The National Palace Museum (NPM) should fully disclose investigation reports and security videos regarding damage to three artifacts dating to the Ming and Qing dynasties, the New Power Party (NPP) caucus said yesterday.
It should also improve the procedures on how historic artifacts are managed and preserved, the party said.
Museum staff cleaning a storeroom on Feb. 3 last year discovered that a Ming Dynasty-era stem bowl with incised decorations of two dragons had been damaged, NPP Chairwoman Chen Jiau-hua (陳椒華) said, citing a report the museum submitted to the legislature on Monday.
Photo: Tu Chien-jung, Taipei Times
The bowl was damaged some time between a major inventory check on March 2, 2012, and Feb. 3 last year, she said, citing the report.
“However, we received a tip that the stem bowl was broken because of an error by museum staff,” Chen said.
“Museum Director Wu Mi-cha (吳密察) imposed a gag order on this matter and ordered that all relevant documents be handled as confidential information,” Chen added.
“Footage recorded by the museum’s security cameras is not sufficient to ascertain whether the damage was due to human error,” she added.
“Therefore, the museum should turn over all of the footage on the surveillance system to lawmakers so that we can know the truth, provided that it is done in ways that does not invade the privacy of museum staff and compromise the security of the storeroom,” Chen said.
Wu on Friday said the museum has completed its investigations into the damage to the stem bowl as well as a yellow porcelain bowl made during the Kangsi era of the Qing Dynasty, which were found to have been broken when museum staff opened their boxes.
It has yet to complete an investigation into a porcelain dish from the Qianlong era of the Qing Dynasty, which he said was broken by museum staff.
Although Wu denied the museum deliberately concealed the incidents from the public, Chen said the museum released two of the investigation reports only due to public pressure.
The museum should release the investigation into the third damaged artifact as soon as possible and inform the public the criteria it used to list certain information as “classified,” Chen said.
“It should not give the public the impression that it listed certain materials as classified because it wanted to hide them from the public, and only declassified them when it could no longer withstand public pressure,” she added.
The incidents also exposed shortcomings in the procedures that the museum uses to report and handle damaged artifacts, Chen said.
“The museum is only required to notify the Ministry of Culture if damaged artifacts are classified as national treasures or important cultural artifacts,” she said.
“However, many of the 700,000 artifacts owned by the museum are neither classified as national treasures nor important cultural artifacts. Should there not be a mechanism to report damage to other artifacts as well?” she said.
The museum’s operational guidelines only stipulate how artifacts should be managed and preserved, and lack a mechanism to report, verify and investigate when an artifact is damaged, destroyed or lost, and explain the incident to the public, she said.
NPP Legislator Claire Wang (王婉諭), who serves on the legislature’s Education and Culture Committee, visited the museum on Monday and requested access to the investigation reports.
“Footage recorded by the surveillance system shows a chaotic work area, with researchers, employees and mechanics all gathered at the same spot,” Wang said.
“They were responsible for different tasks, but you could not tell who was in charge of what simply by looking at the video. This is probably why human errors occurred,” Wang said.
The museum should stipulate standard operating procedures for museum staff working in storerooms, which could reduce the chances of them damaging artifacts, she said.
An online system should be created to allow museum staff to report artifacts that need to be repaired or restored, she added.
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