Viewing the exhibition, a connection between the known and the unknown

The museum is approaching our vision. In recent years, the museum has "walked off the altar" and shown its kind and plain side in a variety of ways, and the public no longer regards visiting the museum as a kind of learning and burden, and has some "elegant entertainment" fun. Favorable policies have also provided a boost to the democratization of museums, and the variety of museums has become increasingly diverse: history, archaeology, art, nature, technology, and many surprisingly niche areas. With the profound heritage of Chinese culture, the door of any niche field is opened, and it is also a vast world of thousands of years. People's vision of history and the future has also been opened.

The museum opens its doors, lowers its posture, and no longer "refuses people thousands of miles away", which in turn has certain requirements for visitors. Unfortunately, when the threshold for viewing the exhibition has been reduced to the minimum, many audiences who lack interest in the exhibition and have no knowledge reserves have poured into the museum. There are those who cool off the heat, those who are noisy and noisy, and those who take pictures for shows. Of course, choosing to use precious leisure time to enter the museum instead of other so-called Internet celebrity places, there are still some cultural pursuits, but if this pursuit is not done, it is often easy to go in the opposite direction and waste the hearty cultural feast provided by the museum.

What should the museum's exhibitions look like? This can be said to be a matter of benevolence and wisdom. It is undeniable that it depends on the national education system to include history education, and most of our basic understanding of history comes from the history textbooks of the student era. Compared with the grand history revealed in textbooks, the lack of historical knowledge at the microscopic and artifact levels can be compensated by the exhibition of the museum, and it is not an exaggeration to say that the museum is a supplement and extension of subject education, and even a lifelong historical and cultural classroom.

So before we choose to walk into a museum, we have to do some preparatory work. One is to prepare the visitors: what are the features and highlights of this museum? What are the permanent and temporary exhibitions? What are the most characteristic exhibits? How to reasonably arrange the tour route and time? In fact, most of these work can be done through the Internet, at present, the major museums have built their own portals or self-media platforms, and often paying attention to some cultural and large numbers can also bring a lot of convenience to your visit. In fact, museum exhibitions often have some rules to follow. For example, a provincial and municipal museum will basically have a general history exhibition introducing the history and culture of the province and the city, and the museum will comb through the local history in accordance with the chronological order from the Paleolithic era to the Ming and Qing dynasties with excavated cultural relics, graphic exhibition boards, scene restoration, etc. This is the most efficient and comprehensive way to read and familiarize with the local history and culture, especially for visitors who come to the city for the first time and are extremely unfamiliar with the place, such a general history exhibition can give you a comprehensive and systematic understanding of the area, at least establish a framework: which dynasties it was the capital of, what role it played as a regional hub, which historical celebrities were born, what historical events have occurred... And then your trip to the city is to fill in the "meat" within this framework, and you will suddenly have a sense of ease.

For museums in permanent cities, it is recommended to pay more attention to the temporary exhibitions of the museum, especially those in municipalities, provincial capitals, and regional center cities. Because in recent years, inter-museum exchanges between museums have become more and more frequent, and the collection of Hall A flows to Hall B by way of borrowing, and Hall C has planned to collect cultural relics from multiple museums such as A and B to match a special exhibition with a theme. The exhibits flowed, and the museum's exhibition was constantly renovated, not just "one brush" and "two brushes" can be exhausted. Not to mention that every year, new archaeological results are constantly being made public everywhere, and the museum's exhibits are constantly enriched and improved. In Beijing, for example, the National Museum replaces the temporary exhibitions in the form of a marquee all year round, almost every three months, and all the temporary exhibition halls have been renewed. The Palace Museum due to the use of ancient buildings to build exhibition halls, exhibition space is far from meeting the display needs of massive collections of cultural relics, so it can only be arranged in the form of alternating exhibitions, especially those precious paper calligraphy and paintings, each exhibition will have to rest for several years, the opportunity for exhibition is extremely precious, which makes many special exhibitions fleeting, can not be sought, but also the fun and charm of watching the exhibition.

There is also the preparation of self-knowledge. Every exhibition should not go home empty-handed, but many people are always "confused" in the face of museum exhibitions, especially those who are more unfamiliar with historical and archaeological knowledge. In the final analysis, it is actually within the intellectual context constructed by the museum, and the connection between the known and the unknown is not made. Perhaps, there is a fragment of historical knowledge in the minds of the exhibitors, but because it does not match the correct position, it lacks a knowledge system, just like pearls that are not connected with threads, and cannot exist as jewelry. The correct way should be to use these scattered "knowns" to consciously look for the "unknown" that matches it in the museum, expand the boundaries of their own cognition through the transfer of knowledge, and correct and supplement the defects of their own knowledge. For example, before I went to Luoyang to visit, I knew that Luoyang was the ancient capital of the Thirteen Dynasties, but because of the lack of microscopic understanding of the geography of Luoyang, I always thought that the thirteen dynasties were stacked in one place, at least not too far apart. When visiting the Luoyang Museum, a map relief in front of me solved my problem, it turned out that in the Iloilo Basin where Luoyang is located, from west to east, there are five capital city ruins of the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, the Sui and Tang Luoyang City, the Han Wei Luoyang City, the Erlitou Ruins and the Yanshi Shangcheng, which exist in different time and space, and have their own characteristics in the scale and structure of the city, but the same is bred under the nourishment of Yishui and Luoshui, and its culture has a distinct inheritance relationship. With this geographical pattern of "Five Capitals Huiluo" to browse the exhibits in the collection, the logical clues in the mind are clearer, and even strange cultural relics can be placed under the pattern of the capital city to understand its connotation.

The visit to the museum can often not stop in the exhibition hall, but also extend to the outside of the exhibition hall, paying attention to the cultural relics behind the cultural relics. The museum is a place where cultural relics are condensed, and it will show the historical and cultural characteristics of a certain area as comprehensively as possible, but it cannot replace the shock of your personal footing in the historical site. Each artifact in the collection will be marked with its place of origin, and those places are either ancient tombs, or ancient city sites, or ancient buildings, which are actually cultural relics in a broad sense. In the field of cultural expertise, they are called "immovable cultural relics" to distinguish them from "movable cultural relics" such as bronzes, pottery, porcelain, calligraphy and paintings seen in museums. "Immovable cultural relics" are not available because of their "immovable" characteristics. Among them, the most precious is the "National Key Cultural Relics Protection Unit" announced by the State Council, which currently has 5058 units. They are distributed outside the museum, scattered in the north and south of the motherland, inside and outside the Great Wall, they are a concentrated display of the essence of Chinese history and culture, except for a few developed as tourist attractions, the vast majority of people are rare and unknown.

I am accustomed to calling each trip to ancient times a "museum protection tour", that is, in the route planning, the museum and the "national key cultural relics protection unit" are the main objects of visit, taking into account the visit of "movable" and "immovable" cultural relics. The national treasures in the museum make people know the subtlety, appreciate the richness of culture and the subtlety of art, and visit ancient sites, tombs, and ancient buildings on the ground, let people be in the historical situation, use imagination to build your own historical space, and get more wisdom and enlightenment for the current life from the culture. I think this kind of "museum protection trip" is the "pipe fullness" on the spiritual level.

Published in the 7th edition of The Literary and Art Daily on April 22, 2022

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He graduated from the Communication University of China and is now a member of the Beijing Writers Association, the Beijing Cultural Relics Protection Association, the Beijing Film and Television Arts Society, and the partner of Zhen Cheng and the Bookstore of the City.

His published works include "The Troubled World: The Past of the Three Kingdoms in the Letters", "The Dispute of the Nations: The Political Game of the Rich Families of the Three Kingdoms", "Such a Good History: The Struggle for Hegemony in the Three Kingdoms", "The Battle of the Heroes: The Romance of the Three Kingdoms", and the production of the audio course "History of Young China".

Soon to be published "Return to the Three Kingdoms Scene" and "Three Kingdoms on the Map".