Children as guides
Every year, the museum puts on antiques study camps during summer and winter vacations, with reduced rates for teachers--the sowers of culture-- if they register for the full session. Over the last 10 years the museum has also successively started up children's culture appreciation classes and women's classes, has set up a volunteer cultural worker system, and, with the Bureau of Social Affairs, has put on "Evergreen" study camps for senior citizens.
The museum now has over 200 cultural volunteers from all strata of society, and there are even a few foreign faces among them. Volunteers start by working at the reception counter, and depending on what level they study to, can make it all the way to being museum guides. But how many people know that the museum lays on four guided tours in Chinese and English at regular times every day?
The study class with by far the best attendance is the children's "Energetic Creativity" class. This activity has now been running six years, and covers Chinese art history starting from right back in the neolithic age, using play to impart a feeling for history. With four classes of 30 children each for primary school children of various ages, this year the activity attracted over 700 applicants, and the selection had to be made by drawing lots.
If the children who have attended the classes develop a liking for history, when they go browsing in an antique shop with Mother they can spot Banpo painted pottery at a glance, and when they bring their friends to the National Palace Museum they can even act as guides.
One Academia Sinica researcher wanted to give his child a cultural education, and thought of the National Palace Museum, which he himself had not visited for a long time. "I didn't want him to grow up only knowing about video games," he laughs, "but in fact I need to brush up on things myself."
To implant culture you have to start young, and this level of interest is more than encouraging. But unfortunately at present the museum does not have enough space or personnel to be able to throw open its doors more widely to education.
Ancient paintings on CD-ROM
Apart from organizing activities, in recent years the museum has made reproductions of many art works and antiquities, to "bring them into people's lives." It has also introduced computer technology to reproduce many famous paintings digitally, and in the last two years it has started publishing electronic books on CD-ROM. Titles already released are A City of Cathay, a guide to the museum entitled Five Millennia of Chinese Art: Images of a Spiritual Journey, and Great National Treasures of China, an in-depth guide to the museum's greatest treasures.
Sung Lung-fei, head of the museum's publications division, says that a future objective is to produce a CD-ROM title to accompany each special exhibition, and for every CD-ROM to appear in seven language editions: Chinese, Japanese, English, French, Italian, German and Spanish. These electronic books feature in the special exhibition on "Publications of the National Palace Museum" now on in the Documents and Library Building. It presents an interesting contrast with the exhibition on "The Development of the Book in China," which covers the evolution from writing on stone to writing on pottery, animal bones, bamboo, wood and finally on paper. But in fact electronic publishing is just the next stage in this development.
A promising youngster
Apart from its collection of artifacts spanning many millenia, the museum's buildings and facilities are also impressive. At 70, the National Palace Museum is quite a youngster among the world's museums, but after several expansion programs over the years, its modern facilities and management are something rare even among world-class museums.
All the exhibition galleries are maintained at constant temperatures and humidities. The temperature and humidity in the storerooms is also adjusted appropriately according to the materials of the different artifacts kept there, and the museum has comprehensive fire prevention and control systems. Infra-red and microwave security sensors are in operation 24 hours a day, and card readers control the entrances and exits to the storerooms. These many conservation and security measures often arouse the admiration and even amazement of visiting directors from other museums.
The National Palace Museum is also about to introduce a high-tech "acoustic guide" for its various permanent exhibitions, in four languages: Mandarin, Taiwanese, Japanese and English. Japan's NHK broadcasting corporation is working with the museum to film HDTV videos and laser discs presenting the beauty of Chinese art and antiquities in a large-screen format in its audiovisual center.
Deeper appreciation takes more effort
The teacher points the way, but learning is up to the individual. A national museum has the responsibility to make the best use of its collections to educate the public; but if ordinary people want to enjoy the same pleasure as the emperors in their palaces and to appreciate our national treasures in depth, then they themselves must put in time and effort to understand them. "There's nothing wrong with liking the jade cabbage," says a researcher in the Department of Painting and Calligraphy; ingenious curios like the cabbage and the pork, and works like A City of Cathay and the Song dynasty Knick-Knack Peddlar and Children--which he calls "a walking department store" --have long been favorites.
A City of Cathay depicts the city of Kaifeng in Northern Song times. If we look at it closely we can see familiar scenes such as outdoor stage performances, markets and so on. Knick-Knack Peddlar and Children shows a street peddlar. The baskets hanging from his shoulder-pole are filled with an impressive array of goods--everything from teapots to everyday household utensils to children's toys-- which viewers find tremendously interesting.
Ingenious curios or paintings of scenes from real life can easily arouse people's sense of novelty. But faced with paintings, calligraphy and porcelain, bronzes and ancient jade, many frustrated visitors must share the feeling that "they all look the same!" Furthermore, the impression that "these antiques are completely divorced from modern life," also puts people off visiting the National Palace Museum.
Come prepared
The first time you see things they're unfamiliar, but come a few times and you'll naturally get into it," says Lin Po-ting, head of the museum's Department of Painting and Calligraphy.
It's the same as when Westerners look at Eastern things and people--many can't distinguish between Chinese, Japanese and Korean, for "they all look the same!" But once they've had some contact and know a little about their historical and cultural backgrounds, they can discern the differences in their clothing, speech and even their faces. These exquisite works of art into which our ancestors poured so much effort represent the elegance and talent of each passing age. Their creators were our own flesh and blood, so it should be that much easier for us to understand intuitively what they are trying to communicate, and enjoy a journey through the past.
In Lin Po-ting's view, if the public can come prepared, this will make it easier for them to step back in time. "You can't just rely on the museum to feed you information. You have to bring with you the knowledge to interpret what you see, before you can arrive at a dialog and resonance." If you have read Su Dongpo's "Ode on the Red Cliff" (about the battle of Chibi--the Red Cliff--in 208 AD), then when you come to the National Palace Museum and see The Red Cliff by the Jin painter Wu Yuanzhi, the Qing red lacquer screen carved with a scene from Su's poem, or even Su's portrait, you will understand them immediately and be delighted to feel a bond of understanding across 1000 years. Paintings of the landscape of Chibi will certainly seem different to you from other landscape paintings too.
Or again, look at the Song painting Noble Scholar Under a Willow, which depicts a man sitting stripped to the waist under a willow tree, staring lost in thought at a spoon in a bowl of wine. The Qing emperor Qianlong added a poem to the painting which asks: "What's his name? In the Tang, he was called Li, and in the Jin, Tao." If we remember "The Tale of Mr. Five Willows" by the Jin dynasty poet Tao Yuanming (c.372-427), we will know the answer to this riddle! Qianlong was referring to the poets Li Bai and Tao Yuanming, who were both accomplished drinkers.
Looking at old artifacts with today's eyes
So are the old antiquities in the National Palace Museum really "divorced from modern life"?
Professor Chiang Hsun of Tunghai University's fine art department believes that although landscape paintings are indeed beautiful, and represent scholarly ideals at their most refined, there is some distance between them and our life today in this urbanized island nation. But ordinary people's acceptance of paintings like The Night Revels of Han Xizai is very high--almost every restaurant has one.
When modern birdlovers look at Song bird-and-flower paintings, they are always bowled over by their superb realism. Birdwatching in the "Palace" is surely no less fun then seeing them from a distance in the woods.
In 1962, when national treasures from the National Palace Museum went for exhibition in the United States, one American who kept birds himself stood in front of Shrike and Bamboo by Li Anzhong of the Southern Song and stared at it with complete absorption for a full two hours. He invited Li Lin-tsan, who was escorting the exhibits, to his home, where he asked him: "Was your painting done from my bird, or was my bird done from your painting?" Not only are these old Song paintings not divorced from modern life, they can even build a bridge between Chinese and foreigners!
People who like flower-arranging pick up ideas for flowers and vases from old paintings in the National Palace Museum; jewelry designers draw inspiration from old paintings, bronzes and headgear; frustrated employees who feel put upon by their superiors read Su Dongpo's The Cold Food Observance, and feel for that literary giant's plight when, despite his talents, he was unjustly banished to Huangzhou, and had to take shelter in a tumbledown old temple. He wanted to cook some food to fill his hungry belly, but could not light a fire because it was the festival of Cold Food Observance. Disappointed lovers can look at Nymph of the Luo River by Wei Jiuding, in which we see the river spirit Fu Fei, the drowned daughter of the emperor Fu Xi, rising up over the waves "like a startled swan in flight, like a swimming dragon," while the lovestruck Cao Zhi (the poet son of the Three Kingdoms general Cao Cao) can only stand woodenly on the river bank all night, watching the object of his desire from afar. No justice for the one, no love for the other. Most of our dreams in life come to naught, but we can take consolation in the fact that it's always been that way--so why worry! Who says those old antiques in the National Palace Museum can't soothe modernday people's souls, that they are divorced from modern life?
Divorced from modern life?
But I digress. After a 7000-year journey of the spirit through the National Palace Museum, if we go up to the top-floor San Hsi Tang tearoom to rest our legs and drink a cup of tea, when we look out of the window we no longer see verdant hillsides, for our view is blocked by a 19-storey monstrosity emblazoned with the words "Luxury Condos." At this moment we ordinary inhabitants of this urban island really do have an intense desire to "be divorced from modern life"; and although our stomachs are rumbling with hunger, the thought that floats into our minds is not the mouthwatering cabbage and pork, but those scholars' landscapes with their high mountains, flowing waters and thatched cottages next to streams!
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The jade cabbage. (courtesy of the National Palace Museum)
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Shrike and Bamboo by Li Anzhong of the Song. (courtesy of the National Palace Museum)
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The museum's "Energetic Creativity" classes have been running for six years, giving children the chance to get to know the history of Chinese art through play.
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If you can't get enough of looking at the antiquities in the museum itself, why not take home an "electronic book" on CD-ROM and appreciate them at home at your leisure?
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