Chinese art world's rarest works go on display
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calligraphy. (Chao-Yang Chan for The New York Times )
Chinese art world's rarest works go on display
By Keith Bradsher Published: December 28, 2006
TAIPEI: After four years of renovations that closed two-thirds of the building,
the museum housing the world's most famous collection of Chinese art is
reopening this winter and holding a three-month exhibition of its rarest works.
The National Palace Museum, home to the best of the 1,000-year-old art
collection of China's emperors, is often compared to leading Western
institutions like the Louvre in Paris, the Prado in Madrid and the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York. But while this museum's holdings are magnificent, the
institution has been known for being a highly politicized place where priceless
porcelain sat in poorly lit display cases and where invaluable paintings were
kept in a damp artificial cave, for fear of Communist attack from mainland
China.
That has now changed. Heroic statues of Chiang Kai-shek, Taiwan's former leader,
and of Sun Yat-sen, the founder of modern China, have been banished. New
lighting, air-conditioning, climate-controlled storage vaults and other features
rival the newest museums in the West. Even the wall labels attached to the
artwork are now written in clear and specific Chinese, English and Japanese.
And after many years of hiding its most valuable and most fragile artworks —
those from the northern and southern Sung dynasties that ruled China from 960 to
1279 — the museum has brought them out for a "Grand View" exhibition that opened
on Christmas day. Four of the best- known paintings from the Northern Sung
dynasty — one of them on loan from the Metropolitan in New York — are being
shown together for the first time, along with other rare paintings, scrolls and
some of the earliest printed books.
The four paintings are magnificent landscapes that tower over visitors yet still
have the exquisite detail of miniatures. The Chinese characters of the name of
one artist are so subtly hidden in the trees of one painting that they went
unnoticed until this century.
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The National Palace Museum in Taipei reopens.
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the first to find them, said Ho Chuan-hsing, a specialist in early paintings and
calligraphy at the museum.
Many of the pieces are so fragile that they are never lent to museums elsewhere.
Some will only be on display here for half the exhibition: either from Dec. 25
to Feb. 7 or from Feb. 8 to March 25. Museum policy allows these works to be
shown only for 40 days, after which they are loosely rolled and placed in a
vault to rest for at least three years; the exhibition here will not go on tour.
Art scholars describe the "Grand View" as unique.
"To see all of these paintings come out at one time again is just not going to
happen," said Marc Wilson, a Chinese- art specialist who is the director and
chief executive of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri,
which lent two rare scrolls to the exhibition here. "These are the foundations
of modern Chinese pictorial sensibility."
Also on temporary display this winter in a single case are 50 of the 70 known
examples of Ju ware, one of the world's rarest and most valuable kinds of
porcelain. Manufactured for imperial use at a single kiln in central China for
just two decades at the end of the 11th century, Ju (pronounced rue) ware is
glazed with a lustrous, green-tinged shade of blue that has a faint, rose
sparkle.
Craftsmen ground up agate, a semiprecious quartz, to make the glaze, using a
technique that was soon lost and has never been rediscovered. The 50 pieces on
exhibit here include the museum's own 21 examples and 29 borrowed from other
collections around the world.
The presentation of the Ju ware is raising eyebrows at a museum so conservative
that many of the curators wore the traditional blue silk robes of Chinese
scholars into the 1970s. The vases and dishes sit on a waist-high white surface,
about 30 meters, or 100 feet, in length, that is an imitation of the runways on
which models promenade at fashion shows.
The exhibition was arranged by Jimmy Yang, a 33-year-old Taiwan- born,
Australian-educated architect and designer who showed up at the Chirstmas Day
opening in a black T- shirt and bluejeans.
"We wanted it to be a little more up- to-date, a little humorous even," he said
as visitors began ogling the spotlighted vases.
Chi Jo-hsin, the chief curator of the museum's antiquities department,
acknowledged that the presentation had been controversial within the museum's
staff. "Some think it is good, and some think it should be different," she said.
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The Imperial Palace in Beijing, better known as the Forbidden City, became a
museum in 1925 as part of a republican bid to prevent the restoration of the
last emperor, Pu Yi. When Chiang Kai- shek's Nationalists became worried in 1933
about a possible Japanese attack, they secretly sent the collection in
wheelbarrows to the Beijing train station, to be transported south, in what was
the start of the collection's 16-year odyssey during the war with Japan and
China's civil war.
The Nationalists ended up shipping the most valuable art to Taiwan, where it has
remained ever since. A large number of the works that were left behind have been
gathered at museums in Beijing and Shanghai, augmented by the fruits of more
recent archaeological excavations, the purchase or confiscation of private
collections and gifts from tycoons in Hong Kong and elsewhere.
The exhibition here is taking place in rooms that have been heavily renovated as
part of an extensive museum overhaul. Tu Cheng-sheng, who started the renovation
as the museum's director in 2002, said then that it would be too controversial
to remove the memorial hall dedicated to Sun Yat-sen, a symbol of Taiwan's ties
to the mainland. But the hall and its giant bronze statue are gone now, a
disappearance that Lin and Tu, now the Taiwanese education minister, declined in
separate interviews to discuss.
The building's exterior still has jade- green tile roofs and yellow walls
designed to evoke the Forbidden City. But the museum's celebrated tearoom has
been transformed as part of an effort by Lin, the director, to address a problem
facing art museum directors all over the world: how to draw the young and
trendy.
The tearoom used to be a reproduction of the Three Treasures room at the
Forbidden City, complete with an elaborately carved and flamboyantly painted
ceiling. That ceiling has now been covered with gray-brown paint and the room
turned into a very contemporary Taiwanese tearoom, with furniture made of oak,
not the traditional sandalwood.
The "Grand View" this winter may also represent the last chance for visitors
from the United States and elsewhere to see the best of China's art without
having to push through throngs of mainland Chinese tourists.
Taiwan is negotiating with Beijing officials to allow mainland tourists to start
visiting the National Palace Museum this spring. While the number of tourists is
supposed to be limited to 1,000 a day at first, the tourism industry is expected
to press for quick increases in that cap.
Jason Kuo, a Taiwan-born professor of Chinese art history at the University of
Maryland who studied at the Taipei museum from 1971 to 1973, said that the
museum faced a difficult balance as it prepares to handle more visitors, appeal
to young Taiwanese and protect the art collection.
"They want to be open to the West," he said, "but they want to maintain their
heritage."
IHTCOM