Chapter 2. Literature Review
2.3 Museums and International Traveling Exhibitions
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Image 1 Wu's NeZha participating in a traditional dance in Romania
The hybridity of the Techno Nezha represents the merging of the old and the new and helps explain why this deity is “best able to represent Taiwanese identity” more than other deities or folk symbols. (Sheng, p. 407) By using its culture as a tool of soft power, Taiwan can broadcast its beliefs and ideals to audiences. The god Nezha has been transformed into a “new symbol of Taiwanese culture.” (Sheng, p. 407) His iconic appearance is memorable and helps shine a spotlight on Taiwan’s culture. Nezha statues still guard Taiwanese temples but the god’s role has expanded tremendously. He has achieved fame and headlines, bringing joy with his
performances and much needed attention to his country.
2.3 Museums and International Traveling Exhibitions
As discussed there are many paths that cultural diplomacy can take. One significant route is traveling via the global network of museums, places where “different cultural visions and community interests are negotiated.” (Clifford, p. 8) Communicating one’s cultural visions and interests to other states is an integral part of cultural diplomacy. Museums offer an opportunity for countries to have communication and representation outside their borders. Clifford cautions that theses institutions are not a final destination for culture. Rather, museums acts as contact zones for culture. These zones are a form of “contact approaches” involving systems “entering new relations through historical processes of displacement.” (Clifford, p. 7) In a museum different cultures coexist and their power dynamics can be negotiated by curators and
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conservators. These spaces perform as contact zones by creating opportunities where
“geographically and historically separated groups establish ongoing relations.” (Clifford, p. 195)
One specific way that museums engage in cultural diplomacy is by participating in cross-cultural collaborations. This can take the form of international traveling exhibitions (ITEs) which are
“exhibits temporarily loaned from museums and galleries in a number of countries.” (Lai, p. 90) ITEs typically are organized by museum curators from a minimum of two countries, though multiple countries can participate in individual ITEs. Such a “cross-national exhibition” may be temporary but it has the ability to attract a high number of visitors to the hosting museum. (Lai, p.
90) The impermanence of the event may prompt an increase of visitors to the hosting museum and heightened media coverage. ITEs are symbolic of a deepened era of global connection; they can also signify a “new relationship with society.” (Lai, p. 90)
Museum collections are more than mere objects for public display. They embody history from specific times and locations that may be linked with “pointed meanings in current political struggles.” (Clifford, p. 190) Over time the meanings associated with these objects can change.
Tracing the changes of these objects is akin to tracing a life journey. Appadurai asserts that objects and commodities, “like persons, have social lives.” (Appadurai, p. 3) The value a particular object is given is established by “human transactions, attributions, and motivations”
placed upon them. (Appadurai, p. 5) These attributes can deepen over time but also adapt to changing circumstances. Relationships can develop around said objects, such as the religious connection between Taiwan temple culture and Budaixi performances in Taiwan. Museums may be the final resting place for an object but it is important to note the relationship it has to its culture and country of origin. ITEs have an opportunity to revive these connections and to develop new relationships with peoples of differing cultures. These relationships, or “cultural flows” can be tracked across various scapes such as “ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes.” (Clifford, p. 7) The flow of culture through museums and ITEs can be described as a museumscape.
By embracing “reciprocal communication,” museums have an opportunity to “decenter the physical objects in favor of narrative, history, and politics.” (Clifford, p. 191) Including these
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aspects can foster cultural diplomacy. In the case of Taiwan, its narrative of colonial history, transition from colony to democracy and ongoing struggle for sovereignty can be included in exhibitions. As contact zones, museums explore their relationships to each other and to the larger community. This relationship is embodied in the international traveling exhibition. ITEs have connected museums from different regions in the world, “powerfully manifesting the global mobility of museums and heritages, and the mobilities of people and of the objects they
instigate.” (Lai, p. 95) By creating space for interaction between cultures, mutual understanding can blossom. This is an important aspect of cultural diplomacy. Contact zones emphasize
“copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices.” (Clifford, p. 192) By creating space for such understandings, museums can enable the two core functions of cultural diplomacy-representation and communication.
They also create space for the performance of culture. This can be an opportunity to educate and display a culture that may be largely unknown or misunderstood. However, there is a political aspect to such an opportunity. Is important to recognize who politically “deploys nationality or transnationality, authenticity or hybridity, against whom, with what relative power and ability to sustain a hegemony.” (Clifford, p. 10) Within contact zones, it is important to note the effect of power inherent in the relationship. In many museums, the history of colonialism in the creation of the museum’s collection involved “conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict.” (Clifford, p. 192) This past history can contribute to an asymmetrical power
relationship when two museums choose to work together. “While reciprocity is a crucial stake, it will not be understood in the same way by people from different cultures in asymmetrical power relationships.” (Clifford, p. 194) Examination of hierarchical relationships is vital to making cooperation between museums as egalitarian as possible.
International traveling exhibitions hold particular significance for Taiwan. With the loss of its United Nations seat in 1971, Taiwan became not only disconnected politically but also culturally, such as within the museumscape. As Taiwan's economy underwent a resurgence in the 1980s and the country because one of the four tigers of economic rise in Asia, Taiwan reconnected with the world. This included reconnecting culturally and Taiwanese museums, both traditional and contemporary, began participating in ITEs. The more traditional museums were institutions
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conserving traditional Chinese culture. Taiwan’s National Palace Museum is one such institution and is the “finest representative, dominating the field in presenting work to foreigners and educating citizens.” (Lai, p. 95) Contemporary Taiwanese museums, such as Taipei's Fine Art Museum, may have a more limited collection but they too focus on education and presentation.
Both inbound and outbound ITEs have assisted Taiwan’s connection to the larger global museumscape which have “enabled the construction of bridges not only to Europe and the United States, but also to China and other parts of the world.” (Lai, p. 96)
Countries can also strategize to host or participate in Mega-Events as a form of soft power.
Mega-Events are large scale social events that receive ample amount of media coverage. Events on this scale “represent a visible and ostensibly collectively-owned platform that can be used to help achieve a series of political, economic, social and cultural objectives for their promoters.”
(McPherson, p. 3) Similar to ITEs, Mega-Events has social and cultural value befitting the local communities where they occur and the countries of origin. Mega-Events can be global in scale such as the Olympics or more national focused like the Superbowl5. Events of this nature capture heightened media coverage and enhance civic engagement. Participants and observers benefit from deeper social inclusion and “demonstrable civic boosterism.”(McPherson, p. 2) Mega-Events can give attention to participating countries and increase their presence in the global contentiousness. Like ITEs, Mega-Events create bridges between communities, cultures and countries. The more Taiwan can create these networking bridges the more it is connected to the global community.
Creating bridges forges connections between cultures but it also can stir up controversy. Such was the case with the Splendors of Imperial China exhibition in 1996. Work for this event involved the National Palace Museum (NPM) in Taipei and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET) in New York City. Exhibitions are not immune to political tension and many museum shows “require delicate international diplomacy, but this one was unusually loaded with political meaning.” (Solomon, p. 183) Protesters in Taiwan took issue with the NPM’s decision to send valuable works of Chinese art, including items the museum regulated to a restricted list that reduced display in Taiwan, to the United States. There was also fear of China taking possession
5An annual football competition in the United States.
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of the items once they’d left Taiwan. Meanwhile, pressure from Beijing prompted corporations to withdraw their sponsorship. The controversy was a “telling display of Taiwan's deep identity crisis.” (Solomon, p. 183) The exhibition items are part of a museum whose history is tied to both China and Taiwan. As the ITE was set to open four days before Taiwan's first democratic presidential election, the Splendors of Imperial China “would remind an American audience of Taiwan's presence and its increasing hunger for self-determination.” (Solomon, p. 183)
As the controversy increased, an investigative committee was launched in Taiwan and the exhibition items were reevaluated, throwing the ITE plans into crisis mode. A compromise was made allowing the ITE to take place. However, twenty-three items were withdrawn from the exhibition and nineteen other items were only allowed to be displayed overseas for forty days.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art was “immensely gratified to see how enthusiastically the public responded” to the Splendors of Imperial China exhibition. (Report, p. 4) Attendance for said exhibition was over 426,000 people during the eight week run and was the museum’s highest attendance for an Asian art exhibition. Though it has been touted as the “greatest
exhibition of Chinese art ever staged in the West” because of the controversy “much of this work is unlikely to leave Taiwan ever again.” (Solomon, p. 196)
International traveling exhibitions brought art and culture from around the world into Taiwan and has allowed Taiwanese culture to travel the world in return. ITEs can be presented at a single overseas museum but often they conduct tours, traveling from one museum to the next before the visiting collection returns to its home country. Museum objects imbue the identity of the culture they are from and therefore they are not merely a physical object on display abroad. These objects are displaying a country, its society and cultural belief systems. International museums are an important resource for Budaxi because they offer an avenue for the art form to be displayed outside Taiwan and for the receiving audience to learn more about the country.
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