）, and referred to as the 掩面（Yanmian）in literature of the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368-1912), included the front and back covers of an accordion-fold Buddhist scripture. The Buddhist scriptures printed during the Ming and Qing dynasties, including the Northern Yongle Tripitaka transcribed in the late Ming Dynasty in particular, were mostly bound with colorful silk fabrics used as the mounting materials. Having been handed down and dispersed up to the present, such mounting fabrics have become an important source of information for the study of silk production at that time.

The collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art comprises a total of 539 pieces of silk sutra covers, including 497 acquired from the collection of Carl Schuster in 1940, and two packets of the Northern Yongle Tripitaka donated by Howard A. Wolf and Peter A. Benoliel in 1947. All the mounting and binding fabrics are very rich in both variety and pattern, and fairly comprehensively reflected silk weaving techniques and artistic styles during the period of the Ming and Qing dynasties.

It can be seen from the aforesaid records that the fabrics used for mounting Buddhist scriptures at that time were mostly satin, twill, and plain weave silk. But in fact, apart from the complete sutra packets, the sutra fabrics deposited at the PMA were all patterned-possibly because when a curio dealer tore away a sutra cover for sale, he might have thought that the plain weave was of no value, and he therefore did not care to retain it. Judging from the coloring of the warps and wefts, this collection of fabrics can be classified into two categories, monochrome and polychrome. The scope of the patterns of the sutra covers involves an extremely wide range, including plants, animals, figures, auspices, geometry, cloud patterns, etc., and covers almost all the popular themes of fabrics made at that time. Most of the patterns are endowed with auspicious meanings.

It is worth noting that, judging from the patterns of the sutra covers we concluded that such fabrics might originally have been used as patches, robe materials or other trappings. There are even collages of a few spare materials with similar patterns. Consequently, we may infer that these sutra covers were designed to show piety through the use of one’s own belongings as almsgiving; it is also possible that, due to a shortage of financial resources, spare materials were used to improvise.

Prof. Wei-Cheng LIN

The University of Chicago

Exhibiting Chinese Art in Virtual Reality

It has become a trend in art museums around the world to add digital components to their exhibitions – from smartphone apps, interactive platforms, digital models, to full-fledged virtual reality. Chinese art exhibitions are no exception. These digital implements serve informational and/or didactic purposes, enhancing visitors’ viewing experience and improving their interest in and understanding of the exhibition. In some cases, they are employed simply as new technological gimmicks to evoke some sort of “digital sensation.” While these digital components are mostly part of the exhibitionary and installation strategy designed to bring more and younger visitors into the museum, as the digital technology develops, they concurrently also create “new” images of the artwork that bring about different visions, perceptions, experiences, and understandings of it. In other words, the new “digitality” in the art exhibition is more than a curatorial issue or challenge, but also has some important art historical implications. Virtual reality, which provides the best all-around visual simulation, also solicits most questions in this regard – in particular, when exhibiting Chinese art in virtual reality.

Some have argued that the idea and practice of “virtual reality,” as we understand it today, were already developed in the Western convention of perspective representations. It produces a viewer-centered vision that is able to simulate his or her spatial relationships with the surroundings in a measurable and empirically verifiable manner as if he or she were in that simulated space. They further argue that it is then awkward trying to reconstruct or simulate the experience with Chinese traditional artworks virtually as China lacked such a visual convention. While these arguments hold some truth, this paper shall demonstrate that virtual reality also has a history in China, only in different terms. To this end, this presentation will start with a reconsideration of the digital image of Chinese art produced through 3D technology not as a representation, but a recreation. It will then situate the digital image, specifically that of virtual reality, in a broader Chinese art historical context to see ways in which the new digital image could be part of the old tradition. The presentation will end with some reflections upon the current practice of using digital technology in Chinese art exhibitions to suggest how the new digital imaging technology has changed not only the way we exhibit Chinese art, but also the way we appreciate and understand it.

Ms. CAO Hong

Peking University

How to Fulfill an Ideal Exhibition Logic using Digital Technology: A Case Study of Northern Wei Murals Exhibition at PKU Sackler Museum

1) Brief History of SMPKU: SMPKU was opened in 1993 and was the first teaching museum in China. SMPKU has not only showcased the university’s accomplishments in archaeological and cultural relics studies, but also has served as an important academic exchange center by working with artists and specialists from various cultural backgrounds in organizing art exhibitions and symposiums.

2) Themes of the exhibition: “An Imaginative World of Afterlife: The Northern Wei Murals of Shaling M:7 and Yungang Grotto Art Exhibition” was an exhibition organized by the School of Archaeology and Museology at PKU in collaboration with Yungang Grottoes Research Institute from 12 Jan 2017 to 26 March 2018. This exhibition focused on the murals found in the tombs (AD435) of Northern Wei Dynasty in Shaling near Datong, Shanxi province. The finding of these murals was among the top 10 Archaeological Discoveries of 2005, in China.

In this exhibition we displayed several reproduced murals and some original statues from Yungang Grottoes. These mural reproductions were created by the joint efforts of the archaeologists at Yungang Grottoes Research Institute and muralists from the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. They worked on the project for 2 years. The statues and mural paintings depict the affluent lifestyles enjoyed by Northern Wei’s ruling class, and their wishes to continue the prosperity into the world of afterlife.

3) Highlights of the exhibition: This exhibition emphasized the collaboration of professionals across disciplines, including archaeologists, curators, art historians, ancient architectural history experts, artists and computer experts. During the presentation, I will further discuss the latest research results and new approaches to digital technologies, such as 3D printing and VR, to expand an audience’s participation experiences as well as how to create an exhibition audio video tour with the WeChat app.

Prof. Christiaan JÖRG

The Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden

The Dresden Porcelain Project: Cataloguing a Royal Collection of Asian Export Porcelain

Together with silk and tea, porcelain was one of the commodities from China that traveled the world. Like tea and silk, it was exotic, exclusive and much sought after in Asia and, since the 16th century, in the West. For Europeans, the decoration on porcelain often was their very first impression of a non-Western culture, making them wonder about the world and its marvels.

Tea and silk decay quickly, but porcelain has an almost eternal life, even if broken and therefore often is considered a good example of early globalism in material culture. In the West, it was influential as a new element in Western interior design, it was at the core of changing eating and drinking habits in Europe around 1700 and it strongly influenced the chinoiserie fashion in the 18th century.

Porcelain was widely in use in Europe and archaeological excavations made clear that at least in the Netherlands it was represented among all layers of 18th c. society. It also was the subject of collecting among the European upper classes, initially for cabinets of curiosities, later for porcelain rooms where an abundance of objects with a great variety of shapes, colors and decorations was presented, thus enhancing the taste and status of their owner.

A wonderful, well-documented early 18th c. porcelain collection is that of Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland (1670-1733). It was a large collection: when he died he owned about 25,000 pieces of Chinese and Japanese porcelain. Only one-third survived and is preserved in the Zwinger in Dresden, Germany. It still is a collection of great importance because the objects can be matched with their descriptions in the contemporary inventories that have been preserved. These inventories also give information where Augustus acquired his porcelain, the prices he paid, and how he used it. This correlation is possible because the number that each piece was given on arrival was engraved or painted on the base. We therefore have a corpus of porcelain that is undisputedly genuine and reflects the taste, the appreciation and the variety of porcelain at the time.

However, the collection also is important because it stood at the basis of the invention and development of the first true Western porcelain in Meissen, near Dresden, in which Augustus had heavily invested. In his ‘Japanese Palace’ in Dresden he intended to combine the Asian and the Meissen porcelains, but his plans were never realized.

At present, a cataloguing project is on its way to produce a modern, digital catalogue in English of each and every piece of the remaining Asian porcelain collection of Augustus the Strong. Thanks to the Bei Shan Tang Foundation and others, all objects have been photographed and all relevant inventory entries transcribed and translated. An international team of 30 specialists is now writing new entries and Christiaan Jörg, academic supervisor of the project, will present the latest discoveries of his colleagues at the symposium.

Ms. SZETO Yuen Kit

Hong Kong Museum of Art

Preserving and Promoting Chinese Painting and Calligraphy Collections for All in Museums

Museums provide an environment to preserve objects of high historical and cultural value. Their collections not only reflect the development of civilizations through time, but also enrich the cultural life of their audiences through display. Chinese painting and calligraphy are particularly precious as they embody the exquisite essence of Chinese culture, thus the preservation, research and promotion of which are important missions for museums and their practitioners. Shiqu baoji [Catalogue of Painting and Calligraphy in the Qianlong Imperial Collection] of Emperor Qianlong (r.1736-1795) of the Qing dynasty records around 2,000 works of painting and calligraphy from the Tang, Song and Yuan dynasties. Yet, when compared with the 7,644 pieces documented in the inventory of Emperor Huizong (r.1101-1125) from over 600 years ago, the decrease in number shows that paper and silk calligraphy and painting are indeed very fragile and transient in the tides of history. Last year, the Palace Museum organized an exhibition and an international conference on Shiqu baoji. Curators, experts and scholars gathered to re-examine the Chinese gems, taking a step further to explore the strategies of preservation, research and public education, which are the core functions of modern museums.

In the early 20th century, some works catalogued in the Shiqu baoji were lost and scattered overseas via Hong Kong. Fortunately, Mr. Low Chuck Tiew, owner of the Xubaizhai Collection, had endeavored to rescue and acquire 13 pieces. For the sake of long term preservation of calligraphy and painting, Mr. Low decided in 1989 to donate his Xubaizhai Collection, including those previously in the imperial collection of the Qing dynasty to the Hong Kong Museum of Art. The Museum established a special team, building an advanced storage, a research center and a gallery to manage and display the collection to a professional standard. The works from the collection have been frequently exhibited under different themes and featured in various educational activities and publications. The Museum is now planning an exhibition showing the Shiqu baoji works in the Xubaizhai collection which will recount some stories of the imperial collection and stress the importance of preserving the cultural heritage. The Department of Asia of the British Museum curated a special exhibition on the culture of Yangzi River. One of the exhibits, The Odes of Chen by the Song painter Ma Hezhi (act. ca 1130 – ca. 1170), was a documented painting in Shiqu baoji. The exhibition allowed visitors to learn about Chinese history, culture, painting and calligraphy from diverse perspectives. These exhibitions illustrate how museums and curators fulfill their roles and perform their duties in preserving and promoting cultures.

Dr. JIAO Tianlong

Denver Art Museum

A Centennial Journey: collecting and promoting Chinese art at the Denver Art Museum

The history of a museum’s collection reflects the museum’s vision and mission. Collecting and promoting Chinese arts in American art museums reflects the museum’s understanding of the role of Chinese arts in their strategic plan. Since 1915, the Denver Art Museum has been collecting and promoting Chinese art. This centennial journey represents a unique perspective of a west American museum towards Chinese art. Like many American museums with Chinese art collections, Denver Art Museum has largely built its Chinese art collections from private donations. However, unlike some museums with big gifts from one or few collectors, the Chinese art collections at the Denver Art Museum were primarily accumulated through small or medium gifts over the past century. Almost 400 donors from the US, Asia, Europe and South America have helped build the collections. The first of these was Walter C. Mead (1866-1951), who pledged his collection of Chinese and Japanese art ‘to the people of Denver’ in 1915, forming the nucleus of Asian arts at Denver up to the early 1940s. With the generous support of these donors and the museum’s own purchases, the Denver Art Museum’s Chinese art collections rank today among the finest in North America, representing 5,000 years of art history of China.

With the expansion of its Chinese art collections over the past century, the Denver Art Museum embarked on ambitious exhibitions and programmes featuring and presenting Chinese arts and culture to the residents of Denver and beyond. It has to date developed or hosted more than ninety special exhibitions — including many collaborations with museums in Asia, Europe and other parts of the US — along with educational programmes, lecture series and academic symposia.

Ms. QIAN Ling

Tianjin Museum

Collection, Research and Exhibition for Chinese Ancient Artworks of Tianjin Museum

The talk is divided into two parts. The first part introduces the historical evolution of Tianjin Museum, as well as the categories, composition, sources and characteristics of its collections. The second part introduces a series of ancient art exhibitions planned and organized by the Tianjin Museum in recent years, including “Paintings of the Shanghai School”, “Paintings of the Yangzhou School”, “Paintings of ‘Four Kings’ in the Early Qing Dynasty “, “Paintings in Late Ming”, “Paintings of the Wumen School in the Mid-Ming Dynasty” and more. I will share about the museum’s work in art history research and social education, and discuss the goals and directions of future art research, curation, and dissemination.

Dr. Katherine Anne PAUL

Newark Museum

Newark Museum Chinese Projects: Past and Future

Today the Chinese art collection of the Newark Museum numbers approximately 9,000 works of art (not including an additional 5,600 works of Tibetan art). Over 100 Chinese objects entered the collection with the Museum’s founding in 1909. The first major exhibition to focus on China was the 1923 traveling exhibition, “China, the Land and the People”. Organized in conjunction with the Chinese legation in Washington, DC, this was an unprecedented compilation of early twentieth-century Chinese crafts which showcased contemporary (1920s) life in China as well as its history. Two smaller exhibitions formed from this larger one traveled to twenty other US cities in the 1920s. This institutional history prompted a number of significant gifts of Chinese art to the Museum throughout the twentieth century.

In recent years, several projects have focused on different facets of the collection. The Museum hosted Professor Han Huirong 韓慧榮 of Beijing Normal University 北師大 to review and publish the Museum’s extensive collection of paper cuts resulting in the 2015 publication: Revolutionary Chinese Paper Cuts from the Newark Museum. 《剪綵出東方 紐華克博物館館藏中國剪紙》. This summer of 2016 Professor Lei Chinhau 雷晉豪 recently of Hong Kong Baptist University reviewed the Museum’s pre-Ming dynasty ceramic collection. We anticipate a publication resulting from his review in the near future.

Recent exhibitions of Chinese art at the Museum feature both special exhibitions and permanent gallery reinstallations. In 2013, the special exhibition “Ming to Modern, Elevating the Everyday in Chinese Art”《明代至今：日用品中的中國藝術》was drawn entirely from the Museum’s holdings (excepting one loaned work). In 2012 three permanent gallery reinstallations were created along these themes: “Re-Activating Antiquities: Honoring the Archaic in Chinese Art, 200 BC-2012 AD” 《復古》; “China’s China: Porcelain, Earthenware, Stoneware & Glazes”《中國陶瓷》; and “Buddhism, Taoism, Confucius and Cult of Mao: China’s Religious Arts” 《佛教，道教，孔子和毛澤東的崇拜》. Additional permanent gallery installations that showcase Chinese art include the 2011 “Tiaras to Toe Rings: Asian Ornaments” and in 2010 “Red Luster: Lacquer & Leather Works of Asia”.

Planning for the next special exhibition is underway. With the working title: China Trending: 18th Century Fads and Fashions for Velvets, Painted Enamels and Glass, the exhibit will feature the Museum’s own superior examples of Chinese velvets, painted enamel wares and glass works and will highlight some of the early global exchanges between China and Europe that led to the creation of these pieces. As demonstrated above, the Museum welcomes visiting scholars to study and publish focused aspects of the larger collection. Areas that remain understudied include our significant holdings of jades, paintings, costumes and textiles.

Mr. SHI Ningchang

The Palace Museum

Traditional Techniques and Scientific Means in Conservation at The Palace Museum

The Palace Museum — the home of 24 emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties — gathered countless rare and exotic treasures which have gone through hundreds or even thousands of years of vicissitudes with varying degrees of damage. The restoration of cultural relics has always existed, and the method of restoration has been passed down from generation to generation. The Conservation Department, having experienced historical evolution, has now developed into a professional unit specialising in the protection, restoration and scientific research of cultural relics. With the increasing adoption of science and technologies in the protection of cultural relics, the Conservation Department has provided significant support for the diagnosis of damage, as well as formulation of strategies for preventive conservation and restoration of cultural relics. Ancient methods combined with modern techniques form the backbone of “The Hospital for Cultural Heritage” within The Palace Museum. For over half a century, these cultural treasures were sent into “The Hospital for Cultural Heritage” with their longevities extended by the doctors in the hospital. Meanwhile, the Conservation Department possesses 4 items of National Intangible Cultural Heritage. With the implementation of “Peaceful Palace Museum” project, more than one hundred professional and technical personnel from 13 kinds of workshops restore hundreds of pieces of cultural relics every year, including: wood, textile, lacquerware, inlay, metal, ancient clock, ceramic, mounting of ancient painting and calligraphy, facsimiles and digital printing of ancient painting and calligraphy, traditional packaging, thangka and artwork.

Dr. Katherine TSIANG

University of Chicago

The Tianlongshan Caves Project and Exhibition Plan: Dispersed Sculptures, Digital Archiving, and Cave Reconstruction

The Tianlongshan Caves Project-Introduction
The Buddhist cave shrines of Tianlongshan were carved from the mountainside outside of Taiyuan City, Shanxi province, mostly from the sixth through eighth century. In recent history they have been seriously damaged when their sculptural contents were first recognized for their aesthetic value and dispersed through the international art market. Since 2014 the Center for the Art of East Asia at the University of Chicago has collected wide-ranging information and images of the sculptures and caves. A small work team has traveled around the globe to photograph and conduct 3D scanning of about one hundred sculptures and has created a website as database that brings together historical information, old photographs, and digital photographs and 3D models of the sculptures. This is searchable by cave numbers, museum locations, sculptural figure types, and other criteria and viewable with interactive 3D displays.

Dispersed Sculptures
More than 150 sculptures known from publications have been attributed to the Tianlongshan caves. The sculptures taken from the caves now are located in museums around the world where their original significance as religious images in the context of a cave temples and religious practice is lost. The former locations of many of these sculptures can now be confirmed with the current research and collected information. In addition the project will work with collaborators in China to conduct 3D scanning of the caves. This will enable us to create digital reconstruction of caves based on the scanned 3D data that could be shown in museum galleries together with the sculptures.

Exhibition Concepts and Goals of Digital Installations
The next step in the Tianlongshan Caves Project is to design a special museum exhibition that makes innovative use of contemporary technology. The goal is to devise new ways to create museum installations that offer an engaging, informative, and in some cases, interactive experience for a general museum audience. In both intimate and large-scale digital displays, the installations will create virtual spaces inside of galleries that offer new ways to view works of sculptural art even in the absence of the actual works of art and to experience the spaces of cave temples. The digital displays will allow visitors to to survey the Tianlongshan caves site environment and observe the art and architecture of the Buddhist caves in various ways. It will show the caves in their current condition and reconstruct their former appearance with the digital restoration of the missing sculptures in the caves. The exhibition can digitally transport the sculptures from their current museum locations and reunite them with their former groups of religious images in cave contexts. This will enable visitors to understand the historical appearance and religious meaning of Tianlongshan as well as the consequences of the destruction of the caves in recent history.

Dr. Marco LEONA

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Science and Art: The Colors of East Asian Paintings

East Asian painters and printmakers have achieved a rich visual language within the constraints of a very simple, almost minimalist technique. A relatively narrow range of pigments thinly bound in hide glue or dispersed in starch paste afforded artists in China, Korea, Japan, and the Himalayan plateau surprisingly evocative possibilities in scrolls, screens, album drawings and prints.

The complexity of painterly effects achieved by East Asian artists has often been overlooked in the West, and the extent to which color and gloss are manipulated through pigment selection, shading, and overlying with transparent or colored glazes has only been brought to light in recent studies. Much in the same way, the variety of natural and synthetic inorganic and organic pigments, and their history of mining, manufacture, and trade over China and the neighboring regions is not sufficiently known.

Despite the enormous importance of Chinese art over the centuries, the pigments of Chinese, paintings have not been studied in the West to the same extent as those of Japanese paintings or Himalayan thangkas. This situation should clearly be addressed, as China played a key role in developing and disseminating most of the traditional East Asian pictorial forms, as well as painting materials. In fact, the development of painting techniques in the regions around China cannot be understood without looking in detail at the material evidence presented by Chinese paintings.

This talk will attempt to stimulate discussion and new research in Chinese painting materials by presenting the results of scientific examinations of paintings and prints in private and public collections in the United States carried out over the last fifteen years. Case studies presented will range from the identification of lac dye on a Qing painting by Qian Wicheng, to the manipulation of gloss in a 15th century Tibetan thangka, from Kōrin’s technical choices in Irises at Yatsuhashi, to Hokusai’s experiments with Prussian blue in his paintings, from the sophisticate use of indigo and Prussian blue mixtures in the Nishimuraya printed Thirty-six views of Mount Fuji, to the synthetic dye revolution in Meiji prints.

The results presented were obtained by using a combination of non-destructive and microanalytical techniques such as fiber optics reflectance spectroscopy, X-ray fluorescence spectrometry, hyperspectral imaging, Raman spectroscopy, and surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy.

It is hoped that this project will start a much needed dialogue between Chinese and US scientists to share analytical results and compare respective findings, in the interest of enriching the art historical and conservation fields with the latest scientific developments.

Ms. Joanne HACKETT

Victoria and Albert Museum

Science, History and Craft: A Trinity in Support of Conservation

It has been said that a good conservator needs to possess three key skills; an understanding of science, an appreciation of art history and the context of material culture within history and the artistic ability to make skilful conservation repairs. Using examples from various sections of the V&A conservation department as illustrations, this presentation will explore how science supports the work of the conservator in understanding how artworks are made, what they are made from, how they degrade and how best to conserve them for the future. The first example will describe how the analysis of the pigments used to manufacture painted Chinese export silks determined the appropriate adhesive technique to use to repair splits in two eighteenth-century English dresses. The second example will examine the effectiveness of a collaboration between the conservation science department of the V&A, the School of Science and Technology at Nottingham Trent University and the Royal Horticultural Society in a survey of Chinese export paintings that helped our understanding of early trade in painter’s materials between China and Europe. The presentation will also cover aspects of the V&A’s extensive and ongoing research into East Asian lacquer, focusing on the technical examination of a seventeenth-century kuan cai (Coromandel) screen which resulted in the identification of a previously unknown pigment and helped to inform which course of conservation was appropriate for the screen.

Finally, the presentation will address the various ways that scientific analysis can be presented to the public in order to enrich their understanding of the art on view in the museum.

Dr. Katherine EREMIN

Harvard Art Museums

Art Meets Science at the Harvard Art Museums: Case Studies from the Chinese Collections

The Sackler Museum, part of the Harvard Art Museums, contains a rich and varied collection of Chinese art, ranging from Neolithic ceramics and jades to modern and contemporary paintings. Multidisciplinary study with close collaboration among scientists, conservators, curators and art historians is crucial for the preservation, understanding, interpretation and presentation of the collections. The Chinese collections have been an area of active research ever since 1928 when Rutherford John Gettens was appointed as the first scientist in an American art museum. In this presentation, I will highlight some recent projects from these collections undertaken in the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies.

A new study of the museums’ Chinese jades by renowned art historian Dr Jenny So involves close collaboration with conservators and scientists. Many art works preserve clear pseudomorphs or impressions of organic materials such as textiles and wood which were wrapped around the artefacts or came into contact with them during burial. These provide rare information about the nature and use of ancient Chinese textiles. Detailed study and measurement of tool marks helps to understand original manufacturing and decorating techniques and identify later alterations. Together with non-destructive analysis and x-radiography, this revealed that some key objects are pastiches of ancient components combined in the late 19th or early 20th century. The analytical and technical information will be fully incorporated into the catalog.

The art museums have a strong commitment to training and each year conservation fellows undertake a detailed analytical research project on works in the collections. Recent projects drawn from the Sackler Museum collections include Erlitou to Shang period bronzes inlaid with turquoise, studied by Ariel O’Connor, and, most recently, pottery from the Qijia culture of northwestern China, studied by Elizabeth LaDuc. Understanding of the ceramics was greatly enhanced by Elizabeth’s replication of the Qijia vessels and their decoration at the Harvard Ceramics Studio. The exhibition “Prehistoric Pottery from Northwest China” included an online feature with a large illustrated section on the conservation research. Hosted on the main art museums website, this is accessible to the general public as well as to specialists and scholars.

Replication is also an important aspect in an ongoing study of Jun ware flowerpots for an exhibition in summer 2017 organized by curator Melissa Moy. Kathy King, director of the Harvard Ceramics Studio, has created a number of replica vessels using different manufacturing techniques to aid interpretation of the x-radiographs and provide better understanding of production methods. The results will be incorporated into the online feature accompanying the exhibition.

The juxtaposition of art and science in these projects has greatly enhanced our understanding of the art works and our presentation of these to a diverse audience. We are confident that these and future collaborations will continue to strengthen our knowledge of the Chinese collections at the Harvard Art Museums.

Ms MING Wilson and Mr. GUO Fuxiang

Victoria and Albert Museum and The Palace Museum

Tribute and Gift – Material Evidence of the Macartney Embassy to China

In 1792 Lord George Macartney led a British embassy to Beijing, ostensibly to offer gifts to Emperor Qianlong for his birthday. Citing the high value, the fragility and bulkiness of the gifts as excuses, the embassy did not follow the standard procedure of landing in Guangzhou, but sailed direct to Tianjin instead. They submitted a “tribute list”, which is now preserved in the China First Historical Archive.

Emperor Qianlong in return gave the King of England and members of the embassy numerous artefacts, called shangwu (bestowal). The original bestowal list is still extant in England, its copy in China.

The two speakers, Ming Wilson from the V&A and Go Fuxiang from the Palace Museum, will discuss what happened to the gifts in both England and China after this historic Sino-British encounter.

Prof. Jeffrey MOSER

Brown University

Teaching without Masterpieces

The concept of the teaching museum is undergoing a Renaissance at major universities in the United States. Since their inception over a century ago, teaching museums have endeavored to mobilize their collections and intellectual resources to advance the research and educational programs of their universities. In recent years, this long-standing mission has been reinvigorated with large-scale museum renovations featuring state-of-the-art study centers, a new generation of research-oriented curators, and surging interest across the academy in object-oriented inquiry. The scale of these endeavors presents a challenge for smaller teaching museums without the financial resources and world-class collections of major institutions like Harvard and Yale. Faculty and curatorial staff at smaller institutions recognize the importance of museum-based education, but frequently find their collections and in-house curatorial expertise insufficient for their pedagogical ambitions.

Using my own participation in the “Assemblages” pilot program at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) as a case study, this paper explores ways in which novel partnerships between institutions can overcome some of the challenges of limited resources. With support from the Mellon Foundation, I am leading a team of students in developing the RISD Museum of Art’s small collection of Chinese paintings into a resource for introducing students and museum audiences to the art of connoisseurship. Like many collections of its kind, the majority of the works in the RISD Museum’s Chinese painting collection are problematic in one way or another: anonymous works of uncertain date, later paintings incorrectly attributed to earlier masters, and even at least one outright forgery. By gathering the material, visual, and textual documentation necessary to elucidate the problems with each work’s attribution, we aim to reveal connoisseurial process. The results of our work will provide raw material for the undergraduate students in my annual Chinese painting seminar, who will work with our team to develop an exhibition of our findings and to archive our data and process for future scholars to access, elaborate, critique, and revise.

Museums everywhere recognize the desirability of making the complex work of their curators and conservators more accessible to visitors. By treating the RISD collection of Chinese paintings as a resource for explaining connoisseurial process, we are transforming what might otherwise be dismissed as an undistinguished and problematic collection into an engaging learning experience. By working across institutions, we are enlisting energy and expertise that the museum could not generate in isolation, and by engaging students throughout our process, we are ensuring that the making of the exhibit is every bit as educational as the exhibit itself. All of this was made possible through a modest, focused grant from the Mellon Foundation, which can serve as a model for other organizations seeking to advance the model of the teaching museum into new institutional settings.

Dr. Lukas NICKEL

University of Vienna

Exhibiting Qingzhou Buddhist Sculpture in Museums

In 1996 workers levelling a playground in Qingzhou, Shandong, came across a pit filled with Buddhist sculptures. Staff of the local museum recovered fragments of about 320 figures most of which were dating to the 6th century AD. Already in the following year the find was presented to the public, during an exhibition at the National Museum of China. In 2000 the Hong Kong Museum of Fine Arts staged a special show. In 2001 a large-scale special exhibition was created at the Museum Rietberg in Zurich, and was shown at the Alte Museum in Berlin, the Royal Academy in London, and the Sackler Gallery in Washington. In each venue visitor numbers reached record levels. Over the following years more exhibitions followed in Sydney, Singapore, Paris and other places. Even though found only a few years before and even if their context was still little understood, the Qingzhou Buddhist sculptures soon became some of the most frequently exhibited artworks from China.

The paper will summarise what is known to date about the find, and will raise the question: Why did these sculptures provoke such an extraordinary interest equally among a Chinese and a foreign audience? Why did these objects of Buddhist worship appeal equally to Buddhist and non-Buddhist viewers? What made them attractive to visitors even when removed from their original context and presented in Museums? The talk will try and explain the exceptional appeal of these art works for a modern audience.

Dr. Chen SHEN

Royal Ontario Museum

Objects in Art and Archaeology and Objectivizing Early History of China in Museums

Subjects of museums’ exhibitions and galleries are objects. In most art museums, objects are treated naturally as arts. Defining arts within the context of ancient history sometimes could be problematic and challenging. This paper explores practices in museums of art and how early history of China can be objectivized, in addition to being contextualized. Objects can be, and should be, classified and viewed both as artworks and as functional utensils that were created in times of ancient civilizations. However, interpretations of ancient objects do not necessarily contextualize ancient history when those objects in exhibitions and galleries were simply displayed in historic chronologies with labels of archaeological contents. This paper argues for objectification of early creations in art and archaeology while displaying and interpreting objects in museums.

The purpose of re-thinking ancient objects in displays is public engagement, a current trend in museum practices. When objects in art and archaeology are interpreted in very different, sometimes obscured, ways with tools of social media, museum curators should utilize exhibits and programs to provide a multi-faceted and multi-layered meanings of objects linked to early history that might be in the process of being objectivized. Three integral processes of presenting ancient objects of early history appealing to general audiences can be re-considered: 1) objects in visual arts following principles of archaeological content; 2) objects in archaeological contexts following design principles; and 3) objects in art designs and archaeological contexts following needs and interests of the public. Therefore, the foundation for this new approach of museums’ displaying ancient objects is to identify public interests (especially in non-Chinese communities) in early Chinese history.

Ms. Nathalie CRINIERE

NC Agency

Exhibition Design and Culture Interpretation

When people nowadays come to visit a museum, they do not only expect to be amazed, surprised or questioned by the art pieces but they are now also very sensitive to how the pieces are presented and how the arrangement of space brings them a very special mood to look at and understand the exhibition.

The work of the designer is to bring visitors into this world taking into account that the art pieces are the purpose and not the design scenography.

Mr. Adrien GARDERE

Studio Adrien Gardere

Designing Contents

The presentation will focus on Studio Adrien Gardère’s expertise in translating curatorial visions into spatial, visual and intuitive display, making the artifacts and what they convey accessible to all. Working hand in hand with renowned institutions, curators and architects around the world, and breaking with traditional exhibition design while fully addressing curatorial vision, Studio Adrien Gardère creates unique visual and physical engagement, sensitive and innovative display, poetic and subtle interpretative installations.

The presentation will illustrate such approaches through the Studio’s most recent projects:
The Giacometti Retrospective – Yuz Museum – Shanghai (2016)
The Roman Antiquities Museum – Narbonne, France (arch. Foster+Partners) to open in 2018
The Aga Khan Museum – Toronto, Canada (arch. Fumihiko Maki) opened 2014
Le Musée du Louvre-Lens – Lens, France (arch. SANAA) opened 2012
The Islamic Art Museum – Cairo, Egypt (renovation led by Studio AG.) opened 2010

The presentation will focus on the Studio’s design process, and its specific responses to the curator’s narrative, to artifacts’ collection and the architecture. Each commission is approached by the Studio uniquely, looking for specific solutions within the artifacts, curatorial vision and spirit of the building, architectural and historical context, never reproducing past models. Being able to fully comprehend the dynamics involved, the museum’s mission and objectives, and the subtleties of the curatorial vision, is key to the Studio’s philosophy and projects’ success.

In this regard, Adrien Gardere’s presentation will concentrate on its capacity to adapt to different cultures and professional approaches and to establish fertile dialogues with all the actors involved in a Museum project, and on the Studio’s philosophy to look for design solutions at the heart of the content and its context.

Dr. Klaas RUITEENBEEK

Asian Art Museum, National Museums in Berlin

Starting from the King: Berlin’s New Chinese Art Galleries

In Berlin a new, large museum and center for the arts and cultures of Asia, Africa, the Americas and Oceania is being built, the Humboldt Forum, to open at the end of 2019. The museum galleries measure 18,000 square meters, of which Asian Art covers 5000 square meters. Chinese art (including ancient Xinjiang) is about 2000 square meters. We moved the Chinese art collection of about 5000 objects and the Xinjiang ancient Buddhist Art collection of about 15,000 objects from the current Asian Art Museum in the suburbs into the Humboldt Forum in the middle of town. With our splendid collections, we will tell new stories, which will have more context, more transcultural focus, and more contemporary relevance than in the old museum. This is a museum for the globalized world of the 21st century, that welcomes visitors from all over the world and shows them art and cultural objects also from their own country in ways that make them rethink their own culture. Of course, we don’t forget tradition: we start the Chinese galleries with a magnificent Shang-Dynasty Yue-Axe that symbolizes kingship.

Ms. WANG Fang

Guangdong Museum

Cooperation with the Archaeologist Director: On the Education Program in the Exhibition of “Sailing the Seven Seas – Legend of Ming Maritime Trade during Wanli Era”

The biggest challenge Guangdong Museum is facing involves several aspects, such as how to build a new type of partnership with visitors, how to enhance their educational experience, how will education become the core mission of a traditional museum, and how to persuade a museum curator with an archaeological background to support educational activities at the museum? The speech today will, therefore, take the exhibition “Sailing the Seven Seas – Legend of Ming Maritime Trade during Wanli Era” as an example, showing how educational activities on underwater archaeology, marine archaeological relics and the history background were planned and designed, as well as the ways in which student exhibition planners were engaged in the preparation of the exhibition. It also reveals insider secrets such as how the curator was convinced to add educational activities and readable information for an exhibition, and how “Curator’s coming” became an institutionalized branding program. Finally, it explores how Guangdong Museum, with a limited budget, successfully invited social institutions to collaborate in the exhibition “Maritime Silk Road ” in both Canton Tower and the Guangzhou subway, bringing museum exhibitions out of the building and closer to the general public.

Dr. Viv GOLDING

University of Leicester

Working Collaboratively: Education and Engagement at the Creative Frontiers of the Art Museum

In this session participants will examine how museums can become inclusive sites for learning and understanding about ‘Others’ and ‘Ourselves’ through museum collections. We will consider the nature of learning from material culture and the intangible heritage – the stories, songs and dances – from which such culture emerges. Delegates should come ready to engage in some interactive experiences.

I specifically want to share with you my collaborative work with Professor Joan Anim-Addo of Goldsmiths College London and the Caribbean Women Writers’ Alliance (CWWA), which I outline in chapter two of my 2009 monograph Learning at the Museum Frontiers: Identity, Race and Power. This collaboration is international and longstanding, now spanning over several decades, most recently with Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC 2011-13) funding on a ‘Translating Cultures’ theme and that I reference in my 2013 paper ‘Museums, Poetics Affect’ for the journal Feminist Review. My focus, which is highly relevant to the conference in China, will be on building new theoretical frameworks from outside of the Western world to inform museum practice, which I employed by collaborating with the CWWA community and the AHRC network. I shall consider together with delegates the revaluing of traditional knowledge(s) and the sensory ways of knowing that emphasize creativity in terms of process and outputs, as well as issues of agency and authority that can be contested at certain frontier zones such as the museum.

Overall, I will pose a series of questions for delegates, which highlight the complexity of the issues. I ask. How, if at all, might individuals come to deeper understandings of self and other in museums? To what extent might a respectful attention to the material culture and intangible heritage of diverse communities promote intercultural dialogue? Who owns cultural heritage in museums; where are the boundaries of power and control?

To interrogate these ideas our audience will be invited to engage in some active learning experiences to explore embodied knowledge construction, specifically the interconnections with objects and the 5 senses we commonly count on in the west that are challenged by CWWA. Then delegates will be able to hear some Caribbean sounds, the poet’s wonderful strong voices and the demotic languages that helped to raise new voices and visibilities in the context of the Horniman Museum, in London UK. Finally, a creative writing exercise will be offered to delegates before some tentative conclusions drawn.

Dr. Stephanie NORBY

Center for Learning and Digital Access, Smithsonian Institution

Engaging the Public Using Digital Museum Collections

The Smithsonian Institution is the national museum of the United States and includes nineteen museums, a zoo, and nine research centers. The Smithsonian has 138 million artifacts, works of art, and specimens. As a national museum, one of its greatest challenges is to make these collections accessible to everyone, no matter where they live.

One of the strategies for addressing this challenge is the digitization of our collections. The Smithsonian Institution published, Creating a Digital Smithsonian: Digitization Strategic Plan 2010 to 2015. Staff representing all of the museums collaborated to set goals and establish priorities. Using new technology and an assembly line efficiency, the Smithsonian is able to digitize objects at a rate of one every six seconds. As a result, some museums have digitized their entire collection in high resolution. Most recently, the Freer / Sackler, Smithsonian Museums of Asian Art and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum completed this work. While digitization is valuable for all aspects of museum work, it is particularly valuable in supporting education.

The Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access (SCLDA) is a central office of education at the Smithsonian that focuses on teachers and students as its primary audience. The Center built the Smithsonian Learning Lab, a web-based platform for accessing all of the Smithsonian’s digital collections. Teachers and students who visit the Lab are able to:

• Search for and create sets of digital objects: Educators identify “favorite” objects, recordings, images, and learning resources and save them in their personal profile. They also are able to link to or upload digital objects from other sites or their own work such as handouts or discussion guides.
• Use tools to customize: Educators find and organize digital objects for teaching, customize them using editing and annotation tools, and add instructional features such as assessments and discussion prompts.
• Share within networks: Educators share what they create within self-selected communities (a classroom of their students, for example) and publish widely to anyone using the platform.
• Collaborate within communities of practice: Educators may provide feedback, reuse, or adapt Smithsonian- or teacher-created sets to meet the needs of their own students.

The Center conducts ongoing research to understand how teachers and students discover, navigate, and use museum digital collections. (See a summary of findings). With a grant from the Corporation of New York, independent researchers are interviewing teachers and conducting classroom observations to understand how teachers and students use museum digital resources and the impact on their teaching and learning. Preliminary findings suggest the following:

• Teachers use digital collections to introduce new ideas, teach concepts, and analyze source material.
• Students are highly engaged when digital collections are used in the classroom.
• The central barrier is the difficulty in finding appropriate digital resources and the time required to build teaching collections.
• Many digital objects do not have adequate metadata (support information) essential for effective use in the classroom.
• Teachers need training on how to use these resources effectively.

The presentation will focus on how digital images of Chinese collections are being used by teachers to enhance classroom instruction in world history and art courses and plans for refining and enhancing the Lab based on research results.

Dr. WANG Guanyu

Art Museum, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Memory of the Golden Age: The Chinese Porcelain Collection of Portuguese Museums

As one of the 2014/2015 J. S. Lee Memorial Fellows, the speaker will share her exchange experience at the Site Museum of Mosteiro Santa Clara-a-Velha, Coimbra, Portugal.

The sharing will be divided into three parts: the first part is a brief introduction of the museum which serves to explain why it was chosen as the host institution. As a conservation institution built beside the historical site, the Site Museum is significant for its collection of excavated Chinese porcelain, which is among the first Chinese porcelain pieces imported into Portugal in around the mid-16th century. Before the discovery, there were nearly no known archaeologically found pieces of this period. Since these excavated pieces reflect much more contextual information than those acquired by other means, the collection of the Site Museum is of rare value to ceramics studies. The second part of the sharing is a review of the speaker’s major activities at the Site Museum, which includes studying the Chinese porcelain collection systematically, leading curatorial work of the special exhibition “Memory of the Golden Age: Chinese Porcelain of 16th Century in the Old Monastery of Santa Clara”, and conducting a field trip to the Netherlands. In the last part, the speaker will express her sincere appreciation to the J. S. Lee Memorial Fellow Programme and raise suggestions based on her own experience, which she expects to be helpful to the future development of the Programme and its new participants.

Dr. Mei Mei RADO

Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture

Textiles and Early Modern Global Exchanges: European Silks and Tapestries in the Qing Palaces

Focusing on two recent special exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on which I have worked-Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500-1800 (2013) and China: Through the Looking Glass (2015), my talk will provide an in-depth examination on the themes of global intercultural exchanges in textile and fashion exhibitions. These two landmark exhibitions reflected the latest academic trend and exemplified the most innovative curatorial approaches to textiles and fashion, the presentations and studies of which remain relatively marginal in museums and in the academic field of art history.

While introducing the curatorial planning, objects, gallery designs, and audience’s experiences associated with these two exhibitions, I will probe a series of questions, such as, how did these exhibitions enrich the traditional curatorial approaches with an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural one, and why is this approach particularly relevant to textile and fashion history? How was China represented in these exhibitions and how does a global perspective of China offer new analytical angles to Chinese art? How do the exhibition designs for textiles and fashion find a balance in meeting conservation requirements, displaying the objects’ artistic quality and technical virtuosity, and presenting theoretical narratives? At the end of my talk, I will also briefly address some criticism and controversies on the transcultural themes in fashion and textile exhibitions, especially in the American context, with an aim to trigger further discussions on how museums handle culturally sensitive issues.

Dr. CHEN Fong-fong

Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Staging Everyday Life and the Pleasures of Leisure: Images of Women in Qing Dynasty Chinese Painting

This paper explores the depictions of objects, clothing, and architectural spaces as narrative modes in the pictures of women’s everyday lives in relation to their social roles. By looking at images of women, with a focus on the paintings shown in “Beauty Revealed: Images of Women in Qing Dynasty Chinese Painting” (University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2013), this paper emphasizes the everyday and cultural lives of women in inner chambers and gardens. It argues that everyday life, in particular women’s leisure activities and hobbies, could be a significant aspect of gender analysis. This paper posits that women were both the audience for these images, as well as subjects of the male gaze, and positions their daily life within the literati culture of the Ming and Qing periods.

Dr. CHEN Yafei

Zhejiang University Museum of Art and Archaeology

The Educational Functions of University Museums: Taking Zhejiang University Museum of Art and Archaeology and Yale University Art Gallery as Examples

The Zhejiang University Museum of Art and Archaeology (ZUMAA) was established in 2009 by Zhejiang University. Its construction has been ongoing for seven years and once completed, ZUMAA will be a fully-equipped teaching museum for art history with international facilities. Since its early stage of planning, ZUMAA has been working closely with museum experts in the U.S.A., Europe, Asia and in our own country to draw on their experience and meet the current needs of Chinese universities.

The Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG), founded 170 years ago, is the oldest university museum in the U.S.A. It is highly celebrated for not only its rich collections but also its accomplishment in museum education, making it an important hub for the general education of art history at Yale University. In 2014, I went to the United States for eight months as a J.S. Lee Memorial Fellow. Under the supervision of Dr. David Ake Sensabaugh, Head of the Department of Asian Art, I participated in the work of the Education Section and gained valuable museum education and curatorial experience. I was also able to visit dozens of university museums, public museums and private museums to learn about their building facilities, collections, exhibitions, education programs, etc.

This talk will combine my experience gained in the United States and my participation in the preparatory work of the Education Section of the Zhejiang University Museum of Art and Archaeology since 2011. It will introduce what domestic university museums can learn from their international counterparts. I hope very much that by taking advice from local and overseas experts, I can better serve ZUMAA and make it a center for the general education of art history.

Dr. HE Jianfei

Bei Shan Tang Foundation

Shifted Perspectives: Interpretive Planning of Chinese Art Exhibitions at the ROM

This presentation will be on the way my perspectives shifted through my intensive museum practice at the Royal Ontario Museum. I offer 2 case studies, drawn from the planning of 2 exhibitions I was involved in at the ROM. The ROM is an encyclopedia museum with one of the largest Asian collections outside Asia and an important cultural agency of Canada. Working there is a social practice, not just an intellectual or public practice, and it requires one to learn how to inspire critical dialogue through art from a place of expression and experience, imagination and reality, conception and creation.

My museum practice at ROM broadened my understanding of the field. As a coordinator of the exhibition “The Forbidden City: Inside the Court of China’s Last Emperors”, hosted by ROM and The Palace Museum, I worked with project management teams from the initial conceptualisation stage through the final design. To explore the issue of cross-cultural understanding in traveling exhibitions, I also conducted in-depth interviews with the ROM’s creative team, interpretive planner, 2D and 3D designers, project manager, as well as colleagues in marketing, programming, media relations, museum volunteers departments, and the Institute for Contemporary Culture. With this experience, I took up the role of a curatorial lead for the Chinese Export Art exhibition, a show that reflected the universal cultural phenomenon of gazing and embracing differences among different countries. More importantly, it has fueled in me the desire to thoroughly rethink how to help a Western community to gain a sensibility about the arts and archaeology of Asia, preparing me for my next step – establishing Chinese art and culture initiatives. Everything Foucault and everybody else say about “disciplinary boundaries” is contained in this shift and more.

Roundtable Discussion Summary

Museum professionals in North America and Europe often raise the questions: How can museums engage the visitor? What should museum displays look like in the 21st century? How do we stay relevant? These questions are a focus of directors, curators, educators, designers, public affairs specialists, and the like, all of whom play important roles in the success of the modern museum. The same questions apply equally whether an institution is an encyclopedic museum holding a collection that represents a wide breadth of human civilization, or is more specialized, holding a collection dedicated to a specific culture or time period, such as a museum of Asian art or a contemporary art museum. In all cases, museum professionals have similar goals, protocols, and needs — that is to attract and serve their audiences, including offering enjoyment and education, and also to develop a sustainable plan to support the staffing needs and infrastructure of the museum building at a level to physically preserve the collection and extend the objects’ lifecycle into the far distant future.

While care and preservation of the collection is the core responsibility of a museum, its heart lies in the power to use the collections to reach people, and hopefully to sometimes profoundly touch them. As the museum scholar, Stephen Weil puts it, “Museums matter only to the extent that they are perceived to provide communities they serve with something of value beyond their mere existence.” (Stephen E. Weil. Making Museums Matter (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Press, 2002), pp. 4, 5, 41). This paper will look at some of the implications of this view of museums. How do museums provide for a community, and specifically how do they do this in the context of holding collections of Chinese art, and how do museum staff work together to accomplish this large goal? The paper will in particular address the curatorial role with some specificity.

At the outset, it is worth noting that Weil’s comment is widely accepted and represents a prevailing view in museum communities, but it is also worthwhile to point out there may be a danger in his use of the words “matter only” if they provide beyond the importance of their physical existence, because this points to a shifting balance towards prioritizing community service over preserving the collections themselves — a view I find untenable. Preserving, and also researching the collections, are time consuming, expensive, and mostly behind-the-scenes endeavors that have enormous gravitas, but which are losing position to other concerns of the museum world. The hidden nature of preservation and research has perhaps made it hard for museum directors to champion these aspects, but we must keep these as an unwavering goal of institutions. This paper explores the role of museum staff in upholding Weil’s broader perspective for museums, but aims to also emphasize the importance of staff, primarily curators, who can serve as an active interface between the two sides of the museum — collection care and research and people-to-people engagement.

It is laudable, and in fact, obligatory, for museums to want to share their collections in ways to inspire interest and appreciation for the objects they hold and expand viewers’ understanding of them, as well as to find new ways to engage visitors and make them feel actively engaged in the museum experience. Displays should connect and communicate with the viewer, and when a museum is successful at doing this, it builds its viewer base, which is necessary for income generation and sustainability. More visitors streaming through the door translates into greater profits from tickets and merchandise sales; and for museums with free admission, more visitors can translate into greater private or government support. In Western museums that have important collections of Chinese art, there is almost universal agreement among staff that the greatest wish is for visitors to leave the museum (or end a website visit) feeling enriched, finding themselves more interested or thoughtful about Chinese art, and possibly even thinking differently about China itself.

Using art to connect people with a better understanding of China in general is a goal that most museums today see as part of their relevance to modern society. This sounds good, and even obvious, but tensions can arise, since there are differences in opinion about what achieving relevance means. There are different points of view about whether historic art collections, or even contemporary art, should be used as a direct means to understand the modern political and cultural entity of China. For example, can a presentation of Ming/Qing imperial art be used to inform visitors about China today? The answer is perhaps a very guarded “yes”, in the sense that when visitors who previously had no knowledge about historic China learn through seeing Chinese artefacts of the 15th and 18th century that have stylistic connections to Middle Eastern, Himalayan, or European cultures, they gain a greater understanding that China was not historically insular. This knowledge may be enlightening for them when looking at modern China’s international position. But the danger is that increasingly some museum staff members are trying to use historic art to make direct connections to modern politics and life. Museums seem to be walking a tightrope — should they host programmes with political commentators, or is this perhaps an arena in which they should collaborate with other academic institutions, such as a college or think-tank like the Brookings Institutions? This paper will examine some of the approaches that museums are taking today to ensure that visitors in a Western society will feel attracted to displays of Chinese art.

What are some of the practicalities of how museums can accomplish this? Museums have always been, and are increasingly, reliant on teamwork to accomplish these goals as their mandate becomes broader. Therefore, there are inevitably questions about which individuals and which departments should be represented on which teams and who (if anyone) should lead each team, and how to communicate internally and externally. Different museums have different approaches to this complex question and a few prototypes will be examined.

One of the questions that always comes up in this type of discussion is what is the role of a curator, and can/should a curator be a project/team manager. Decades ago, curators were likely to be the person-in-charge, beholden only to the Director’s higher judgment, but today they are usually placed as just one of many highly regarded staff members. Institutional structures are nobly trying to nurture all types of staff and thus benefit from diverse and disparate talents. It has become common to talk about curators as “content providers,” and value them in exhibition, and other, teams the same as the members of other departments. Much is gained by being certain to avoid a monopoly by curators, but it is worth questioning the validity of a now not uncommon view that holds that curators are generally removed from the public they serve, and are mostly ivory tower academics or even prima donna. While there may be the occasional curator of that nature, I would suggest that this a largely unfounded view that has spuriously come into play, perhaps partly as a kind imaginary foil to give other newer roles in the museum, such as interpretation officers, more validity and urgency. I propose the newer job roles are critically important to the success of the modern museum, but this in no way diminishes the key importance of the curator, nor should we collectively buy into the myth that curators are disconnected and disinterested in the public. Curators are invaluable not only in providing and shaping content and fact-checking content generated by others, but it often remains unsaid that curatorial passion (which is also knowledge-based) for the objects they study and care for can make the curators the most informed and energetic team leaders.

Without knowledge and passion, it is easy for museum objects to become just “things”. This paper takes a look at what curators can provide in the modern museum setting. Keeping in mind the comment by the famous Irish playwright, George Bernard Shaw, who said “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place,” I will also address the practicalities of how curators can improve their communication with other museum staff, and will review the scenario in which a curator as team leader is paired with a project manager, whose role in entirely administrative, and can assist in team management. I will also address the issue of the size of committees, since there is a trend to increase the membership of committees, disregarding what many business leaders note that the smallest reasonable membership is strongly advised. Art collections are brought to life by the collective expertise and imagination of museum staff, as well as by close coordination with collaborators, who may include the museum visitors themselves, living artists, performance centers and academic institutions. In all this, the curator plays a critical role worth examining in some detail.

Mr. LING Lizhong

Shanghai Museum

Organizing International Traveling Painting and Calligraphy Exhibitions at the Shanghai Museum: Three Case Studies

Since the organization of Chinese National Treasures of Painting and Calligraphy from the Jin, Tang, Song and Yuan Dynasties exhibition in 2002, the Shanghai Museum has organized several similar exhibitions, with painting and calligraphy works borrowed from several leading museums in the country. All these exhibitions have turned out to be huge successes. The exhibitions provoked the audiences’ interests towards the classics of traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy, received high attention and acceptance locally and internationally, and built a good foundation for lending its own collections for exhibitions abroad.

In the past ten years or so, the Shanghai Museum has attached great importance to its international travelling exhibitions. It accumulated substantial experience from several previous exhibitions of this kind by first cooperating with Japanese colleagues for two exhibitions: “Masterpieces of Ancient Chinese and Japanese Calligraphy” in 2006 and “Masterpieces of Ancient and Chinese Paintings in Japan” in 2010. It then cooperated with five prestigious museums in the US for the “Masterpieces of Early Chinese Painting and Calligraphy in American Collections” exhibition in 2012. All these were big successes.

While it has learnt quite a lot from its own past experiences, the Shanghai Museum has also learnt from experiences and concepts of its colleagues both home and abroad. This is quite helpful to the Shanghai Museum to diversify its ways of organizing exhibitions strategically. For example, selection exhibitions can be one of the successful forms; however, the Shanghai Museum has explored new forms such as theme exhibitions. As a matter of fact, it has been preparing the exhibition, “How the Wu School of Painting Originated” 《吳門前淵》 since 2012, which is scheduled to be on view in 2016. In this exhibition, it is planned to display 120 items of three modules, to be borrowed from around 20 museums and institutions. This exhibition aims to present the results of scholarly research, focusing on academic aspects but also appealing to the general audience. It is well expected that this exhibition will promote academic research and general interest. The research findings will surely inspire the artists of the contemporary and future generations.

Ms. Jane PORTAL

The British Musuem

Lending MFA Paintings to Shanghai Museum’s Exhibition in October 2012: Masterpieces of Early Chinese Painting and Calligraphy in American Collections

In this presentation, I will outline the process by which four US museums lent Song and Yuan Dynasty paintings to Shanghai Museum in October 2012. I will also include our experience of lending ceramics to the Yuan Blue and White exhibition at Shanghai Museum in 2012.

I will go through the collaborative process at the US end and at the Chinese end. This will include details of preliminary meetings between the four US institutions, hosting Shanghai Museum representatives in the US to choose the works, getting loans approved by museum Boards, getting works valued, arranging couriers/transportation and application for a US government indemnity.

At the Chinese end, I will describe some of the challenges facing Western museums when arranging loans to China, in particular Chinese works of art to Chinese museums. These include the situation at customs, storage at the airport, transportation and installation requirements. Not least is the challenge of obtaining immunity from seizure of Chinese works in foreign collections from the Cultural Heritage Bureau.

My presentation will be illustrated by slides showing elements of the process and I will conclude by suggesting some ways to meet the challenges in the future.

Dr. Jason SUN

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Opportunities and Challenges: Sending Exhibitions to China

The last decade or so has witnessed a rapid increase in collaborations between the Metropolitan Museum and its Chinese counterparts. The Met has hosted several exhibitions from China, including “China: Dawn of a Golden Age 200-750 AD (2004)”, “The World of Khubilai Khan: Chinese Art in the Yuan Dynasty (2010)”, and “The Emperor’s Private Paradise: Treasures from the Forbidden City” (2011), to name only a few. At the same time, the Met has lent a number of artworks to Chinese museums, either as part of Met-curated shows or by participating in Chinese-organized exhibitions. Two recent Met-organized exhibitions are “Earth, Sea and Sky – Nature in Western Art: Masterpieces from The Metropolitan Museum of Art”, which opened at the National Museum of China in January, 2013 and “The American West in Bronze: 1850-1925”, which opened at the Nanjing Museum this September.

During the last two years the Met has twice lent works to the Shanghai Museum: Twenty-nine Song and Yuan paintings in 2013 and a prized set of ancient Chinese bronze ritual vessels this November. While these exchanges have augmented mutual understanding and created exciting opportunities, they have also brought unprecedented challenges. This paper aims to examine and share the Metropolitan’s experiences with colleagues at the conference.

Prof. Joseph CROOK

The British Museum

The British Museum’s Touring Exhibitions in China

Background:
The British Museum is committed to sharing it’s collections with a global audience. Whether through welcoming international travellers through our doors in London, loaning objects, continuing to expand our online collections, or touring exhibitions, the objectives of access and engagement remain constant.

Since 2006 the British Museum has toured 11 exhibitions to China, two of these were in collaboration with the V&A. They have been displayed in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong. The exhibitions have been diverse in their subject matter, including iconic Greek statues, Indian temple art, Assyrian wall reliefs and highlights from our renowned collection of ceramics. It is our hope that in the years ahead we can build on this foundation, touring an even broader array of objects to an even wider Chinese audience.

The museum-building boom within China means that many cities across the country now benefit from modern museums that have the facilities to host international touring exhibitions. It is hoped this will bring opportunities for the British Museum’s collections to be shared with new audiences throughout the country.

Future opportunities
Recently the British Museum has been exploring opportunities for touring exhibitions to travel to a number of major museums outside of Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong. During several trips to cities across China we have engaged in discussions about the types of exhibition that could be desirable; this includes the size of exhibitions, the themes and the types of objects that Chinese audiences would wish to see.

It is our hope that there will be opportunities in the coming years to bring British Museum touring exhibitions to Chinese museums with whom we have not worked in the past. It is recognised that some Chinese museums have different budgets to the major museums in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong. This poses a challenge because of the high costs of transport and insurance associated with large exhibitions, and so creative solutions will need to be found.

Multi-venue tours of international touring exhibitions appear to be favoured by many Chinese museums. There are distinct advantages to multi-venue tours in terms of costs. In addition they have benefits for the profile of an exhibition in China, and bring exhibitions to a wider audience. It is therefore a model that the British Museum is interested in exploring further. It may be that the future lies in creating multi-venue tours to upwards of four venues, thereby allowing significant cost-sharing.

The museum appreciates the value of face-to-face meetings for helping to clarify complex issues relating to exhibition projects. Meetings have consistently helped to bridge gaps in understanding by providing us with a forum in which to discuss different working practices and contexts.

Despite certain challenges there is a clear will on both sides to work together and possible solutions are being identified. It is hoped that, with the links we now have, we can continue to work with Chinese counterparts to bring British Museum exhibitions to wider parts of China in the coming years. In addition the museum will continue building on the strong and valuable relationships we have in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong to tour exhibitions there in the future.

Mr. YAO An

Art Exhibitions China

Chinese Cultural Relics Exhibitions – An Approach to Beauty of China

Chinese cultural relics exhibition opens a new prospect of cultural relics exchanges and cooperation with other countries. It serves as a window to show Chinese culture to the world and plays a prominent and efficient role in facilitating Chinese diplomatic relations.

General Information of Chinese Outbound and Inbound Exhibitions
From 2005 to 2013, Chinese museums held 492 outbound exhibitions in 48 countries and regions. The number of exhibitions held in Asia was 276, or 56% of the total. 198 shows or 40% of the total were in Europe and America, with the remaining 4% in Africa and Oceania, where exhibitions were lacking. It can be indicated from the above figures that Chinese cultural relics exhibitions have become hot topics and distinguished business cards and earned great prestige in the world.

Adjustments in Legislation on Outbound and Inbound Cultural Relics Exhibitions
To have a better international perspective, the Chinese government keeps adopting and optimizing legislation on outbound and inbound cultural exhibitions. The focus has been shifted to cultural exchange, scientific research, and cultural relics protection.

Key Cases of Inbound and Outbound Exhibitions
According to statistics, in 2013, there were 67 inbound and outbound exhibitions, with duration ranging from 5 days to 14 months. 49 domestic and 61 international museums were involved. 6199 pieces of exhibits were presented to the audience, among which 328 pieces were Grade-A. In particular, the exhibitions “Early China”, “Treasures of China”, “Tea Culture” and “Buddhism on the Silk Road” were very well received.

Trends of Outbound and Inbound Exhibitions
Audiences are fascinated by cultural diversity or mysterious beauty in the flow of rich and colorful exhibitions all around the world. In the future, exhibitions themed “National Treasure”, “Cultural Memory”, “Vivid Chinese Life”, “Etiquette and Ceremony”, “Archives Treasure”, “Glory Land and Talented People”, “Cultural Heritage”, and “Contemporary China” will be presented to show the past and the present of China. It is believed that with the development of international museum and exhibition exchanges, Chinese cultural relics exhibitions will become more dynamic and attractive.

Ms. ZHOU Yanqun

Shanghai Museum

Issues in Antiquities Loans

Nowadays, loans between museums for exhibitions have become a common practice worldwide. In the last 5 years, the Shanghai Museum participated in over 30 loan exhibitions abroad, and held 25 loan exhibitions at home and abroad. To assure successful loans, curators and organizers should pay special attention to a number of key issues.

When applying for loans from China, the borrower should notice the regulation issued by the SACH that the total number and proportion of top-grade pieces of a loan is strictly limited. Endangered species require additional approval which takes about two months to obtain. A provenance certificate is required for the pieces shown together with the loans from China. When an exhibition requests loans from more than two Chinese museums, the application should be made by an appointed coordinator on behalf of all the participants in China. Loan application documents include an exhibition proposal or invitation, exhibition outline and exhibition venue facilities report in addition to the agreement between the lender and borrower.

For loans to China, all Chinese antiquities loans to China for exhibition require a provenance certificate. There is no free of capture and seizure clause in our State Law so far. A Letter of Guarantee signed by the SACH can be provided if it can be accepted.

From our experience, medium-sized thematic exhibitions on a mutual exchange basis between museums is a good way to minimise cost while making an impact.

Mr. Jun TOMITA

Tokyo National Museum

Collaborative Chinese Art Exhibitions at the Tokyo National Museum, 2012-2014

From January 2012 to September 2014, the Tokyo National Museum held the following five exhibitions of Chinese Art:

I. Two Hundred Selected Masterpieces from the Palace Museum, Beijing (2 Jan-19 Feb, 2012)

II. The Twentieth Century for Chinese Landscape Painting: Selected Masterpieces from the National Art Museum of China (31 Jul-26 Aug, 2012)

III. Wang Xizhi: Master Calligrapher (22 Jan-3 Mar, 2013)

IV. Treasures of Chinese Painting from the Shanghai Museum (1 Oct-24 Nov, 2013)

V. Treasured Masterpieces from the National Palace Museum, Taipei (24 Jun-15 Sep, 2014)

The number of international loans were: 200 items for I, 50 for II, 4 for III, 40 for IV, and 186 for V (including 231 loans to the Kyushu National Museum). I, III, and V were large-scale exhibitions held in the galleries on the second floor of the Heiseikan building, which has 2,900 square meters of exhibition space. Most of these exhibitions materialised as a result of the long-term relationships of over 20 years that the Tokyo National museum has enjoyed with Chinese institutions.

Our museum had to give up certain loans immediately before the opening dates of the exhibitions due to the international political climate. In my presentation, I will discuss the exhibitions held between 2012 and 2014, including the processes leading up to their openings, our aims in holding these exhibitions, as well as the influence they had and the problems that arose both in and outside of Japan.

Dr. Kevin MCLOUGHLIN

National Museum of Scotland

Ming China in Contemporary Scotland

This presentation will look at the experiences and challenges of bringing an exhibition on the Ming (U.K.)dynasty (1368-1644) to the National Museum of Scotland (NMS) in Edinburgh. Ming: The Golden Empire was held at the NMS from 27 June to 19 October 2014. The exhibition was very well received by both the media and the public, and it brought unique and rare artefacts from the collections of the Nanjing Museum halfway across the world to a new audience in Scotland. The exhibition came to Edinburgh through an intermediary company – an exhibition and design company based in Edinburgh and Chengdu called Nomad. This company now works with a number of Chinese museums to develop and promote exhibitions internationally.

This presentation will examine some of the lessons learned from working through a third party exhibition company; the particular curatorial challenges of working with an exhibition developed on a commercial and not primarily on a curatorial or scholarly basis; as well as the challenges of marketing and making accessible the culture and history of a unique period of Chinese history to a non-specialist audience in a museum institution which is not an art museum or an Asian art museum. What in other words were the key challenges for an exhibition curator in soundly articulating and making accessible a culturally complex and nuanced historical period of Chinese history to a museum audience which may have had very little prior knowledge of or encounter with Chinese history, visual or material culture.

As a corollary of the experiences outlined above, this presentation will also seek to situate the experience of working on this exhibition project within a wider reflection on what it might mean for external museums hoping to work with Chinese museum and cultural institutions in a rapidly growing and transforming Chinese museum sector over the next five to ten years. This presentation will conclude by asking what the future might hold for external museum professionals hoping to work with and build links with Chinese colleagues, and what do Chinese museum professionals in turn hope to gain from working with external museum institutions and colleagues. And what might the future hold in developing exhibition projects with a China which now views culture as among other things a major strategic industry, and a powerful developmental force.

Dr. ZHANG Hongxing

Victoria and Albert Museum

From Policy to Practice: A Personal Reflection on Exhibition Collaboration

Collaboration between Chinese museums and museums outside China have been rapidly growing in recent years not only in terms of numbers but also in complexity. This paper takes the Masterpieces of Chinese Painting 700-1900 exhibition held at the V&A last year as an example to explore how collaborations between museums are practiced. It starts out by introducing this exhibition project and its major components, before moving to review the areas of collaboration that had taken place. The paper then considers ways of improvement and new possibilities.

Ms. Jessica HARRISON-HALL

The British Museum

The British Museum Collaboration with China: Research and Exhibitions

Early Ming China’s multiple courts were internationally engaged long before the arrival of Europeans who traded directly with China in the 1500s, Ming: 50 years that changed China, co-curated by Jessica Harrison-Hall of the BM and Craig Clunas of the University of Oxford explores multiple courts in the early Ming and their international connections. Through 280 objects and paintings, the show examines the contexts for the Forbidden City and explores the myths and realities of Chinese national hero Zheng He, the eunuch who led armadas across the Indian Ocean to Africa before Columbus was born.

Curating the exhibition involved working with 30 lenders (museums, libraries and private collections). This paper focuses on the relationships with Chinese museums particularly curators, directors and people responsible for cultural heritage in regional China. Organisations included Art Exhibitions China, the State Administration for Cultural Heritage, the Ministry of Culture of China, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This collaboration required close engagement with senior high officials in China as well as with the British Council, British Embassy in Beijing and the Chinese Embassy in London all of which played important roles.

Cultural diplomacy, big business and the growing emphasis on “soft” power generates interest in the Ming exhibition among UK politicians. Vince Cable, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, opened the exhibition on 16 September 2014 and said; “This event is a good example of a coalition between the BM and its exhibition sponsor, BP,” -as reported in the London Evening Standard. George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer, mentioned the exhibition in a parliamentary speech on 12 September 2014. The Hon Ed Vaizey, Minister for Culture and the Digital Economy on 23 September 2014 described it as “a stunning exhibition”. Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, cited the Ming exhibition as a major autumn blockbuster and one which brought tourists to London, delivering an important income stream. Within China, the Ming show has also been used as a vehicle for cultural diplomacy. Li Keqiang (now Premier of the People’s Republic of China and party secretary of the State Council) visited the BM in 2010 and discussed some of the BM’s Ming material, which is included in the exhibition. In 2014, his wife, Cheng Hong examined paintings and objects being conserved for the show.

As well as these successes my paper will address some of the difficulties involved in working with China on a project of this scale. There are different approaches to academic research in China and elsewhere. The sheer size of China and the time to travel and build relationships directly with core museums, libraries and individual lenders, whilst moving forward other parts of the project, was a real challenge. Perhaps digital technology will help as more Chinese museums start to put their collections online. Balancing the quid pro quo is a challenge. Can the BM lend treasures to Chinese museums on a similar scale? Chinese museums have much larger staff than the BM. This impacts the hospitality and care we can provide. The 7-hour time difference also impacts on communications. Linguistic challenges are ever present. Legal requirements are different in the two countries affecting contract negotiations. Chinese timescales are much shorter than English timescales for planning events and exhibitions. In addition to the Chinese relationships, we are balancing the needs of sponsors, lenders, politicians, art organisations, journalists and exhibition teams. Despite working in systems that are organised and function quite differently, the end result of the collaboration between China and the BM that produced the exhibition is one that has shown positive public, as well as scholarly benefit.

Dr. LIU Yang

Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Opportunities and Challenges of Traveling Exhibitions from China

In recent years, exhibition exchanges between US museums and their Chinese counterparts have thrived, which has the potential for great impact on cross-cultural understanding between the two countries. What are the opportunities and challenges of American museum curators attempting to organize exhibitions from China? This presentation will highlight how the ongoing and thriving archaeological activities in China provide great resources for American curators. The presentation will also elicit challenges in bringing travelling exhibitions from China and discuss the ways to rectify common practices that place unnecessary burdens on the exchange of exhibitions.

Dr. Natasa VAMPELJ SUHADOLNIK

University of Ljubljana

Chinese Art Objects and Other Materials in Slovenia: Identification, Registration and Digitization Project

The present paper will briefly introduce a newly begun research project at the Department of Asian and African Studies at University of Ljubljana, in Slovenia, which was planned in collaboration with Slovene Ethnographic Museum. The project will include Chinese art collections, together with other materials and resources, which are currently held in various museums and other institutions in Slovenia. While some collections and objects have been the subject of research in recent years, an overall survey and listing, i.e. identification, categorization, listing in catalogue format, and digitization, has yet to be undertaken. Many objects and materials are stored in depositories, and in some cases the existing categorization has proved to be incorrect. Due to this situation, a precise and comprehensive examination, analysis, study, identification and digitization of all Chinese art objects in institutional collections in Slovenia, will be performed.

The paper shall also briefly present two smaller projects, included within the aforesaid project, which are planned in collaboration with the Palace Museum in Beijing and the National Palace Museum in Taipei. The first project is the restoration of an original “model” of a Chinese house and decorative screens which were brought to Slovenia at the start of the 20th century. The second project instead concerns setting up a database of old photos, postcards and other documentary material from China with metadata, digital images and explanatory texts, that meet the most current international standards.

The paper will also briefly introduce the newly established EAAA, which has as its main aim encouraging and promoting academic and scholarly activities related to Asian art and archaeology in European countries. It will also discuss creating different forms of cooperation between European and Asian museums, in order to enhance the Chinese heritage and related researches in Europe. Such forms of collaboration can play an active role in today’s globalized society, which is characterized by ever-expanding currents of intellectual and material exchanges.

Dr. Helen WANG and Prof. ZHAO Feng

The British Museum and China National Silk Museum

Researching Silk Road Textiles – An International Collaboration

Helen Wang and Zhao Feng will introduce their collaboration of almost ten years — starting with the “Textiles from Dunhuang” series — and show how these scholarly and specialist catalogues have opened up new avenues for collaborative research with scholars in other fields.

Zhao Feng would also like to suggest a new international collaboration proposal, the “Silk Mountings of Chinese Paintings and Calligraphy”.

Dr. WU Hang

Nanjing Museum

International Museum Collaborations: More than Traveling Exhibitions

Exhibitions are a major channel for museums to conduct international collaborations. In the past, a quite usual approach for Chinese museums to conduct international exhibition collaboration was to loan objects. In this way, Chinese objects are interpreted in a western narrative, which sometimes may deprive them from the meanings, contexts, and discourse they originally contain. Another frequently adopted model was to loan an entire exhibition. In this way, the stories are often told in a way that has no appeal to the local audience.

Nanjing Museum has been exploring new approaches to conduct international exhibition collaboration. For example, the “Treasures of China” exhibition, which was held in Colchester Museum in the U.K. in 2012, invited ten students from the U.K. to China to pick their favorite objects from Nanjing Museum’s numerous collections. Based on their choices, museum curators added other objects to form the whole exhibition. This approach introduced an audience view in the exhibition curation. Moreover, the opportunity provided by this exhibition to travel to China to encounter with Chinese culture has become a great life experience for these students. Encouraged by this success, we are now extending the project – next February, a group of ten Chinese students will travel to Essex, UK to select their favorite artefacts from Colchester and Ipswich Museum Service’s collection to form an exhibition to be held in Nanjing Museum.

To get help from local media to warm up the local audience of an exhibition venue seems a good practice. Nanjing Museum loaned an exhibition on the Ming Dynasty to De Nieuwe Kerk Amsterdam in 2013. The local audience had very little knowledge about Chinese history and culture. Except for the blue and white porcelain, they knew nothing about the Ming. Our solution was to have a group of journalists from local media companies come to Nanjing to see the collection, the museum, the city, and the culture with their own eyes. After their return, the local audience in Amsterdam was able to access the information and knowledge about the Ming dynasty, the theme of this exhibition, before the opening.

The ideal approach, but also a more challenging one, rather than to loan just objects or an entire exhibition, is co-curation. Curators from both sides work together on theme selection, exhibits picking, and exhibition development. An effective way to initiate such collaboration is to find a common ground of mutual interest such as similarities in collections or relevance in terms of the time period.

Dr. HUANG Han-yin and Ms. Sarah CAMPBELL

J. S. Lee Memorial Fellow and Victoria and Albert Museum

Experiences at the Learning Department of Victoria and Albert Museum

This presentation shares the experience of a six-month attachment with the Learning Department at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) from June to November 2013. The Fellow set out to understand the learning needs of school groups and younger visitors and to explore how museum learning provides resources to children, making the programmes engaging and fun without ‘dumbing it down’ for our younger visitors. The main objective of the programme was therefore to develop educational resources with the Schools, Family and Young People team of the Learning Department. The development of resources was carried out with an emphasis on the V&A’s permanent Chinese collection and the special exhibition “Masterpieces of Chinese Painting 700-1900”, and covered different stages of the development from planning, content development to delivery.

The presentation begins with a description of the tasks and activities during the attachment, which included creating a new China Gallery back-pack, developing teachers’ resources for the China Gallery and the special exhibition “Masterpieces of Chinese Painting 700-1900”, preparing and delivering the October half-term programme, and assisting in the planning of the Chinese Festival programme. Illustrated by these tasks, The presentation goes on to discuss how colleagues at the V&A made use of the gallery space, which was seen not only as display space but also as a seminar room, lecture hall, theatre or story-telling stage. It reflects on how the V&A’s use of its gallery space offers food for thought in terms of encouraging in-gallery learning instead of separating the activities from the displays. Finally, the presentation concludes by pointing out that the key to a successful exchange programme lies in constant communication between fellows and host institutions. It suggests that discussions beforehand help both parties have a clearer picture of the arrangements during the attachment period and, particularly for Fellows, reduce anxiety of settling into a new environment. Equally important is to have regular communication with contact persons at the host institutions in order to reflect on the progress and to ensure necessary adjustments are made.

Ms. LIN Miaomiao
Dr. Colin MACKENZIE

Beijing World Art Museum
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

A 12-Month Fellowship in the Curatorial and Education Departments at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

This paper explores my experience as a 12-month J.S. Lee Fellow at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Unlike previous fellowships, which were primarily focused on art history/curatorial research, my goal as a museum educator was to understand the organizational structure of a Western museum, and the role that education plays in it, and to see what aspects of Western museum organization and museum processes could be usefully applied to China.

During my yearlong fellowship, I worked with the Chinese Art Curator, Dr. Colin Mackenzie, and the Director of Education Division, Mrs. Judith Koke. With their guidance, I contributed to the exhibitions “Journey through Mountains & Rivers: Chinese Landscapes Ancient and Modern”, and “Jade: China’s Immortal Soul,” and the educational programmes “Chinese New Year Events” and “Family Gallery Guide to Chinese Art”. Through my participation in a great number of museum practices, I finally figured out what our similarities and differences in education are, and what we could learn from American museums.

In this presentation I will discuss some of the areas in which I gained a better understanding of the complexity of museum work, particularly the organization of exhibitions in the U.S. One of the key insights I gained was how closely curatorial, education, and fundraising departments work together. In particular, the concept of keeping the audience as the focus and trying to see a potential exhibition, even from early discussions, from the point of view of the audience. I found that concepts like the “big idea” and the “takeaway message” were considered very important. I also learned much about the focus on audience evaluation both in terms of general demographics and surveys of visitors’ attitudes toward the museum prior to their visit as well as their experience during the visit.

As a museum educator working in a museum that exhibits primarily “foreign” (i.e., non-Chinese) art and therefore deals with challenges of interpreting it for a domestic (i.e., Chinese) audience, it was very useful to work with a non-European Department which faces similar challenges: how to engage audiences with something they can be totally unfamiliar with.

Although not all the practices in a US museum can be transferred wholesale to a Chinese museum, I believe that it is important for Chinese museums to understand the dialogue and changes that are taking place in Western museums and to adopt those elements that are suitable. Since returning to China, I have begun to discuss with my colleagues how we can use some of the new techniques and organizational structures that I encountered during my fellowship and we have begun devising an achievable and realistic plan for the next three years.

I believe that a successful exchange can contribute to both professional exchange and personal life exchange; it could even lead to the creation of future international joint programmes. I truly hope my fellowship experience can be a useful example for the J. S. Lee Memorial Fellowship Programme as well as future fellows.

Dr. SUN Miao

The Palace Museum

The Invisible Design of Museum

I spent four months working with my colleagues at the Freer Gallery: (1) attending weekly meetings of the Department of Design and Production and the Department of Exhibitions as well as all exhibit projects meetings; (2) visiting the collection storage and familiarizing myself with the galleries, as preparation for the design work for which I am responsible; (3) designing an exhibit project at the Freer Gallery 13, the Freer Corridor and the Sackler Gallery N8, titled “Gifts to the Collection: 1987-2012”; (4) visiting and interviewing staff members at various departments to better understand the ways in which the Freer and Sackler operates.

The knowledge and skills I garnered during my stay in the US are of immense value to the museums in China. I came to understand that design is not just a concept or a piece of paper. In fact, project management, production quality, and the idea of public service are the three important factors of museum design. That is called “Invisible Design”.

I wish to put them to use in my actual design work at The Palace Museum and to introduce them to other museum professionals in China. In respect of improving the quality of exhibitions at The Palace Museum, I plan to (1) standardize all the colors, fonts, measurements used in The Palace Museum, producing a detailed style guide and document each process of the exhibition; (2) set up an in-house workshop for exhibition construction jobs (mounts, stands, etc.) and a lab for developing technologies catering to the needs of The Palace Museum to solve such issues as lighting and earthquake proofing, so as to better protect the objects; (3) help to shift gradually to a new mode of exhibit projects managing, bringing in persons of various specialties that have been hitherto neglected yet much needed, including exhibition coordinator, graphics designer, writer, and exhibition conservator. I also plan to organize an exhibits group in Beijing. We can have some designers’ meetings regularly. The discussion will share the best practices, good examples, pitfalls to avoid, and address other questions.

Prof. Sascha PRIEWE

The British Museum

Building Museum Sectors: The British Museum’s International Training Programme

The International Training Programme demonstrates the BM’s commitment to building a global network of colleagues crossing geographical and cultural boundaries. The Museum’s staff and collection provide a forum to disseminate museum best practice and to exchange specialist knowledge and professional skills. The Museum aims to provide the opportunity for mutual learning, discussion and collaboration among museum professionals from around the world from very diverse institutions and backgrounds but with one goal — to help drive and shape the museums of the future.

For almost ten years, the BM has been training museum professionals in collections management, storage and documentation; exhibitions and galleries; conservation and scientific research; national and international loans; learning, audiences and volunteers; fundraising, income generation and commercial programmes; leadership, strategy, museums management and communication. Participants also spend time in a department relevant to their specific interests, with tailored individual training and research time. Another key part of the programme is a 10-day period spent at another UK museum. This allows the participants to experience multi-site museums and different types of displays, and helps these museums develop international relationships.

In 2014, the programme took place from 3 August to 13 September and welcomed participants from Armenia, China, Cuba, Egypt, Greece, India, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Mexico, Pakistan, Palestine, Oman, Turkey, and Sudan.

Dr. Daisy WANG

Peabody Essex Museum

The Past and the Future of US-China Museum Collaboration at the Peabody Essex Museum

The PEM has a long history of engagement with China. Established in 1799, the Museum holds the very first American museum collection of Chinese art, which was formed in 1800. Highlights in our Chinese art collection include the world’s largest and most comprehensive collection of Chinese export art and the largest American museum collection of nineteenth-century photographs of China. Since 2003 the museum has been home to Yin Yu Tang, a unique 200-year-old house from China and the only intact example of Chinese vernacular architecture in the U.S. Most recently, we worked with the Palace Museum, Beijing to organize a major traveling exhibition in the US featuring Emperor Qianlong’s garden Juanqinzhai.

Delving into the museum’s deep historical ties to China inspires new thinking about our future collaboration with China. This presentation shares information about collaboration opportunities at PEM and considers a number of new avenues to collaboration with Chinese colleagues in exhibition, publication and digital projects.

Dr. CAO Yin

Art Gallery of New South Wales

A New Curator at a Changing Gallery

Cao Yin joined Sydney’s AGNSW just as the institution was about to embark on an evolutionary change. While she continues her role as a curator of Chinese art in the conventional sense, she faces fresh opportunities as well as new challenges. In this presentation, she will discuss these changes and their impact on her work at AGNSW.

The AGNSW is the leading museum in Australia in terms of its long history of collecting Chinese art and promoting Chinese culture. The Chinese programme was a particular area of interest over the past three decades when the gallery was under the leadership of Mr. Edmund Capon with his expertise and passion for traditional Chinese art.

In the past decade, AGNSW held several important exhibitions curated by Director Capon with the assistance of Dr. Liu Yang, then curator of Chinese Art, including The Lost Buddhas: Chinese Buddhist Sculpture from Qingzhou (29 Aug – 23 Nov 2008) and The First Emperor: China’s Entombed Warriors (2 Dec 2010 – 13 Mar 2011), the latter the gallery’s most popular exhibition to that point, attracting more 300,000 visitors.

The Chinese programme at AGNSW entered a new phase in 2012 with the retirement of Mr. Capon, who had been the gallery’s director for 33 years, and the departure of Dr. Liu who was the Chinese Curator for more than a decade. The new director, Dr. Michael Brand, is determined to continue the long tradition of a strong presence of Chinese culture at the gallery, and is also planning to develop a more comprehensive programme to engage with China.

The new strategic plan is a reflection of the gallery’s response to the larger social and political development in Australia, and to the ever closer ties between Australia and China in recent years. The renewal of the entire executive team has also brought new ideas and a different management style to the operation of the gallery. The institution’s planned “Sydney Modern” expansion now being under way will add further impetus to the transformation of the gallery to inspire audiences of the 21st century.

Prof. Josh YIU

Art Museum, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Collaborations with Long-term Impact

This presentation will be a summary of several initiatives undertaken by the Art Museum in recent months. I shall discuss some projects — such as the “Digitization of the Sheng Xuanhuai Archive”, the “Investigation of Ancient Chinese Gold Working Techniques” and “Preservation of Modern Chinese Ink Painting” — that involve institutions and individuals outside of the museum field, and show how these projects may engage and resonate with the community. As these projects are still in the planning stage, my discussion is also intended to be a brainstorming session with curators and colleagues who may help us to enrich the projects.

Dr. Adriana PROSER

Asia Society Museum

The Second US – China Museum Leaders Forum, Shanghai and Hangzhou 2014

From November 18 to 21, Asia Society (AS) and the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries will host the second US-China Museum Leaders Forum in China. The forum is an AS initiative that began in 2012 to develop tangible and actionable projects that museums in the US and China could execute to promote better collaboration and exchange. In 2012 the museum leaders identified various benefits of museum exchanges. Such programmes provide information and experiences to museum audiences; foster tolerance and understanding between nations; and enhance cultural competence in a globalized world. The directors also identified obstacles impeding museum collaborations, including disparities in resources and practices; cumbersome bureaucratic, legal, and regulatory systems; a lack of familiarity between museum professionals; and the absence of institutional and funding mechanisms to facilitate exchanges. The consensus view among those attending was that the expansion of museum collaborations will require new funding and organizational mechanisms to spur and conduct exchange activities. This presentation will be an overview of the Forum, which includes panel discussion on successful museum exchanges and on the state of art philanthropy in the US and China.

Dr. Sarah NG

University Museum and Art Gallery, The University of Hong Kong

An Exceptional Traveling Exhibition: A Case Study of An Artistic Exchange Mechanism in a Cross-strait Four-region Artistic Exchange Project

This paper studies the Cross-Straits Four-Region Artistic Exchange Project 2014 which intends to present a new generation of artists and expand the horizons of young artists around the four regions: Hong Kong, Mainland China, Macao and Taiwan. The theme is “Conforming to Vicinity,” which requires artists to explore the new state of contemporary art in these four places and to understand how regional and city development influence their artistic creation. Their works are shown in museums of these four regions throughout the year including the University Museum & Art Gallery, He Xiangning Art Museum, Macao Art Museum and Pingtung Art Museum. This is an exceptional exhibition which is different from most traveling exhibitions which usually present the same set of exhibits throughout the tours. This project requires most participating artists to strive for change in their respective places to showcase their developing artworks which grow from one place to another until they reach their completed state at the final stop. In addition to its site-specific theme, this exhibition emphasizes the collaboration among multiple institutions and the process of curation and creation.

The paper will discuss this ambitious project from the point of view of the organizational strategies and practical issues that required coordinating the artists and running the project. It will also study the problems that the partners need to deal with issues such as the artist support, artwork display, transport and promotion of this challenging project.

Why do institutions as well as artists want to participate in such an artistic exchange project? Does this type of experience provide a deeper engagement with audiences and give institutions and artists an opportunity to learn from these experiences? What are we finding in the process?

Dr. Hiromi KINOSHITA

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Preserving the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Architectural Interiors

One of the strengths of the PMA’s Chinese collection is its unique Chinese architectural interiors which include a 15th century Buddhist Temple Ceiling, a 17th century Reception Hall and an 18th century Scholar’s Study. Acquired in Beijing in the 1920s, the interiors followed the vision of the director Fiske Kimball who saw them not only as works of art but as settings in which to provide historical context for the display of Chinese objects. Today, the Reception Hall and the Temple Ceiling remain important examples of the official style architecture of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). After fifty years of display, the need to conserve and preserve the vibrantly painted roof beams and timbers of the Reception Hall initiated a study of the materials and techniques of Chinese architectural painting. This paper will present the research and conservation treatment carried out on the Ming Reception Hall and also on a Buddhist wall painting said to have come from a temple In Henan province. Similarities include the range of colors in the palette, raised gold ornamentation and binders. It is often assumed that architectural interiors were frequently repainted, however, analysis of the paint samples showed that the Reception Hall was repainted only once or twice during its three-hundred-year history.

Mr. XI San-cai

Zhejiang University

The Research in Modern Technology’s Usage in the Conservation of Paper Relics

Paper as a medium of written information is extremely important for transmitting cultural and preserving history since the invention of papermaking technology 2000 years ago. Those paper relics such as books, paintings, newspapers and documents collected in museums, libraries and archives are extremely precious in studying the history, politics, economy, art and culture of China.

Paper is a kind of organic material and its main structure is cellulose fibers connected by linear β(1-4)D-glucopyranosyl units. As time goes on, both internal factors (effect of acid and change of texture) and external factors (temperature, humidity, illumination, corrosion of acidic gas, damaged by worms, mildew or mechanical wear) affected the quality of paper, leading to paper acidification, embrittlement or even ruined totally. Therefore, the preservation of paper relics is facing a grim situation.

Since de-acidification is the only way to extend the storage time of acidification paper, scholars of every country have been devoted to the viable means of removing acid since the 1930s. At present, aqueous treatments, non-aqueous liquid-based systems treatments and gas-phase treatments are mostly used in the de-acidification and protection of paper relics, books and documents but it is not satisfactory enough. In recent years, Zhejiang University, Guangzhou University of Technology and Nanjing Museum made fast progress in exploring innovative methods for paper de-acidification on the basis of past experience. For instance, cold plasma technology was applied to the de-acidification and protection of paper heritage and documents by Xiwen Zhang, Sancai Xi, etc. form Zhejiang University.

This paper makes a brief introduction to the reason for paper acidification and the developments of de-acidification technology.

Dr. HU Yuan

Chinese Academy of Cultural Heritage

Scientific Study of Early Chinese Faience and Glass

我的彙報內容主要是我在美國哈佛大學藝術博物館保護實驗室進行的部分研究成果。主要分為兩個部分：

西周弓魚國墓地出土費昂斯殘片的科學分析，研究的重點是採用ESM-EDX分析剖面樣品的元素分佈和組成。此次分析的費昂斯來自兩個墓葬，時代基本上都是西周中期，也是費昂斯產生或出現的時期。分析結果其中一個墓葬的樣品符合高鉀低鈉的特徵，這一結果和之前的一些研究資料是一致的，即西周至春秋時期的費昂斯玻璃相內高鉀低鈉，具有和埃及西亞地區不同的元素含量特徵。但另一墓葬的樣品具有不同的特點，其高鈉低鉀的特徵符合埃及西亞地區的特點，反映出這些料珠或生產技術源於外部，很有可能是由中亞傳入的。

第二部分內容是簡要介紹對多件藏于哈佛大學博物館的東周時期的重要玻璃器的科學分析，這也是首次對這些器物進行科學檢測。這些器物包括東周晚期和漢代的鑲有蜻蜓眼、玻璃條銅鏡和帶勾。通過對這些器物之上的玻璃部件的XRF元素分析，發現一些蜻蜓眼不同區域採用的原料成分差異很大，有些部位顯示出典型的鉛鋇玻璃特徵，有些部位顯示出含有鈣和鈉元素。這反映出當時玻璃在製作過程中的一些特點。東西方產的玻璃原料都在同一件器物上出現，這一發現有助於瞭解當時玻璃製作和使用的重要資訊，對於研究東西方交流也有很重要的借鑒作用。

Ms. XIONG Ying-fei

Shanghai Museum

Discovering the Gaps and Preserving for the Future: My Learning Experiences in Ceramic Conservations at the Freer | Sackler Galleries

中國古代陶瓷器不僅是藝術品，也飽含著豐富的技術內涵，科技研究的介入可以獲取更多的古代陶瓷工藝技術等方面的資訊，為工藝傳承、文物鑒定提供有價值的參考。早在19世紀，西方學者就開始應用先進的科學設備研究中國古代藝術品，美國史密森研究院的弗利爾和賽克勒藝術館 (FSG) 在中國文物研究方面積累了很多研究技術和經驗。受到「利榮森紀念交流計畫」的資助，在2011年2月至8月間，前往FSG進行學習交流，深有所獲。

交流專案主題為「中國古代鐵、銅呈色瓷釉的分析研究」。中國古代鐵、銅呈色的陶瓷器品種較多，選擇標準參考樣品、準確定量為難點，交流中，採用掃描電鏡、顯微分析儀、X螢光光譜儀和電子探針等設備，對52件具有代表性的中國歷代重要時期傳世或出土的瓷片進行測試，通過不同測試方法和標準樣品的選擇比較，篩選出12件適合的標準參考樣品，實現了對瓷釉化學組成的準確定量。最後，通過對資料的分類整理與分析，初步完成了對鐵、銅呈色瓷釉的釉料特點、施釉工藝特徵及影響釉呈色主要因素的討論，達到了預期效果。

史密森研究院對古代藝術品的收藏、研究有很長的歷史，涉及了世界上各個古代文明地區，通過庫房觀摩、資料查詢、與會討論，得以拓展視野和研究空間；收集的資料將在今後的研究中，直接起到至關重要的作用。交流工作期間，也體會到了美國同行嚴格執行操作規範和不斷探索新方法的工作態度。

Panel I – Conservation and Preservation of Museums’ Collection

Four distinct aspects of conservation — namely architecture, paper, faiences and ceramics — were discussed in the session, with a consensus on the importance of research collaboration among different fields. Panelists also discussed whether the role of the curator in scientific research is to support, to promote, or to lead.

The sole use of a single research result or data analysis would lead to wrong judgment, and therefore art historians, archaeologists and scientists should engage in dialogue and develop mutual understanding. A comprehensive understanding of artifacts can be reached through combining academics’ knowledge of art history, registers’ artifact records, archaeologists’ excavation results and scientists’ artifact composition analyses.

Dr. Adele SCHLOMBS

Museum of East Asian Art

Imperial Splendour: Life and Art in the Forbidden City – an Exhibition Organized by the Museum of East Asian Art Cologne in Collaboration with The Palace Museum Beijing from 19 October 2012 to 20 January 2013

Themes and Topics Covered by the Exhibition – The Qing Dynasty in Focus
The Exhibition was the highlight of “China Year” in Germany, commemorating 25 years of city partnership between Beijing and Cologne as well as 40 years of diplomatic relations between the Peoples’ Republic and Germany. The idea was to contribute to a deeper understanding of modern China by focusing on the 17th and 18th centuries in which China developed into a vast colonial empire under the Mandchu rulers. The objects were arranged in the following groups:

1. The son of heaven as universal ruler and the concept of Confucian state ritual. This group comprised a throne ensemble, ancestor portraits, ceremonial robes and depictions of state rituals such as “10.000 States pay reverence to the Emperor of China”. Also included in this group were the Mandchurian ritual of hunting and its influence on military structure as well as the new development of the cult of military heroes.

2. The second group was focused on the different religious systems which were simultaneously supported by the Qing court, while Tibetan Buddhism was favoured as a political link to integrate the peoples at the fringes of the multi-ethnical realm. Also included in this group were objects related to the Jesuits, among them Adam Schall von Bell from Cologne, who received access to the court because of their scientific knowledge and skills in the arts and crafts.

3. The next group illustrated the role played by the emperors as scholars, poets, collectors, artists and fervent supporters of court art, pointing out the Mandchu emperors’ admiration for Confucian values and traditions on the one hand, and their fascination with realistic Western portrait painting on the other, which served to illustrate and propagate their virtues in a stunningly realistic manner which was unprecedented in former dynasties.

2. Imperial Art Objects from the Collection of the Cologne Museum Integrated in the Palace Show – A Dialogue on Provenance

Imperial Art Objects from the Collection of the Cologne Museum Integrated in the Palace Show – A Dialogue on Provenance
The exhibition also included objects from the collection of the Cologne museum which were published in the catalogue at the end by smaller images and with brief captions. The idea was to show these objects in their original context, in other words, to do justice to them, and to show them in a way that they normally cannot be seen in Cologne. Another aim was to start a dialogue on – and enter a new chapter – in the book of provenance history. The Cologne museum made a special pledge to be allowed to show these pieces together with the objects from Beijing. We handed in a list explaining the provenance of each individual object. After about three months the Ministry of Cultural Affairs agreed to the display of almost all of the pieces, but there was one Imperial jade seal which was not allowed to be shown. The reasons were not clearly stated but in my paper I will try to explain why I think this seal was refused.

The Question of Conservation – Varying Standards and Differing Ideas about how to Hang and Protect a Hanging Scroll in an Exhibition
While we were planning and discussing the exhibition architecture with our partners in Beijing, we realized that there exist many views on how to display objects safely. After the arrival of the exhibition team consisting of curators only, and not of professional restorers, we were confused because some of their views were influenced by Western ideas while other views were neither traditional, nor Western. It also seems worth noting that different from Western museums, the restorers of the Palace museum who are familiar with the craft of mounting paintings, do not seem to have much influence on the theory and practice of exhibiting objects. If there existed professional standards defined by those who are actually dealing with the practical art of restoration and conservation, it would probably be easier to find safe solutions.

Ms. LIU Fang-ju

National Palace Museum

兩岸故宮書畫展覽與保存、應用之比較研究

北京故宮博物院與臺北國立故宮博物院的文物典藏，素有密不容分的鏈結關係。自2009年2至3月間，兩岸故宮的院長展開互訪以來，透過舉辦學術研討會與展覽交流等活動，已經使兩岸故宮研究人員以及文物展示的實質合作更為具體化。

本項研究，正是植基於上述基礎。2011年下半，我獲得香港「利榮森紀念交流計劃」的贊助，利用5個月的時間（8月1日至12月31日），針對本身工作中所涉及的領域，分別就北京故宮在書畫展覽規劃，以及書畫保存修復、數位影像建置、數位影像應用等項目的執行方式，進行通盤研習。期間訪談交流的對象，囊括了古書畫部、展覽部、文物管理處、科研處、文保科技部及資料信息中心、圖書館等七個部門，另外亦實地觀摩書畫換展、書畫修復與文物拍攝的情形，受益良深。

在2011年底研習結束前，和2012年初返回臺北之後，我曾分別將此行的經驗與北京故宮及臺北故宮的同仁分享，另外也著手撰寫《兩岸故宮書畫展覽與保存、應用之比較研究》一書。本次講座，即是擷取文稿中的三個要項，為論壇與會者介紹兩岸故宮在各自營運期間（指1949年迄今），所累積的豐碩成果，期能藉助兩院相同議題的比較研究，提供給博物館同業作為參考。

Ms. ZHANG Rong

The Palace Museum

英倫之行收獲及學術成果出版模式的探討

由於各種歷史原因，中華文物散落於世界各地公立、私立博物館和私人藏家中，隨著各個類別文物研究的推進與深入，我們逐步認識到，對於散落世界各地的中華文物的研究是不可或缺的重要組成部分之一。對這些文物的瞭解、研究與出版是今後研究各類文物極其重要的內容。台北故宮曾經出版《海外遺珍》，雖然掛一漏萬，但對瞭解和掌握海外藏中國文物起到了重要的橋樑作用。我們希望借此機會，呼籲對海外藏中國文物的研究與出版能夠得到重視並能夠一步一步地實現。

「利榮森紀念交流計畫」，為文物研究者瞭解、研究海外博物館藏中國文物搭建了一個非常好的平臺，我們建議，在此基礎上一方面繼續擴大博物館的範圍，一方面與各個博物館溝通，實現將研究成果出版，供更多的人欣賞與進一步研究。它既是每一個訪問學人的研究成果，也是「利榮森紀念交流計畫」的業績與成果。在出版運作中，主要涉及兩個難題，一是署名問題，二是文物照片版權與費用問題。第一個問題除了臺北故宮博物院存在一定的難度外，其它博物館均可妥善解決。第二個問題是需要有專門的部門、專門的人員負責協調解決，主要涉及到對方博物館的「情感」問題，是否願意由他人出版，如果涉及的文物量少，尚可理解和考慮，如果涉及的文物量大且沒有圖片或者對方博物館尚未出版，能否接受由中國研究人員、中國的出版社出版?

我們相信凡事都有解決的途徑與辦法，我們可以考慮由雙方的專家一起研究，一起署名，在版權上或在費用上適當給對方比較優惠的條件，目的只有一個，就是將博大精深的中華文物展現給世人。

Dr. Eileen LAM

The Hong Kong Institute of Education

Wandering in and beyond Chinese Jade: A Research on the Sonnenschein Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago

The year of invaluable working experience at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) offered me opportunities of participating in daily curatorial works, and close studies of the museum Chinese jade collection. In this presentation, I will briefly discuss my recent survey on Chinese glass plaques – one of the researches that I conceived and developed by studying the Edward and Louise B. Sonnenschein archaic Chinese jades Collection during the year at the AIC.

Most discussions about early Chinese glass to date have explored issues of origin and studied this material as an indication of China’s contacts with outside civilizations. This research, however, attempts to focus on the different subject of these glass plaques. By juxtaposing the AIC’s glass plaques with other collections’ pieces and those found from excavations, this study will explore the original function of the plaques, and in addition, review the long-standing perception that ancient Chinese glass (particularly in burial context) served as less precious simulations of those of jade.

Dr. YEUNG Suet

The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Updating the Cleveland Museum of Art Chinese Painting Website Information

Updating the Chinese painting website information is one of the major tasks during my tenure at the Cleveland Museum of Art. The project is aimed at enhancing the public’s interest and knowledge of the painting collection by renewing the website’s pictorial and textual information. Equipped with the information of over five hundred objects, the copious online database offers a glimpse into the collection’s history and its characteristics, as well as insights into the role of digitized collection information.

Dr. Colin MACKENZIE

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Towards a Goal of Long-term Collaboration between Chinese and American Museums

Over the past two decades, numerous exhibitions of Chinese art have been presented at American museums large and small. With few exceptions, however, these collaborations have generally been stand-alone projects rather than long-term partnerships. This paper explores whether it may be possible in future to create longer-term relationships and what form these partnerships might take. It begins by reviewing the recent exhibition Masterpieces of Early Chinese Painting and Calligraphy in American Collections at the Shanghai Museum and considers how this exhibition could become a model for future exchanges. The paper then explores a broad range of possible collaborations, including exhibitions, conservation, scholarly research, and audience outreach.

Panel II – Collaboration and Resource Sharing among Museums

The topic of collaboration and resource sharing raised keen interest among the participants, bringing lively discussions about international collaboration in publication, exhibition and resource sharing. There were suggestions for joint research and publication collaboration between the Western museums and Chinese scholars. There was also a proposal of setting up an online platform for image sharing to promote research opportunities. Through the platform, museums could contribute artifact images to build up the database, which would foster the study of the pieces.

Regarding international exhibition collaboration, it was reflected that the difference in exhibition planning time, the escalating insurance expenses for artifact transportation as well as the strict regulations of organizations like Art Exhibitions China, made the organization of international exhibitions difficult.

Dr. Nancy BERLINER

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Reaching the All Audiences: Education, Outreach and Programming at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and at Yin Yu Tang at the Peabody Essex Museum

Currently Curator of Chinese Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and formerly Curator of Chinese Art at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, Nancy Berliner will give an introduction to the collections and missions of each of these two museums – including a discussion of the role of the Yin Yu Tang house project at the Peabody Essex Museum. Berliner spearheaded the re-location, re-erection and the curating of this 18th century house from Anhui Province which is now installed as it appeared when it was last occupied in the 1980’s. Presentations about the two museums will focus on the interaction between the curatorial departments and the education, programming and interpretation departments at each museum. These departments and sub-departments each have their own specific roles in the museum, and their own approaches and missions in reaching out to the many distinct communities that the museums serve. Effective museum experiences rely on the expertise of individuals from all of these departments working together to ensure all audiences (adults and children, specialists and general interest groups) enjoy and learn from their museum experiences.

Prof. LI Jian-mao

Hunan Provincial Museum

Museum Staff’s Role in Education – Case Study of Hunan Provincial Museum

對於作為教育場所的博物館，公眾往往更為關注藏品數量及品質、陳列展覽、參觀人數、可提供的教育項目等顯性因素，而往往不甚瞭解聯繫溝通藏品與公眾之間的隱性因素–博物館館員。儘管教育功能與生俱來，但博物館曾一度被看做是精英文化的代表，館員們當中除了專門從事教育工作或公眾服務的成員，更多的是為教育提供宏觀的指導或主題意義的選擇，均較少的通過陳列展覽與公眾產生直接的聯繫。隨著時代的衍進，社會思潮的變化，特別是博物館社會角色和功能的發展，博物館不再是居高臨下的教導者，而是傳播者與引導者。教育的內容和意義不再僅僅由博物館研究人員所主導，更加入了熟悉藏品的保管人員，善於詮釋藏品的專職教育人員，瞭解公眾需要的公共關係人員以及嫺熟當代各種科技發展與媒體創新的展示設計人員，輔之以藏品展示過程中所必須的開放管理、安防、行政人員，由他們形成一個「博物館館員」團隊，明確職權，使得博物館藏品和展示得以平衡的照顧到博物館專業和公眾的需要，在博物館「大教育」的背景下中產生積極的作用。報告將結合湖南省博物館近年來的工作發展情況與陳列展覽實例，探討博物館館員的身份界定與職權劃分，表述博物館館員在教育中的協作及效果，闡述博物館館員綜合素養水準對教育成效的影響，分析博物館教育物件針對館員在教育中的作用的回饋與評估。以期對博物館館員在教育中的重要作用列出證據並作出說明，對博物館教育的未來發展提供「館員」人力資源支撐的實例借鑒。

Dr. Chen SHEN

Royal Ontario Museum

Transformation of Curatorial Research in Today’s Public-Facing Museums

Entering in the 21st century, public interests in museums’ collection and research have dramatically changed, resulting in increasing demand for more public programmes, gallery interventions, and social network interactions. Today, many museums have begun to revisit their mission statements and to implement strategic plans towards the rebranding of these public-facing institutes. In this talk, I will briefly introduce the current on-going strategic planning at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), with a focus on changes of curatorial research and collection management. As a diversified disciplinary and traditionally research-oriented institute such as ROM, the Canada’s largest World Museum, where research and collection include World Cultures and Natural History, one of these challenges in curatorial division lies in the fact that the public was less informed with what curators actually do at their best in cutting-edge research, and that they are less inspired by history and contents of the collection on display at galleries and exhibitions, not to mentioned those accounting for 90% of the collection in storage. ROM’s new eight “Centres of Discovery” are created to highlight areas of curatorial expertise, which invite active engagements in public programs and education. With increasing use of mobile and social network technologies and applications in museums’ exhibitions and galleries, we need to ask this question: What positive roles can curators play, and within multifaceted and multi-directional outreach programs, how can they retain their own research interests and quality, academic freedom and dignity? Transformation of curatorial research in today’s public-facing museums is not to abandon or alter curators’ own research interests and ability in order to accommodate the general public’s interests. On the contrary, as long as the academic research of researchers can be presented in the context of relevance to the current events and issues of social changes, then the research based on museum collections recognized by the global academic community will certainly enjoy a more far-reaching reputation. In the end, it is precisely the curatorial research and collection of cultural relics that transform the museum into an important and creative destination for understanding the changing natural and cultural worlds.

Prof. Shelagh VAINKER

Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Oxford

Curators and Outreach: Recent Experience in the Ashmolean Museum

This presentation will look at the importance of educational and outreach programmes in the Ashmolean Museum. The development of educational activities for all ages was a key factor in securing a major grant from the UK Heritage Lottery Fund for the 2006-9 redevelopment of the Ashmolean, and remains a priority. Since 2012 new programmes have also been introduced to increase the use of the collections in teaching throughout the university.

In addition, it will include an account of outreach activities relating to the Chinese collections over the last nine months, with particular reference to projects during my J S Lee Fellowship at the Capital museum. The Fellowship greatly enriched two museum exhibition projects as well as affording opportunities for me to take part in outreach activities at museums and galleries in Beijing. The presentation will conclude with an introduction to the innovative use of technology in the Ashmolean’s current main exhibition Xu Bing: Landscape Landscript (28 February – 19 May).

Ms. Julia WHITE

UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

The University Museum’s Role in Arts Education

Institutional Direction
The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive is the fine arts center on the University of California, Berkeley campus. With a broad collection of historic and contemporary arts, as well as film from around the world, the museum plays a central role in the arts education of the campus and the community.

A recent strategic plan initiative at the museum led to some conclusions about its role in arts education:

• A core value of the museum is the belief that art and film contribute powerfully to learning and that we must strive to fulfill this educational potential for diverse audiences.

• We believe that art and film should play a central role in the learning experience of every Cal student, especially undergraduates.

• We know that exposure to the arts increases cultural awareness, develops sense of self, improves cognitive capacities, and fosters greater sociability, all of which contribute to improved classroom learning in diverse disciplines.

Curators’ Role
The Curators’ role within the University museum setting is not unlike that in city, county or private museums; we are the creative voice of the institution through initiation of original exhibitions, as well as development of collections and programs. In gallery printed labels and interpretative content rests solely with the curator. Collaboration with the Education department is essential to the development of relevant programs and we serve as the “expert” voice on selection of outside speakers and interpretive programs.

The tight bond between the university and the museum creates opportunities for curators to be directly involved with the academic community. A few of these include formal roles in classroom teaching (guest lecturers), participation in campus wide initiatives (Townsend Fellows), gallery talks (student docent training and alumni groups), and student mentoring and internships for post-graduate and graduate students in the arts (Mellon, J.S. Lee, W.T. Chan, ACHIEVE, PFA Film Curating Internship).

Our curators also serve as supervisors for work-study students whose long-term academic and professional interest may or may not be in the arts, but whose family’s financial situation allows for on-campus employment. The program introduces undergraduates to the arts in a very direct way and opens the door to life-long involvement in the arts. Examples of student projects include work in conservation, collections management, and art and film research.

As the museum prepares to move to a new site in downtown Berkeley new initiatives for enhanced community learning have begun including programs for teens, K-12 in-gallery interactive exhibitions, art-making classes, and greater exchange between artists and community. Live programming of dance, performance, and music are new programs involving guest curators from specific disciplines. The size and scope of the museum as well as its long-standing commitment to higher education encourages experimentation in all facets of our programing.

Panel III – Inspiration & Innovation: Curators’ Roles in Education and Outreach Programme

The museum education programmes presented shared two common elements – fun and relevance of the topic to the audience. Integrating education elements into museum programming has become a trend and museum education is no longer restricted to the education department. The concern about audience engagement raises the art-oriented versus audience-oriented exhibition content consideration. It was suggested that art and collections should still be the foundation of an exhibition; however, the balance between the two is worth exploring.

Other than being a place for exploration, inspiration and learning, a museum is also a safeguard of the world’s collections. One of its missions is to conduct research to acquire and diffuse knowledge. Hence, concerns of artifacts and audiences are both essential in considering museum academic research and education.

In the discussion about enhancing collaboration between China and the West, better understanding between the parties is crucial, especially in the organization of international exhibitions. Financial and exhibition models, as well as exhibition contents need to be discussed and tailored to different exhibition locations and venues. There was also a suggestion to have a long-term staff exchange to enhance understanding and foster long lasting collaboration.

Prof. Peter Y. K. LAM

Art Museum, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Happy Birthday to the Emperor: A Blue and White Vase Revisited

The Vase

• A monumental blue and white vase with ten thousand shou-characters in the collection of the Art Museum, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
• Acquired in South Kensington, London in 1951-2
• Various opinions – export piece, non-imperial, even Vietnamese
• Early 1980’s: Importance of the piece recognized

Preliminary Studies

• Counting, calligraphy style, variations of the shou characters
• Prototypes – Ming Jiajing vases and other Kangxi shou vases and brushpots
• Emperor’s Birthday: Wan Shou Jie 萬壽節
• The Kangxi Emperor: his reign: 1662-1722, 61 years, longest in history of China
• Emperor’s birthday on 18th day, 3rd month of every year
• Probably presented in 1713, 52th year, 60th birthday

2011 New Discoveries

• Acquisition of a ‘birth certificate’ in June, 2011 from an auction in Beijing:
  A blue and white brushpot with a prose-poem, Wanshou Zun Fu 萬壽尊賦
  And related new findings

Dr. Joseph CHANG

Asian Art Museum, Chong-Moon Lee Center for Asian Art and Culture

Calligraphy, Painting, and Seal: An Initial Survey of the Permanent Collections of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco

My talk presents an important group of paintings, in the permanent collections of the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, by painters who were active in Nanjing in the 17th century China. Landscape paintings by Gong Xian (龔賢 1618 – 1689), Fan Qi (樊圻 1611 –？), Zou Zhe (鄒? act. 1640s – 1670s), and Ye Xin (葉欣 act. 1640s – 1670s) of the Eight Masters of Jinling 金陵八家 and those by Xiao Yuncong (蕭雲從 1596 – 1673), Cheng Sui (程邃 1607 –1692), Kuncan (髡殘1612 – 1673), and Cha Shibiao (查士標 1615 – 1697) will also be presented. Unusual landscapes by Xiao Yuncong, Fan Qi, Ye Xin, and Cheng Sui will be included in further discussions, with a focus on the painting “My Teacher Cheng Yuanji by Cheng Sui”.

An undated fan by the Anhui painter Xiao Yuncong could be an early work from the early 1640s when he spent years in retreat at the Qixia Temple in Nanjing before the fall of Ming dynasty, an early, perhaps the earliest, landscape handscroll by Fan Qi dated 1645, and another rare large hanging scroll by Ye Xin are all little known works of interest to scholars and students alike in the field of Chinese painting. More discussion will be devoted to Cheng Sui’s My Teacher Cheng Yuanji, which is stylistically related to that of Kuncan, on which an interesting seal by Cha Shibiao appears on the join between the painting and the long inscription above reveals a close circle, who were Ming loyalists such as Ji Yingzhong (紀映鍾1609 – 1681) and Zhou Liaoxu (周蓼卹) in addition to Cheng and Cha, active in Nanjing in the early Qing dynasty.

Finally, a brief note on the painting Bamboo, Rock, and Cymbidium by the modern scholar, diplomat, and artist Ye Gongchao (葉公超 1904 – 1981), who was better known as George Ye. The landscape elements of rocks and waterfall were actually added by another younger painter Fan Po-Hung (范伯洪 1937 – 1988). Ye and Fan co-painted many works in the 1970s and most of which bear only Yeh’s signature and seals, a little known fact in the history of modern Chinese painting.

Prof. XU Xiaodong

The Palace Museum

A Reconsideration of Several Jades in The Palace Museum Collection

This presentation introduces five jades at The Palace Museum in Beijing. They are all from the Qing imperial family collection and were suggested as Tang or Ming pieces, but never published so far, maybe due to the fact that no one is quite sure about their unusual shapes, dates and places of origins. When and where were they made? This presentation suggests other possibilities while taking the opportunity to ask for more suggestions and advice from all the participants of this conference.

Dr. Hiromi KINOSHITA

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Material Study and Dating of Inlaid Mother-of-Pearl Lacquers

Chinese lacquer in the MFA is not as well-researched or published as other areas of its collection. In my presentation, I will give a brief survey of some of our less well-known lacquers and discuss recent material studies carried out on a group of mother-of-pearl inlaid lacquers.

The majority of the MFA’s collection is made up of later Qing mother-of-pearl inlaid lacquers. Associated with poorer quality workmanship and export wares, Qing mother-of-pearl inlaid lacquers have never been as popular or seriously studied as lacquer from the earlier periods. Researching the collection has revealed several interesting things. One is that some pieces, originally catalogued as Chinese, may in fact be from the Ryukyu Islands (Okinawa). The remaining group of dishes and boxes, which number 180, appear to have been used by the middle and upper class as everyday utensils. The pieces are fascinating to study as they encompass many different subject matters – famous landmarks, poems and idioms – and also vary in the quality of their workmanship. Furthermore, examining the elemental composition of metal foil inlay has revealed much about later mother-of-pearl inlaid lacquer process and also clarified certain techniques.

Dating these lacquers is challenging. Usually, dating is reliant upon stylistic analysis and comparisons with similar designs on other contemporary media including woodblock prints, paintings, porcelains, and textiles. The MFA has a presentation box with a cyclical date with designs and motifs that also appear on other smaller pieces. If a date for this box can be established using Carbon-14 or radiocarbon dating, then it may be used as a yardstick in which to date other pieces. As the box was made less than 300 years ago, obtaining a deterministic date is impossible, however, preliminary analysis shows that it is most likely to have been made in 1668 or 1788.

Mr. LING Lizhong

Shanghai Museum

New Light on Wang Yuanqi and Dong Qichang: Two Works from the Shanghai Museum

王原祁（1642－1715）《題畫稿墨蹟》冊發現後，對近百年來學界所熟知的《麓台題畫稿》、《王司農書畫錄》二書予以重新審視，得出如下結論：上述諸本中，《司農本》內容最為齊全，共收214則，其中第1則的標題為《墨蹟冊》所無，而第31則、33則、34則為諸書皆無收；但該書存在諸多脫漏誤識，以及標題小注遺漏甚多且未忠實於原著等問題。《麓臺本》內容雖不全（共收56則），脫漏字亦夥，但該書將源於《墨蹟冊》全本的《前刻本》中為諸書所無的另外48則畫論予以刊刻存世，且著錄方式較之《司農本》更忠實於原著，其重要性不言而喻。而《墨蹟冊》共收畫論32則，是王原祁題畫稿部分原著墨蹟，其中的24則畫論為《麓臺本》無收，並可替代《司農本》，另外8則畫論可校正《麓臺本》之舛誤，第25則為諸本所無；且該冊較之《司農本》之輾轉編輯，對王原祁??畫論的確切內容、形成過程、書法風格、畫論貢獻的研究之價值和意義，尤顯重要而彌足珍貴。且對《墨蹟冊》、《麓臺本》、《司農本》與傳世尚能獲觀的作品四者關係的梳理，在鑒定王原祁作品真偽時是不無啟示的。本案的介紹，是博物館藏品研究，對促進中國美術史得以進一步深入研究的佳例。

Mrs. Ming WILSON

Victoria and Albert Museum

Take a Closer Look at Coromandel Screens

There are two Coromandel screens in the V&A. It would be incorrect to call them new discoveries. Afterall they are large objects, not something that got tucked away in a corner and forgotten by curators. Yet it is exactly their large size that makes them difficult to study close-up.

Both screens were acquired by the V&A in the 19th century. This one was bought in 1885, from the well-known Paris dealer Siegfried Bing (1838 – 1905). The Museum paid an enormous sum for it – ￡1000. I went through all the purchases of the same year. There were only two objects more expensive, and they came from the Fountaine collection which was supposed to be very famous. I did not have time to check records further back, but I would not be at all surprised if that sum was the highest paid for a Chinese object since 1852. Then, for some unknown reasons the Museum bought another screen four years later, at the still very expensive price of ￡700.

The Far Eastern gallery came into existence only in 1952, where the two screens were displayed at the far end of the gallery. The problem with screens is we usually just see the front but not the back. Also anything above eye level tends to escape the viewer’s attention. Photographs are not much help either. Because the screens are heavy and difficult to handle they were photographed in the early 20th century and not again until the 1980s. The photographer did take a few shots of the back, but the height of the screen made it impossible for the details of the design to show up clearly on the photos.

Then in 2000 one of the screens was chosen to be displayed in the British Galleries. Conservators set it up in the tapestry gallery and new photography was taken – that’s why there is part of a tapestry behind the screen. Thanks to modern technology the curator can now examine all the details from her own computer screen. The first thing I noticed is the attempt to reproduce the calligraphy of renowned scholars. They come in different scripts, with names attached to them such as Tang Yin and Chen Jiru. The combination of poetry and picture reminds me of the ink cake books such as the Fangshi mopu 方氏墨譜 and Chengshi moyuan 程氏墨苑. The individual patterns on the borders, known generally as bogu 博古patterns, also have their parallels in the ink cake books.

Yang Ming 楊明, one of the authors of Xiu shi lu 髹飾錄, describes the kuancai technique as ‘the design engraved in intaglio, like that of a printing block’ 陰刻文圖，如打本之印版. Looking at the details of the screen I would say that not only is the technique similar to woodblock cutting, but the overall design was probably inspired by illustrated books of the day. A great deal of labour would have been required in the production. The selling price, even for a country with no shortage of labour, would have been high. Consequently, old screens in Europe were not discarded but were turned into some other form of furniture. The boy servant on the side panel of this chest has part of his head chopped off – a clear sign of the recycling of wood.

My colleagues in the European departments often asked me where in China were Coromandel screens made. So far I have not been able to answer with certainty. In view of the similarity between woodblock and kuancai lacquer I am inclined to say Huizhou, also known as Xin-an. Huizhou was a major centre for printing and publishing in Ming and early Qing times. It was also the hometown of Huang Cheng 黃成, one of the two authors of Xiu shi lu and himself a lacquerer.

Most Coromandel screens are dated to Kangxi. We know some were intended for Chinese customers and some were sold to Europe. Some screens bear long inscriptions, usually celebrating the birthday of a state official, for example the one now in the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, with a date of Kangxi 9th year, equivalent to 1670. Of those sold to Europe the best documented examples are three screens used as wall panelling, installed in the Palace of the Frisian stadholders in Leeuwarden in about 1694, and moved to the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam in 1880.

Sarah Medlam, my colleague in the European Furniture Section, has done a survey of European furniture that incorporates Coromandel lacquer. Her survey reveals that the Coromandel screens were not used as a free-standing screen in 17th century Europe. They were either used to line walls – as panelling, or the individual panels were cut up to decorate cabinets. Some European furniture can be dated quite precisely, because an invoice exists, or an inventory, or some other records. This cabinet from Ham House was made in circa 1675. You can see the right door is made of two pieces of wood, not one. Some scholars think it results from an old screen being re-used. But in the 1670s newly made Coromandel screens were still arriving in Europe so the cabinet-maker did not necessarily have to use recycled screens.

Thus it would seem logical to assume that the screens made for export would have an undecorated back. I cannot imagine a European merchant spending money unnecessarily on a screen with decoration on both sides, when all he needed was the decoration on the front. However, the majority of Coromandel screens, including those with inscriptions, and those with beautiful calligraphies on the back, are in western collections today. The Zhongguo qiqi quanji, published in 1995, features only one kuancai screen, now in the Anhui Museum.

It seems China stopped making Coromandel screens after the Kangxi period, but in Europe the use of Coromandel lacquer continued into the 1780s. That probably was the reason why more Coromandel screens ended up in the West than in China today. We do not have time to look into that half of the story now. What I would like to hear is that there are other kuancai lacquer pieces in Chinese collections that I don’t know about. It is through information sharing that we can gain a better understanding of this remarkable product which is unique to China.

Ms. Elinor PEARLSTEIN

The Art Institute of Chicago

Drafting New Biographies of Ancient Jades

Ancient Chinese jades, like many other antiquities, are silent repositories of information about their age, provenance, function, context, and at the deepest level, the mindset of their craftsmen and patrons. Reconstructing the lives of these jades-from their creation to collection-is an ongoing challenge of archaeologists, scientists, curators, and collectors alike. All are critically dependent on archaeological data and on archaeological interpretations of that data.

The jades seen here represent a small number of the almost 650 Neolithic and Bronze Age jades bequeathed to The Art Institute of Chicago in 1950. All had been collected by Edward Sonnenschein and his wife Louise between 1915 and Edward’s death in late 1935. Those two decades bridged the transition from antiquarian studies-epitomized in Chicago by Berthold Laufer and in China by his mentor, Wu Dacheng- to archaeology, when speculations of date and burial context had yet to be corroborated by many well-documented finds outside Anyang. Today, we face the daunting need to gather, absorb, synthesize, and interpret a floodtide of evidence-intact assemblages as well as chance finds-whose provenance may or may not be known or reliably recorded. The Sonnenschein’s frequently published demonic plaque exemplifies a type for which new discoveries associated with the Shijiahe culture continue to pose new questions as they clarify others. Jenny So has carefully illuminated issues surrounding this site, and I will not attempt to summarize them here. Instead, I sincerely thank the Lee Foundation for bringing her former student Eileen Lam to Chicago. Eileen has focused on other jades for which we have scattered clues but few in-depth stylistic and archaeological studies. Insights on the first two forms described here are hers.

Long before the profusion of archaeological reports, many of the most elegant jades in the Sonnenschein and other Western collections-particularly the perforated examples among them-had been identified as components of stunning pendant sets. Finds datable from the Western Zhou through Western Han dynasties increasingly reveal that the original visual impact of individual pendants such as a pair of arc- shaped pieces derived from their combination in larger assemblages. But the form, placement, and function of trapezoidal plaques perforated above and below had confounded scholars until about 1990, when discoveries in north and central China revealed similar forms that were found together with colorful beads of materials including agate, jade, and faience that had been strung together so as to splay out from both edges. Such pendant sets discovered in situ and on the very few remains identifiable by sex suggest that women may have worn them over or near their shoulders. A more curious example from Pingdingshan incorporates so-called “handle- shaped” jades of a type now recognized in very diverse forms that span roughly one thousand years, from the 18th through 8th centuries BCE. Some of the most intriguing of these so-called “handles” bear inscriptions in crimson red that suggest their ritual use; others have been found together with bits of turquoise and jade that appear to have been inlaid into a perishable and yet unknown material. Indicative of their analytical curiosity, the Sonnenscheins- who purported no scholarly expertise but are said to have perceived their jade room as a “laboratory”-collected thirty-two such handles for which intact finds may someday offer substantial insights. Meanwhile, we are always reminded that isolated reconstructions need be critically considered in any attempt to visualize a jade in its original burial context.

Turning from comparative research to close physical examination, recent Art Institute studies focused on types of surface alteration and on and our means to determine and describe them. One study focused on conspicuous remains of organic materials on several jades clearly analogous to Bronze Age finds in both the Sonnenschein collection and the Sackler collection in Washington DC. This study aimed to describe and develop a visual vocabulary for types of surface alteration that incorporate vestiges of textiles-that is, to distinguish and classify remnant images or “impressions” from textile “ghosts” or pseudomorphs-the latter a phenomenon in which minerals from the burial environment replace and duplicate biodeteriorated fibers. When possible, we also attempted to identify the nature of those fibers. The particular twist in the weave visible on the tip of one blade in the Art Institute, for example, identifies it as the ghost of a silk fabric that had been created by reeling rather than spinning. This study was a collaborative project between the Art Institute’s conservation scientist Francesca Casadio, the Freer-Sackler’s geologist Janet Douglas, curators in the Art Institute’s Asian and Textile departments, and chemists at Northwestern University.

Another collaborative study including these three institutions, as well as Jing Zhijun, a geologist at the University of British Columbia, focused on a Sonnenschein piece that is neither Chinese nor jade, but has been incorporated in studies of both. Although it was then already owned by the Sonnenscheins, Osvald Siren initially published this kneeling figure in 1943 as belonging to private collection in Peking. As seen here in three views, the figure’s hands are bound behind him with two rounds of thick rope. His hair is sharply parted down the middle, and a long double braid runs down his back. His face is defined by raised eyebrows, high cheekbones, an incised mouth, and large pierced ears. This sculpture had no known counterpart until 1984, when roughly similar but larger pieces datable to the late second millennium BCE were first unearthed in and near Chengdu, Sichuan-discoveries with which many here are undoubtedly familiar. At least twelve of these figures discovered since 2001 at the remarkable site of Jinsha in Chengdu are virtually identical in scale and style to the Sonnenscheins.’ But whereas the Jinsha figures are carved of roughly textured stones-serpentinite and tremolite-some of which bear traces of pigment-the Sonnenschein piece is cholorite, and distinguished by a plain and unusually dark, glossy surface. The primary goal of this study was to shed light on the nature of that surface.

The figure’s mineral composition and structure were determined by non-destructive technologies-most notably, x-ray diffraction, which to the uninformed like me looks like dental surgery. Following up on a proposal by Wen Guang of the Institute of Geology in Beijing that the figure may have been heated, samples of chlorite were then burned at incrementally high temperatures; that at 600 degrees centigrade producing a distinctively deep black. This explained the color but not the smooth, shiny texture. Further studies proved that this piece had been impregnated with Japan wax, a byproduct of lacquer that was first developed in the mid-19th century. Together, these features led us to speculate that a craftsmen likely made the Sonnenschein figure near or at Jinsha workshop but sourced his stone from a different site than that of the Jinsha figures revealed thus far, that the figure had been burned (possibly during a ritual ceremony), and that a later dealer or collector-perhaps attempting to disguise the surface damage or simply enhance the figure’s texture-coated it with Japan wax. Burning, polishing and impregnation with waxes would have combined to darken and smooth the figure’s surface. Here, close visual examination, scientific analysis, and archaeological research combined to enhance our understanding of a fascinating and hitherto enigmatic work of art.

Dr. Anita CHUNG

The Cleveland Museum of Art

Contemporary Challenges: The Cleveland Experience

A general discussion of how The Cleveland Museum of Art as an encyclopedic museum — which collects and exhibits works of art across cultures and time — approaches the field of contemporary Chinese art, especially with the museum expansion project that presents an exceptional opportunity for looking to the future. The discussion focuses on establishing links between the past and the present as well as collaboration of professionals across disciplines. It addresses the implications of the new development on our museum practice (e.g. displaying the collection, curator’s role, art collecting, and exhibition programs). Finally, the presentation stresses a simultaneous need to promote modern Chinese art, especially here in the West, as the newly hot contemporary Chinese art scene calls for a broad and deep understanding of China’s modern art, without which the sight of unfolding historical processes will be lost.

Mr. Robert MOWRY

Harvard Art Museums

Contemporary Chinese Ink Paintings at the Harvard Art Museums: Exhibitions and Collections

This presentation is not a research report. Rather, it is a simple statement of what types of contemporary Chinese art are collected and exhibited at the Harvard Art Museums. The presentation will touch on the following points:

• Types of contemporary Chinese paintings that are collected:
  Ink paintings; artists represented include Liu Dan, Li Huayi, Li Xubai, Liu Guosong, Li Junyi, Chen Qikuan, Xia Yifu, Michael Cherney (aka Qiu Mai), among others
• Where presented
  Asian permanent-collection galleries, alongside traditional, or classical, Chinese art
• Collecting strategy; relationship of contemporary ink paintings to other categories of Chinese art collected
• Special exhibitions organized
  The New Chinese Landscape: Recent Acquisitions
  Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard, 12 August – 12 November 2006A Tradition Redefined: Modern and Contemporary Chinese Ink Paintings from the Chu-tsing Li Collection, 1950-2000
  Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard, 3 November 2007 – 27 January 2008
  Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ, 7 July – 14 September 2008
  Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL, 11 October 2008 – 4 January 2009
  Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, 11 February – 24 May 2009
• Relationship of contemporary Chinese ink paintings to the permanent collection, whose strengths include:
  Archaic Bronze Ritual Vessels, Shang – Han
  Ancient Chinese Jades, Neolithic – Han
  Chinese Buddhist Sculpture, Northern Wei – Tang
  Chinese Ceramics, Neolithic – Ming
• Relationship of contemporary Chinese ink paintings to the permanent collection, whose weaknesses include:
  Classical Chinese paintings (though the collection includes several excellent classical Chinese paintings, the overall collection is weak) Qing-dynasty decorative arts (ceramics, lacquer, glass, etc.)
  Chinese furniture, period rooms and architectural settings, scholar’s studio installation, etc.
• Challenges:
  Other Chinese contemporary arts: International-style art, Pop-style art, Post-Modernist
  Relationship of Chinese contemporary art to European and American contemporary art

Dr. CHI Jo-Hsin

National Palace Museum

The Archives of Imperial Display in The Palace Museum and Some Objects in the National Palace Museum

從2009年底開始至2010年上半年，承「利榮森紀念交流計畫」贊助，於北京故宮博物院（以下簡稱「北京故宮」）進行為期五個月的考察與研究，主要是對於國立故宮博物院（以下簡稱「台北故宮」）的藏品溯源。

北京故宮圖書館所藏內廷陳設檔案有數百種，居停期間就台北故宮藏品內容與個人研究偏好，查閱了近百種的陳設檔，最早的有康熙三十三年（1694）正月建立的《（坤寧宮）陳設帳》，最晚的是宣統十六年（民國十三年，1924）八月（農曆）建立的《王、羅大人提出古銅冊》，同年陽曆十一月五日末代皇帝溥儀就被請出宮了。

除了收購與接受捐贈的新增文物外，台北故宮藏品主要承繼原（北平）故宮博物院與原（南京）國立中央博物院籌備處的文物，後者有一大部分是原來貯存於瀋陽奉天行宮與承德熱河行宮的文物，前者則是原來收藏在清朝宮廷內院的文物。前者也是台北故宮收藏品的主要來源，幾占院藏品的九成。因此，北京故宮所保管的清代內廷陳設檔案中所列文物，有不少目前貯存於台北故宮。藉由這些陳設檔案，可進一步瞭解台北故宮藏品貯存於清宮的情形，本文僅舉二例論述，即康熙朝玻璃胎畫琺瑯牡丹藍地膽瓶（故瓷17588）與養心殿後殿竹絲小格百式件（故雜1284）。清代中後期至（北平）故宮博物院成立之初，前者貯存於乾清宮的庫房-端凝殿，後者則陳設於清世宗雍正皇帝及以後諸帝的寢宮-養心殿。

從北京故宮現存六本乾清宮庫收琺瑯器陳設檔案可知，康熙朝玻璃胎畫琺瑯牡丹藍地膽瓶是清朝唯一一件收貯在乾清宮庫房-端凝殿的康熙朝玻璃胎琺瑯器，或即意味著清帝認為它是康熙朝玻璃胎畫琺瑯製作工藝的最高成就。

因為養心殿長期做為清帝的寢宮，皇帝居停於紫禁城內時，置身養心殿的時間最多，遂處處可見供皇帝幾暇怡情的百什件。其中「清 竹絲纏枝番蓮多寶格圓盒」外型相對輕巧又多變，可呈圓筒形，可呈一字形屏風式，又可呈正方柱體！拉開小抽屜，或見小畫卷，或見小冊頁，還有可360°轉動的立柱形屜格。一一比對內貯文物可知，「清 竹絲纏枝番蓮多寶格圓盒」就是陳設檔所指稱的「竹絲小格百式件」，清季收存於養心殿。在現存廿六種養心殿百什件陳設檔冊中，僅《養心殿後殿竹絲小格百式件》的封面黃簽顯示出其於道光十九年建立檔冊時陳設於養心殿後殿，後卻移置於東暖閣，顯示出其與眾不同的地位！

Dr. Libby CHAN Lai-pik

The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Chinese Jades in the Western Context: Two Case Studies

陳麗碧，首屆「利榮森紀念交流計劃」訪問學人之一，去年曾到美國華盛頓 Smithsonian Institution Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery作為期一年的展覽策劃與博士後訪問學人。是次報告題為 “中國玉器的西方內容，從兩個例子說起（Chinese Jades in the Western Context: Two Case Studies）”。報告的第一部份，陳氏介紹了她曾參與的兩個計劃 ── Freer Gallery of Art的中國玉器與青銅器展廳的重新佈展，她所提供的專業中國早期玉器知識，以及展覽的靈感來源。第二部分，陳氏探討一件造型特殊、被認為是中國玉器的小玉瓶。據她分析，此小型玉瓶具強烈的波斯容器特色，造型比例上卻與波斯容器存在差異，應和後來的壁厚圓圈足的中亞回部玉器風格有近似之處。她推測其造型應來自十至十二世紀期間，波斯地區流行的金屬或玻璃製容器造型；然而，產地應位於絲綢之路的東西交匯點 ── 盛產玉器的崑崙地區。

Dr. LEI Yong

The Palace Museum

Was Malachite the Most Popular Green Pigment?

Based on an investigation of recent pigment analyses of many dated caves and murals, as well as some historical records and scripts in China, the most popular green pigment for wall painting and architecture might be copper trihydroxychlorides since North Dynasty (386-581 CE) until late Qing Dynasty (1840 -1911 CE), rather than malachite. Furthermore, the synthetic technology of making bronze corrosion artificially probably began to dominate the green pigments supply in Five Dynasties (907-960 CE) or Song Dynasty (960-1279 CE).

It is well known that Blue and Green Landscape Painting (“Qing Lv Shan Shui” in Chinese) is one of the dominant Chinese landscape painting trends. It illustrates the important roles that blue and green pigments play in Chinese arts. It is also well accepted among normal Chinese artists that the most popular traditional green and blue pigments in China are malachite and azurite.

However, based on recent Chinese mural and architectural painting analytical research, copper trihydroxychlorides (Cu2(OH)3Cl) might have played a more important role than malachite in Chinese paintings. However, this research doesn’t cover Chinese painting scroll due to the difficulties of nondestructive analytical requirement.

Some Chinese historical scripts might document copper trihydroxychloride. “Salt green” or “green salt” (“Yan Lv” or “Lv Yan”in Chinese) was mentioned in both the Weishu and Suishu as one of local products of Qiuci or Persian Capital.

Based on the documents above, the imported “green salt” or “Salt green” in China might be mineral copper trihydroxychlorides. The assumption matches a recent geological discovery of some copper trihydroxychlorides both in Shanshan and Qiuci.

Some scripts of Tang Dynasty (618-907) found in Turfan mentioned the prices of both Malachite and copper green (Tong Lv in Chinese). If copper green was synthetic copper trihydroxychlorides, it should be easier and cheaper to obtain than mineral malachite. But the much cheaper price of malachite in Turfan scripts provided contradictory evidence. Then, the “copper green” here should be the rare mineral copper trihydroxychloride, which had a higher price than malachite.

Wang Jinyu and Li Zuixiong’s research in Duhuang and Yulin Grottos suggested the copper trihydroxychlorides were the most popular green pigment before the Five Dynasties or Song Dynasty. Furthermore, malachite sometimes was always found together with it. The copper trihydroxychlorides and malachite can exist together in nature geologically. Therefore, mineral copper trihydroxychlorides was the most popular green pigment from the Northern Dynasty to the Five Dynasties.

It is very interesting that the most popular green pigment in Dunhuang and Yulin Grottoes was pure copper trihydroxychlorides without malachite since the Five Dynasties or Song Dynasty. This evidence indicates that the synthetic technology of copper trihydroxychlorides began to be popular since the Five Dynasties.

There are several documents mentioning the recipes of making copper green, especially in the Song and Yuan Dynasties.

For example, the recipe in Song Dynasty: Firstly, vinegar added with sodium chloride was heated on a fire for a long time; secondly, the hot vinegar was poured onto copper boards in a big copper pot; thirdly, some green powder was peeled off from the boards after 4 hours. Then repeat those steps.

Based on David Scott’s research, we know the final product of those recipes is copper trihydroxychlorides rather than copper acetate, especially since the treatments of heating prevented making copper acetate.

Research on a wall painting of the Yuan Dyansty (1206-1368 AD) in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Arts has shown that the most widely used original green pigment was copper trihydroxychlorides. Another achievement of this research is that it also found tin in the green pigment, which might be derived from tin bronze.

Similar unpublished research was done by conservation microscopist, Inge Fiedler. She found minor to trace amounts of both tin and lead in the green pigment of a polychrome seated Guanyin (11-13th century) in the Art Institute of Chicago.

Another large mural painting of the Yuan Dynasty, Seven Buddha Sermon Illustrations, is now preserved in The Palace Museum, Beijing. By Polarizing Microscope (PLM), I found green and spherical Cu2(OH)3Cl particles with dark spots in the centre, which are one proof of artificially making.

In addition, an unpublished research on another large mural painting of the Yuan Dynasty preserved in the Royal Ontario Museum also found copper trihydroxychlorides, but without synthetic or natural identification. In addition, the similar murals preserved in Metropolitan Museum of Art, University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology didn’t receive any pigment analyses.

I was involved in a mural painting research of several Ming Dynasty (1368-1644 AD) temples in Yong Deng, Gansu Provence. Most of the green pigments particles were found to be spherical with dark spots in the centre, which is a proof of synthetic making, too. Similar evidence was also found on architectural paintings in The Palace Museum, Beijing.

In summary, based on a number of artifact analyses and historical scripts, for Chinese mural and architectural painting, the most popular green pigment may be copper trihydroxychlorides rather than malachite since the Northern Dynasty until late Qing Dynasty. Then synthetic technology probably began to dominate green pigments production in the Five Dynasties or Song Dynasty. Bronze might be more popular than pure copper when synthesizing copper trihydroxychlorides. Therefore, the green pigments supply for historical Chinese mural making was supported by the synthetic technology of copper trihydroxychlorides in a great deal rather than the mineral malachite’s exploration.

Dr. Lesley LAU Fung-ha

Public Museum of Hong Kong

A Survey of Chinese Export Paintings at The British Museum

Lau has been conducting research on Chinese export art for years and she has once been the curator of the Historical Pictures collection of the Hong Kong Museum of Art. Meanwhile, she is a J. S. Lee Memorial Fellow at The British Museum and is studying the Museum’s collection of Chinese export paintings. Lau’s research focuses on the idea of “Trade-port culture” of the South China area during the 18th and 19th C and with a special emphasis on Canton (present-day Guangzhou). Canton was a “great and popular city” in the western’s eyes and the most prosperous Chinese city for foreign trade. Playing the role as the gateway to China during the past hundreds of years, Canton had been contributing to imperial China to enter the modern era. Chinese export art objects were brought back to Europe and the US by the western merchants and seamen who did China trade business. Chinese export art was a unique art genre – produced in large quantities mainly in Canton of China during the heyday of China trade, could only be seen in the western world now, seldom mentioned by the Chinese art history… Nevertheless, many invaluable and untold information have been enclosed in these paintings. These visual records may help us understand more in-depth of the past. Lau will make use of several themed albums of The British Museum, with cross reference to the contemporary English and Chinese texts, to show you her findings and views.

Ms. ZHU Saihong

The Palace Museum

A Preliminary Investigation of Rare Books from the Qing Imperial Collection in Taipei

這是「利榮森紀念交流計劃（2010/211）」資助項目之一，由於正處於實施之中（2011年4月26日 – 10月26日），因此只能匯報前半段調研工作。

陳述分為三部分：第一部分介紹清宮藏書背景，包括文獻種類、功用，在清宮的收藏狀況，故宮博物院圖書館成立後的典藏沿革，以及目前清宮藏書在海內外圖書館的分佈狀況；第二部分介紹遷台善本的數量、文獻種類和特色，如北京故宮所沒有的「天祿琳瑯」、「宛委別藏」、寫經等宋、元、明本，清代乾隆時期兩大精寫本叢書《四庫全書》、《四庫全書薈要》等；第三部分結合本人的研究興趣，精選了上述難得一見的國寶級文物或重要文物中的少量影像，如清藍線繡本《無量壽佛百福莊嚴繡相頌》、黑線緙絲本《佛說阿彌陀經》等，展示它們在圖繪、裝潢材質、紋飾或工藝等方面的成就，這些內容往往在文獻記載中極少或付闕；結合《真禪內印頓證虛凝法界金剛智經》等善本的著錄實例，說明所進行的基礎性的資訊調研工作，有助於確定版本時代、責任者、裝潢時間、遞藏源流等。兩岸故宮所開展的不同研究也有著相得益彰的作用，這些對於日後「拼碎成全」等研究工作至關重要。

Ms. Valentina MARABINI

The British Museum

Studying Conservation of Chinese Heritage Paintings: Placement at the Shanghai Museum

The extraordinary experience of working in direct contact with probably last generation of highly trained masters in the conservation of Chinese paintings national heritage at the Shanghai Museum; the description of the hard training that is necessary in order to reach the mastership and the unique opportunity to be transferred the authenticity of this century-long knowledge in the purpose of looking after the preservation of Chinese paintings collection held in Western Museums following the respect of the same tradition. This is the inauguration of international collaboration between institutions in the care of important treasures.

Mr. Keith WILSON

Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Lessons from the Xiangtangshan Project

I would like to speak about our current special exhibition “Echoes of the Past: The Buddhist Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan”. It will be closing in Washington on Sunday July 31 and moving on to Dallas and then San Diego. The show has gotten a lot of attention lately (Wall Street Journal review and an upcoming piece of the PBS Newshour, etc.). There are many interesting aspects to this project including:

• The significance of a monographic, site-specific exhibition dedicated to a place in China that doesn’t include any Chinese loans
• The integration of art and technology, including the “Digital Cave,” a large, immersive video installation in the middle of the show
• The structure and design of a show with 4 very different checklists depending on the venue
• The need to confront issues of object removal (in the early 20th century) and current concern for cultural patrimony and repatriation

Prof. Josh YIU

Seattle Art Museum

Celebrating Chine e Painting and Calligraphy at SAM—An Exhibition without Labels

In summer 2013, the Seattle Asian Art Museum will devote three galleries to feature 18 Chinese painting and calligraphy works, and the exhibition will have minimum labels. Visitors will be directed to the computers in the galleries to find out more information about the works through the newly launched online catalogue, which is sponsored by the J. Paul Getty Foundation. The presentation will feature the prototype of the online catalogue, and emphasize its interactive aspect, so that the voice of the users will be given more prominence. To facilitate online discussion, each entry includes the section ‘Questions for Experts/Researchers’, and I conclude the presentation with one such question on a Shitao painting in SAM, which bears a possible Bada Shanren seal.

Dr. SHEN Chen

Royal Ontario Museum

Exhibiting Archaeology: Ancient Artworks in Context

Many artworks were preserved and recovered from archaeological sites and burials of ancient time. Therefore, archaeological context and historical information of ancient arts to be displayed in museum galleries are always challenged by design installations and visual impacts on visitor experiences. This talk introduces the recent exhibition “Warrior Emperor and China’s Terracotta Army” at the Royal Ontario Museum and the Montreal Museum of Fine Art in Canada. The two museums take different approaches to exhibiting one of the greatest archaeological discoveries from China. The successful venues demonstrate both historic perspective and visual design / media are equally important in exhibiting ancient artworks in a cultural context.

Prof. James WATT

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Antiquities and the Study of Antiquity

屈志仁教授先就中國收藏歷史作出介紹，他提到收藏家早在宋代出現，他們收藏文物的目的，一方面為研究，另一方面為賞玩。元、明兩代，中國藝術發展出雅俗觀念，認為工匠藝術庸俗，文人藝術高雅，它也成為了收藏家的審美觀。至清代乾嘉時期，金石學家收藏書畫、文物作學術研究之用，再次強調收藏與研究均同樣重要。

發展至現代，我們可以把中國收藏與博物館歸納為三類：第一類是近代金石學家和書畫收藏家的私人收藏；第二類是宮廷收藏，即故宮舊藏，這類藏品主要反映乾隆的個人愛好；第三類是地方博物館，主要靠考古出土文物為藏品。

同時，現代博物館面對兩個主要問題。首先，現在大部分博物館與考古分開。考古成為了一門獨立的學科，輔以人類學、社會學等學科理論來詮釋，但卻與歷史、典章、名物制度及藝術等研究文物學科脫節。另一方面，藝術史學者只重視和鑽研理論，忽視研究博物館收藏的重要性。面對考古學家及藝術史學家的忽視，甚至批評與挑戰，博物館應如何面對?

Prof. CHEN Kelun

Shanghai Museum

亦師亦友︰博物館與收藏家

上海博物館（「上博」）創立初期，收藏家除了作為主要捐贈者，亦擔任博物館的重要顧問。九十年代上博籌建新館，是博物館成長發展的關鍵時刻，私人收藏家無論在文物捐贈、資金贊助上均提供了極大幫助，因此上博與收藏家的關係更加密切。陳副館長介紹多位與上博有深厚淵源的收藏家，如胡惠春、劉體智、譚敬、杜維善、吳湖帆、龐萊臣、潘達予、李蔭軒、劉靖基、顧公雄、華篤安、施嘉幹等，讓大家了解上博與這些收藏家之間的互信互助、亦師亦友的關係。上博一直努力維繫與收藏家和他們家人這份一輩子的情誼，而這些均是讓上博成為藏品質量首屈一指的博物館的關鍵所在。