The exhibition "Mingxin Miaoxiang: Special Exhibition of Art Dialogue in Longmen Grottoes" at Shanghai University Museum realizes the dialogue between ancient and modern times
The curatorial approach of "Ancient and Modern Glory" is becoming a new fashion of exhibition. In the "Mingxin Miaoxiang: Longmen Grottoes Art Dialogue Special Exhibition", which just ended at the Shanghai University Museum, in addition to displaying 27 fine cultural relics from the Luoyang Longmen Grottoes Research Institute, a number of contemporary creations with the theme of Longmen or inspired by Zen culture were also selected, and they were gathered together and looked at each other in pairs. At about the same time, the "Shangluo" special exhibition, which was cooperated by a number of Shanghai scholars and artists with the Luoyang Museum, also adopted the form of ancient and modern dialogue, and integrated the creation of contemporary artists with luoyang as the theme. In the art museum focusing on modern and contemporary art, some of the exhibitions that have caused a boom in Shanghai in the past year or two, such as "Pioneers of Abstract Art: Kandinsky" at the West Bund Art Museum, and "Imaginary Encounters: The Divine Comedy" Dialogue "The Classic of Mountains and Seas" of the Pearl Art Museum, have also used the idea of juxtaposing the works of modern and contemporary artists with ancient cultural relics.
Some people compare museums to "urban lungs", arguing that cities not only need park space to provide material oxygen, but also need to be spiritually new, and museums are shouldering such a mission. The curatorial approach of ancient and modern coexistence has formed a dialogue space beyond time in the exhibition hall, and can also allow the audience to form more inspiration for interpreting cultural relics from ancient cultural relics, and then migrate this inspiration into their own lives, which is actually realizing the value of the museum as the "lung of the city".
The "Shangluo" special exhibition, which is cooperated by a number of Shanghai scholars and artists with the Luoyang Museum, also adopts the form of ancient and modern dialogue (Photo: Liu Li)
Turn the pavilion into a space that embodies the past, present and future, allowing the museum to extend in the dimension of time
The opening of the museum is the first step in making the museum the "lung of the city". Today, many museums have cancelled tickets, and museums have taken the initiative to provide lectures and other services for the audience, but to create a new golden age of museums, it is necessary to achieve openness in the sense of knowledge production, so that museums can become a space where audiences are willing to participate.
In order for the audience to truly participate in the museum's exhibitions, it is necessary to establish an opportunity for the audience to interact with the ancient culture. Ma Lin, curator of the "Dragon Gate" exhibition at Shanghai University and deputy director of the Shanghai University Museum, noticed a difference: museum visitors like to ask "Is this really true" and "This thing is expensive", while visitors to the art museum like to ask "can you explain the meaning of this work". This seems to show that after many visitors enter the museum, there is a mindset of using the value of money as a yardstick to understand cultural relics, and there is some neglect of the side of cultural relics as ancient art. In the initial part of the exhibition, Henan artist Yin Chaoyang's "Longmen Meteorology" and "Yi Que" are presented, which makes visitors think about the scenery on both sides of the Yi River in Luoyang; opposite the screw bun of the head of Guanyin, a cultural relic returned from overseas, hangs a heavy and fine circle composed of needles by He Chengyao, forming a dialogue. The encounter between ancient art and contemporary art in the exhibition space has inspired many visitors to pay attention to the continuity of Chinese culture and Chinese aesthetics from ancient to modern times.
On the big "Dragon Gate" exhibition
The "Shangluo" exhibition of Luoyang Museum, which echoes the "Dragon Gate" exhibition of Shanghai University, pays more attention to the participatory interaction of visitors and evokes the local memories of visitors. The exhibition not only presents ancient cultural relics such as pottery figurines and scriptures unearthed in Luoyang, but also boldly moves the local famous objects of Luoyang that visitors are familiar with into the museum. The tractors produced by the Luoyang First Tractor Factory once played a crucial role in the construction history of New China, and the models of tractors, like other ancient cultural relics, are displayed in display cases, evoking memories of the past. Luoyang is one of the largest producers of loudspeakers in China, where loudspeakers are even sold by weight, so in the exhibition hall, Luoyang-produced copper loudspeakers are hung under the "three thousand" wooden installations that imitate the structure of ancient stools, which are not only used for playing, but also for interaction. The calligrapher Lu Dadong's double-hooked "AnleWo" three characters are taken from Sima Guang's naming of Shao Yong's apartment in Luoyang, representing the ancients' beautiful expectations for living in Luoyang. Visitors can take home low paper printed with the double hook "comfort nest" and fill the space left by the double hook in their own way, creating their dream home – which becomes a bridge between the audience and the museum.
Loboc "Shangluo" exhibition (Photo: Liu Li)
The "Dragon Gate" exhibition of Shanghai University and the "Shangluo" exhibition of Lobeau seem to indicate that in order to achieve the further opening of the museum, the curators have invariably chosen the same way: to turn the exhibition hall into a space that condenses the past, present and future, a space where ancient and modern shine together, and let the museum extend in the time dimension.
For a long time, the scope of the museum's "business" has been limited to showing people's "yesterday". The task of presenting "Today" seems to belong to the Museum of Contemporary Art, while "Tomorrow" belongs to the Urban Planning Museum. However, using ingenious curatorial methods, the museum can become a bridge connecting the past, the present and the future, and realize the extension of the time dimension of the museum's "business" scope.
Many museums have begun to try to extend the temporal dimension of the exhibition, extending the scope of the collection from the past to the present. For example, since 2020, many museums have begun to collect souvenirs from the fight against the COVID-19 epidemic. In the exhibitions that present the theme of scholars' research, cultural relics will be more boldly displayed in a way that shines with ancient and modern, such as Professor Wu Hong's curated exhibition "Painting Screen: Tradition and Future" (Suzhou Museum) and "Painting Screen: Exhibition on Exhibition" (Beijing Center, University of Chicago), which make the ancient screen and the screen designed by contemporary artists present in the same space, transcending the difference between ancient and modern, and thoroughly presenting the highly characteristic artistic characteristics of the screen.
And in the Humboldt Forum, Europe's most talked-about museum project in recent years, which opened in 2020, the separation between ancient and modern art was completely broken, merging into a reborn 18th-century palace. Two artifacts from cameroon's past are displayed alongside contemporary artworks: the former, the throne given to the German Emperor by the Kingdom of Cameroon's Barmon under colonial conditions, and the latter, Cameroon's contemporary women artist's installation Of Rage. Reminding the audience of the source of cultural relics, allowing visitors to understand the past and present of these cultures in this exhibition space, reflecting on colonialism and reflecting on history, has become one of the missions that the Humboldt Forum is trying to achieve.
"Ancient and modern brilliance" is not a museum's art gallery, but a creative attempt to breathe together in ancient and modern times
Although in the museum's exhibitions, "ancient and modern" is still regarded as a pioneering expression, in the past one or two years in Shanghai, the "neighbor" of the museum, the art museum, "ancient and modern xianghui" has been presented several times.
In the last exhibition hall of the West Bund Art Museum's "Pioneers of Abstract Art: Kandinsky", Kandinsky's late works are displayed together with bronzes borrowed from the Shanghai Museum. The birth of the two works of art was separated by thousands of years, and such an exhibition aroused the curiosity of many visitors. But if one looks closely at the patterns on the bronzes, visitors can see that Kandinsky seems to have drawn inspiration from the ancient Chinese bronze patterns. In the display cabinet on one side, the French art journals of the time are displayed, from which it can be seen that at the same time that Kandinsky exhibited his series of works, the Chinese bronze exhibition was sweeping France and attracted the attention of the art world, which proves that Kandinsky took some inspiration from ancient art such as Chinese bronzes when he created these late works. This kind of international "ancient and modern brilliance" exhibition allows visitors to personally experience the interpretation process of abstract art, not only closer to Kandinsky's later years, but also to feel the connection between abstract art and ancient art, and the connection between East and West.
Pearl Art Museum "Imaginary Encounter: Divine Comedy" Dialogue "Classic of Mountains and Seas""
The exhibition "Imaginary Encounters: The Divine Comedy" dialogue "The Classic of Mountains and Seas" at the Pearl Museum constitutes a dialogue between ancient and modern times, a dialogue between Eastern and Western civilizations. In 2020, the exhibition "Landscape and Books" held by the museum is already a practice of ancient and modern, using the works of contemporary artists, ancient paintings and calligraphy, and ancient books to present the inspiration of books on art. With the theme of the two ancient books of the Divine Comedy and the Classic of Mountains and Seas, the ongoing "Imaginary Encounter" showed the audience in Shanghai the restoration of four precious manuscripts of the Divine Comedy from the Encyclopedic Academy of Tregani in Italy, and introduced the techniques of book restoration with a short film, and exhibited two rare engravings of the Ming Dynasty "Classic of Mountains and Seas" in the Shanghai Library, allowing the audience to get a glimpse of the original appearance of the rare books. The highlight of the exhibition is a number of contemporary art works based on two important classics, the Divine Comedy and the Classic of Mountains and Seas. A series of bizarre works by contemporary artists such as Sylvia Campolesi, Lyon Condini, Valentina Furian, Marta Roberti, Marinella Senatore, Chai Yiming, Peng Wei, Qiu Anxiong, Shao Yinong, Sun Xun, Wu Jian'an, Wu Junyong and other contemporary artists, surround these two precious classics in the exhibition hall of the Pearl Art Museum.
In the past, there has always been a clear distinction between the current museums and art galleries in their respective jurisdictions. Some museum exhibitions that boldly introduce innovations in today's artistic expression often bring criticism of "the articularization of museums". However, as Xu Xiaoxiao, deputy director of the Hangzhou Museum, who hosted the exhibition "How Far Is Forever" and "No. 18 Grain Road Mountain", said, "The museum itself is not the goal, nor is the art museum, it is a way."
So, what does the museum approach look like? Hu Shi, deputy dean of the Institute of Heritage Conservation of Southeast University, said: "From the history of modern museums, the establishment of museums is a correction to the present and the future. "During the French Revolution, many ancient buildings were destroyed tragically, so people of insight set up cultural relics preservation institutions to preserve the fragments left in the ruins of ancient buildings to oppose these acts of wanton destruction of cultural heritage and open them to the public, which became one of the origins of modern museums and museology. Although the modern museum collects antiquities, from the time of its birth, it is pointed to the audience and to the future. In this regard, there is no essential difference between a museum and an art gallery. Contemporary art and ancient art are a creative way of telling. With the help of the dialogue between contemporary artists and cultural relics, it opens up art galleries and museums, and also inspires visitors to form an understanding of cultural relics, opens up exhibits and visitors, and makes visitors feel that today's people and ancients are always breathing together.
Author: Wu Xinyi (Ph.D. in Literature, Fudan University, Postdoctoral Fellow, Fudan Institute of Development)
Editor: Fan Xin
Planner: Fan Xin
Editor-in-Charge: Xiaofang Xing
*Wenhui exclusive manuscript, please indicate the source when reprinting.