Huang Kuang-nan, director the Na-tional Museum of History, is acknowledged by colleagues as a genius when it comes to organizing exhibitions, as nearly every event he puts on creates a sensation. Huang himself is an accomplished inkwash painter, and he has definite ideas about what an exhibition ought to accomplish. As the holder of a degree in education, he brings an almost religious sense of mission to his task. Below he comments on recent exhibitions.
The subject of our current exhibition, Mesopotamian civilization, represents one of the greatest archeological finds of all time. It has tremendous educational value, and we've focused on that aspect. We've compiled publications for young readers, arranged for news coverage, and invited educators to tour the exhibition. We try to make sure that the media reports on us every day, so that everybody will be aware of what we've got going.
But the number of visitors is not the sole gauge of an exhibition's success. You also have to ask whether the organizers have thoroughly researched the subject, how they've laid out the venue, whether the visitors are able to see the exhibit items in a logical order, whether there are sufficient guides and explanations, etc. In other words, you want the visitors to enjoy themselves, learn things, and come away with a memorable impression of what they've seen.
Some exhibitions just naturally have a stronger general appeal than others due to the subject matter. When we exhibited items from the Orsay Museum in Paris, for example, the works by the really famous impressionists, such as Cezanne, Monet, Renoir, and Van Gogh, naturally inspired a lot of excitement. And when we showed the terracotta warriors from the tomb of the First Emperor of Qin we broke a world record for the number of visitors to a single exhibition. Of course, a big reason is that everyone in Taiwan was generally familiar with the terracotta warriors long before we ever put on the show.
A lot of people ask me how we go about selecting topics and organizing the exhibitions. In fact there is no secret to it. More than anything else, you just have to do your homework, and be very familiar with museums around the world. We hold an annual meeting to select upcoming exhibition topics, and we try to choose something that is related to our mission; we look for things that are heavy on art, history, and educational content. And of course, it has to be something of interest to a broad audience at home. It generally takes about two years of lead time to put on an exhibition. Mesopotamia is just one of a series of exhibitions that the National Museum of History is doing on the ten great civilizations of the world. Later we're going to do Mayan civilization, followed by ancient India, then Greece and Rome.
Cooperation with private companies plays a very important role in all this, by the way. Without their help, we never would have been able to carry off any of the major exhibitions we've put on. Most every exhibition that we put on is a money loser; it's astronomical what you have to pay people to borrow their artifacts, and the insurance is extremely expensive too. Private firms, and especially media organizations, care a lot about public image and contributing to society, and one good way to accomplish that is to support exhibitions.
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