Culture Knows No Borders: NPM Splendors Going to USA

Feng Ming-chu, director of the National Palace Museum, and Jay Xu, director of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, signed a memorandum of understanding on March 31 at the NPM. At some future date the two museums will come to a mutual agreement about the type and number of items to be borrowed.

Established in 1966, the AAM has more than 18,000 Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and central, west and south Asian artifacts dating from as early as 6000 years ago.

The NPM has agreed to send some of its works to San Francisco mainly to help to celebrate the AAM’s 50th anniversary. Following trips in 1961 and 1996, it will be the third time that works from the NPM collection have been shown in the United States.

When NPM artifacts went on tour in America for the second time in 1996, The Chicago Tribune devoted a whole section to a report on it, under the headline “Chinese Delicacies.”

Next year is the 90th anniversary of the founding of the NPM. Since its birth in 1925, it has so far put on eight major exhibitions abroad, with the number of works ranging from more than 100 to more than 400. During the shows, those in attendance—whether heads of state or common folk—have marveled at the splendor of the works on display, and the exhibitions have spurred waves of interest in Chinese culture locally, says Daniel Sung, head of the NPM’s Department of Rare Books and Historical Documents, who has assembled old news reports on the shows.

In 1935 the International Exhibition of Chinese Art was held at the Royal Academy of Arts at Burlington House in London. It remains the only large-scale exhibition of NPM works ever held in Britain. Under the protection of British warships, 93 crates full of outstanding NPM works were sent to London for the 14-week show, which attracted 420,000 visitors. King George V enjoyed the exhibition so much that he found himself reluctant to leave after two hours.

In 1998 French president Jacques Chirac, a great lover of Chinese culture, twice attended the “Memory of the Empire” exhibition at the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais. He described hosting the exhibition as a “great honor” for France.

The exhibition attracted more than 200,000 visitors and earned rave reviews from European media outlets. Italy’s Panorama news weekly praised it “as one of the most important art events of the 20th century.” The French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur wrote: “Empires are at their best when they are open to the whole world. Little Taiwan has provided this insight to enormous China.”

Two major exhibitions of works from the NPM were held in the United States during the second half of the 20th century. They created quite the fashion for things Chinese in North America. American museums appealed to the NPM for an exhibit way back in 1953, and US and ROC negotiators held talks over eight years before they agreed upon a plan. Finally, in 1961 an exhibition of works from the NPM toured five American cities.

Over a period of ten months, the show had stops at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum of San Francisco, attracting more than 500,000 to attend.

The NPM established deep friendships with these museums, and some 30 years later the NPM and the Metropolitan, both among the four greatest museums in the world, arranged for another exhibit of NPM works to visit New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Washington DC.

From March 1996 to April 1997, images of the exhibit’s banner with the English words “Splendors of Imperial China” and the Chinese characters Zhonghua guibao (“Chinese treasures”) were splashed across the arts pages of major periodicals throughout the world, as the exhibit received more attention than any of its contemporaries.

American media outlets, such as the Smithsonian magazine and The Wall Street Journal, praised the exhibit for brilliantly illuminating the development of art in China over 5000 years. Describing its immeasurable “cultural value,” CNN called the exhibit “the most dazzling and comprehensive exhibit of Chinese art ever shown in the West.”

Some European lovers of Chinese art traveled to the United States with the express purpose of seeing the exhibition. In the nearly full year that “Splendors of Imperial China” was open in the four American museums, it attracted almost 1 million visits.

After those shows in the United States and France, in the early years of the new millennium the NPM sent major exhibitions to Germany and Austria.

Receiving a steady stream of requests for foreign exhibitions, the NPM observes the principles of friendship and reciprocity when loaning out artifacts and engaging in cultural exchange. For instance, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, after hosting an exhibition of works from the NPM in 2016, will in turn loan out works from its own collection for an exhibit of Asian cultural artifacts at the Southern Branch of the NPM in 2017.

“Before I ever started working at the NPM, the museum was becoming more and more international,” says NPM director Feng Ming-chu, who has worked at the museum for 36 years.

“Just as we send NPM artifacts abroad, so too do we welcome works from abroad for exhibitions here. And we also engage in research exchange with those foreign museums. These are all ways that the NPM promotes cultural and artifact diplomacy.”