Month: December 2017

Ruyi To Be Found Everywhere In Life: Long Museum Exhibition of Chinese Ruyi and Porcelain

Dates: 1.10.2017-31.3.2018
Opening hours: 10:00-17:00 (closed on Mondays)
Location: PUDONG Long Museum
Address: 3398 Longteng Avenue, Xuhui District, Shanghai, China
Website: http://thelongmuseum.org/en/exhibition/overview/a15fpw

Many Chinese greeting words used in daily life or during festivals include two Chinese characters “Ru” and “Yi” (literally “as desired”), like “good luck”, “all the best” and “happy lunar new year”. “Ruyi”, as our casual and habitual use, actually carries deep and rich cultural connotation since ancient times. As a metaphysical concept, the word “Ruyi” appeared as early as in “The Book of Han”. At that time it was not only used literally to indicate “as desired”, but also as the given name of a member of the royal family Liu. As a secular concept, “Ruyi” was one of the most fascinating material objects left in ancient life.

Imperial Porcelains from the Reigns of Hongzhi and Zhengde in the Ming Dynasty: A Comparison of Porcelains from the Imperial Kiln Site at Jingdezhen and Imperial Collection of the Palace Museum

Dates: 29.9.2017-28.2.2018
Opening hours: 8:30-17:00 (closed on Mondays)
Location: Hall for Abstinence (Zhai gong), Palace Museum, China
Address: 4 Jingshan Qian Road, Dongcheng District, Beijing, China
Website: Official web page

The reigns of the Hongzhi Emperor (r. 1488-1505) and the Zhengde Emperor (1506-1521) are the watershed of the Ming-dynasty’s social and cultural changes at the turn of the sixteenth century. The stifling conservativeness gave way to dynamic innovation. A penchant for wealth replaced previous admiration for unsophisticated simplicity. Imperial porcelains from the two reigns share some commonalities including the shrinking scale of production, plummeting variety, and the relative austerity in terms of decoration. For this reason, ceramic objects of the two dynasties are displayed together in this exhibition in five parts –

Freshness & Elegance: Blue-and-White Porcelain and Underglaze Red Porcelain;

II. Lightness & Beauty: Polychrome Porcelain and Doucai Porcelain;

III. Colorful Porcelain: Multi-Colored Glaze Porcelain and Plain Tricolor Porcelain;

IV. Uniformity & Pureness: Single Colored Glaze Porcelain;

V. Profundity of Influence: Chenghua Imperial Porcelain Imitated by Later Ages.

If there has been an event in the field of China’s Museums that has received an unprecedented warm response from the public in the last months of 2017, the TV program called National Treasure will surely be the one. To understand its unique characters we only need to take a look at the keywords surrounding it: museums, entertainment TV programmes, documentary films and 600th anniversary of the Palace Museum. How did it make it with these factors that seem unrelated to one and another?

It is a large-scale cultural exploration program recently launched by China’s Central Television(CCTV) in Beijing. After a two-year preparation, it will exhibit in the first season 27 of the most precious treasures from nine Chinese museums of the first grade – the Palace Museum, Shanghai Museum, Nanjing Museum, Hunan Provincial Museum, Henan Museum, Shaanxi History Museum, Hubei Provincial Museum, Zhejiang Provincial Museum and Liaoning Provincial Museum – across nine episodes, and select in the end 9 pieces of them according to the votes from the audiences online and offline to join the 2020 exhibition of the 600th anniversary of the Palace Museum. The narration of the programme will be a mixture of documentary film and entertainment TV programme, taking the Chinese traditional culture as contents, so as to find a brand new way of storytelling for China’s cultural heritages.

In order to compete with other entertainment shows, the National Treasure invites famous Chinese actors and popular stars to be the host and “guardians” of each single relic, making the treasures “alive” and calling on the interests of the audiences toward cultural heritages through their characterized live performances.

Two days after the broadcast of the first episode on 3rd December 2017, the programme has got a high rate of 9.3 on douban.com(a Chinese social networking service website allowing registered users to record information and create content related to film, books, music, recent events and activities in Chinese cities, used much much more than imdb.com in China), some audiences think that such a favorable feedback benefits from the fact that the National Treasure not only considers the tastes of the public but also takes the responsibility to raise its aesthetic ability.

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