Manila Ayala Museum Reopens Year-round "Cloud Tour"

The ALAYA MUSEUM, located in Makati, CBD, the capital of the Philippines, was re-commissioned after an upgrade this weekend. The museum announced that the epidemic has promoted the digitization of the museum, and the new version of the exhibition has a free online version, which can provide opportunities to learn about the history, culture and art of the Philippines for audiences who love the Philippines, 2465 and 7 days a week.

After displaying the certificate of two doses of vaccination as prescribed, a reporter from China News Agency walked into the reopened Ayala Museum on December 5. I saw a mother with her teenage son who was interested in clicking on a digital touch gallery in the hall. The gallery consists of 8 stretchable screens that bring together miniature images from precious collections and cultural and artistic books that can be zoomed in with a gentle touch and scrutinized for detail. According to reports, this is the first digital touch gallery in the Philippine Museum.

On the third floor of the museum, the first exhibition "Interweaving: Trans-Pacific, Cross-Cultural Philippines" was launched, trying to explore the positioning of the Philippines in the history of world development with art and religious collections, aiming to illustrate that from prehistory to the Spanish and American colonial Philippines periods, as the ancient trade networks of the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea spanned the Pacific Ocean and extended to Latin America, North America and Europe, Manila, as one of the Asian fulcrums of early global exchanges, played a key role in the complex and multi-directional cultural circulation. And these influences are still reflected in the material and cultural life of Asia, Europe and the Americas today.

Among the exhibits are the 1939 Filipino painter Fernando Amosolo's first prize oil painting "Lunchtime", which won the first prize at the World Exposition, and the picture of several indigenous women taking a lunch break in a tropical idyllic countryside, showing the world the idyllic life of the Philippines; There are also paintings of colonists gathering elegantly in a tropical villa. Exquisite Catholic Mass supplies, hand-painted maps from the Age of Discovery, beautiful Handmade Filipino pearls, gold ornamental medallions, and models of Chinese Ming-style official ships brought by Zheng He from the West also appear in the exhibition.

On the second floor of the museum, the "Philippine Historical Miniature Sculpture Experience Exhibition", which has been the symbol of the museum since 1974, has been preserved. In the 60 elaborate exhibition windows, the miniature sculpture realistically restores the architecture, characters, costumes, technologies and scenes in the famous historical events in the Philippines, so that the audience has the feeling of "being present when historical events happen". These include classic historical scenes such as the early trade between Chinese merchants and Filipino islanders, and the participation of Chinese in Manila in the construction of the Spanish Royal City.

The Ayala Museum is a very famous private museum in the Philippines, designed by the late artists Fernando Zobel de Ayala y Montojo in the 1950s, completed in 1967 and managed by Ayala Foundation Limited. Because its collection is mainly derived from the gifts and trusteeship of some well-known families in the Philippines, it has a relatively high reputation in the Philippine museum industry.

Curator Elizabeth Maris M. L. Gustillo (Ma. Elizabeth "Mariles" L. Gustilo wrote in a letter to the audience: "In June 2019, when it was decided to close the museum for a year-long renovation, we had a grand plan. But, like the rest of the world that has been forced by the pandemic, our best plans seem to be at risk.

Our engineering team overcame the challenge of frequent shutdowns caused by the lockdown and completed the renovation of the museum site with quality. At the height of the pandemic, our staff at the Ayala Museum and the Philippine Heritage Library used their imagination and creativity while working from home, enabling us to present audiences with a digital museum unprecedented in the Philippines. "It's not a temporary strategy, it's that the Ayala Museum is catching up with the times," she said.

According to the librarian JOY, the upgraded Ayala Museum, designed according to the annual reception of 1.5 million visitors, will also hold modern art exhibitions, as well as a series of cultural and exhibition activities in addition to regular exhibitions. Among them, cultural relics exchange activities with China are also in the museum's plan.