In a rare venture abroad, Taipei’s National Palace Museum (NPM, 國立故宮博物院) is exhibiting 120 of its grandest masterpieces at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum from yesterday to May 13.
“It is a very great event in the history of our house,” museum director Wilfried Seipel said. “It is the culmination of our work to intensify contacts with Asia.”
His Taiwanese counterpart, NPM director Lin Mun-lee (林曼麗), said the exhibition was part of an exchange of high cultures in East and West. “The hard work of the past four years in organizing this exhibition paid off,” she added.
PHOTO: CNA
Despite all assurances by organizers to leave political aspects aside and focus on the priceless cultural heritage, the exhibition could not escape political realities.
Taiwan is hesitant to let the irreplaceable artworks, moved to Taiwan in 1948 and 1949 by Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), out of sight fearing confiscation attempts by China.
Japan, where Chinese art is generally held in high esteem, tried in vain for many years to persuade Taiwan to show some of its objects there, but was refused because of lack of legal guarantees.
Austria, like Germany, the US and France — the only other venues of exhibitions — gave the legal guarantees required for such an exhibition, Seipel stressed.
Yet the exhibition did not fail to create some diplomatic hiccups. In an attempt to unruffle feathers, Seipel stressed that the exhibition did not show Taiwan’s national culture, but Chinese history and asked for understanding on the part of Chinese authorities.
“It would be too strong to speak of intervention ... but there were issues that we were able to solve,” Seipel said.
The exhibition itself is confined to two rooms in the sprawling Vienna museum and may be too small to satisfy Chinese art enthusiasts, but the exceptional quality and wide scope of the exhibited objects gives a good introduction to the NPM’s collection of 650,000 pieces.
More than half of the objects in the exhibition have never been viewed outside Taiwan before. The exhibition shows several different aspects of Chinese culture — focusing on painting and calligraphy as well as jades, curator Renate Noda said.
Ceramics and bronzes are taking a back seat in the exhibition that has fewer, yet stunning, works of art.
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