National Palace Museum to get major expansion

[Mucha Man]

This is great news. The Palace Museum is going to increase fivefold its display area, as well as finally have a southern branch in Jiayi. The Taipei branch will also eventually get an MRT stop.

A project to expand the exhibition area of Taiwan’s National Palace Museum and build a cultural and creative center nearby will soon get underway, museum director Chou Kung-shin said Feb. 7.

The decade-long expansion plan, slated to kick off this April, will result in a fivefold increase in the museum’s exhibition space, which currently stands at 9,500 square meters, according to Chou.

The museum has seen its popularity soar in recent years and is desperately in need of more exhibition space, according to Chou. She noted that the NPM received over 3.4 million visitors in 2010, 25 percent more than in 2009.

With its limited space, the museum can only display a fraction—less than 5 percent—of the 650,000 artifacts in its possession at any given time.

“This plan will create significantly more room for exhibits and improve the quality of visits to the museum,” she said.

As to the cultural creative center, it will be built on a 4.8-hectare plot of land directly facing the museum. The Ministry of National Defense has agreed to hand over the use of the land to the NPM, according to Chou.

The center will include a museum dedicated to the Chinese character writing system and will be joined to the main museum through an underpass that will also link to a future subway station, Chou said.

In related news, a 70-hectare NPM Southern Branch in Jiayi County, expected to begin operations in 2015, will also seek to integrate with creative industries, sources said.

Established in northern Taipei City in 1965, the National Palace Museum houses the world's largest collection of Chinese imperial art, spanning 7,000 years from the prehistoric Neolithic period to the end of the Qing dynasty.

[Zla'od]

It's getting harder and harder to separate Taiwan's museums from their gift shops. Every aspect is calculated to bring in the moolah--famous-artist exhibitions are marketed like designer brands.

Plus these people are totally in bed with China. I remember the Tibetan Buddhism exhibition, whose plaques were scripted by the several Chinese museums who sent them stuff, and somehow neglected to mention how they had acquired these artifacts, or why several of them (like its centerpiece, a large wooden Yamantaka) suffered recent damage. The volunteers were drilled in how to tell people what everything meant--they learned some stories to tell--but none of them seem to have ever met a Tibetan Buddhist. (Imagine putting on a show like that featuring ritual objects from the Vatican.)

What was the latest one--the Kangxi Emperor and Louis XIV? More Chinese brown-nosing. And those crowds! The organizers treat visitors like cattle. At the Van Gogh exhibition (different museum, I know) they had them stuffed in there, and volunteers with bullhorns telling everybody to move along, please. A more typical situation is where the exhibits are hidden behind dogpiles of schoolgirls snapping photos of it, and each other, or swarms of auditors following museum guides. And those telephone tour-guide things! Those are even worse. Now everybody walks around like zombies, and takes three times longer than before.

One of these days, I may do something drastic--like start a museum of my own, devoted to my backside.