TAIPEI, Taiwan — Divided for 60 years by war and political turbulence, the imperial art collection of China is now the focus of negotiations that could lead to at least a few of the works being exhibited together again.
The director of the National Palace Museum here, the repository of the cream of the 1,000-year collection, plans to travel on Saturday to Beijing, the first official visit by a director of that museum to the mainland since the Nationalists lost China’s civil war to the Communists in 1949 and retreated to Taiwan.
The director, Chou Kung-shin, will hold talks at the Palace Museum in Beijing, which holds most of the rest of the collection. Ms. Chou said in an interview that she would ask the Palace Museum in Beijing to lend 29 Qing dynasty artworks for a three-month exhibition that opens here in October and would seek cooperation in art conservation, publications and promotions. The Beijing authorities are taking a conciliatory stance on closer collaboration in art in the hope of improving their image on Taiwan, with the goal of dampening opposition to an eventual reunification on terms favorable to the mainland.
“We are glad to see the two museums work together and improve exchanges,” Yang Yi, the spokesman of the State Council Taiwan Affairs Office in Beijing, said at a news conference last month.
The people of Taiwan elected a new Nationalist Party president last spring who favors closer relations with the mainland, particularly closer economic relations, while insisting that reunification is not up for discussion.
If no museum agreement is reached during the trip this weekend, further talks will be held when a similar delegation of senior mainland art officials comes to Taipei in March, Ms. Chou said.
When the Nationalists boarded ships to Taiwan six decades ago, they took with them nearly 3,000 crates packed with some of the world’s rarest paintings and porcelain. The fate of the imperial collection, the world’s finest of Chinese art, still represents such a powerful political and emotional link with the mainland that the director of the Taiwan museum sits alongside ministers as a full member of the president’s cabinet.
The odds of success in the negotiations in Beijing may be improved because the artworks that the National Palace Museum seeks to borrow are obscure. They are mainly portraits and seals of Emperor Yongzheng of the Qing dynasty, who ruled from 1723 to 1735. “They are historical,” said Marc F. Wilson, the director of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., which has a well-known collection of Chinese art. “They are not great artworks.”
Ms. Chou said the works would be of educational value for visitors.
The division of China’s imperial collection is one of the great stories of Asian art. The Nationalists evacuated more than 13,000 crates of art from Beijing in early 1933 before the Japanese Army could capture the city. The crates were divided up and repeatedly moved around China until the end of World War II, sometimes barely ahead of Japanese bombing raids and ground assaults.
The collection was reunited after the war in Nanjing, an ancient capital of China. As it became apparent that the Communists would win the civil war, the Nationalists chose the best from the collection for shipment to Taiwan. They were particularly fond of Qing dynasty works, and these are heavily represented in the National Palace Museum’s collection.
The Communists subsequently shipped much of the remainder back to Beijing for reinstallation at the collection’s ancient home, the Forbidden City. But 2,221 crates have remained in storage at the Chaotian Palace in Nanjing as the municipal governments of Nanjing and Beijing have argued over their ownership.
Ms. Chou said that no negotiations are planned on lending any of Taiwan’s holdings to the mainland. Any such step would be extremely controversial here, given the mainland’s long history of insisting that the entire collection belongs in Beijing.Taiwan makes no counterclaim against the mainland’s holdings. The National Palace Museum in Taipei borrowed artworks from provincial museums in China for a large exhibition two years ago and returned them promptly afterward.Even more remote than Taiwanese loans to the mainland is any prospect of joint exhibitions in other countries of works drawn from the Taipei and Beijing collections, officials say. “Why would we want to give this benefit to other countries?” Ms. Chou said. “We want to reserve this for ourselves.”
If the Beijing museum does not lend any art, the planned Qing dynasty exhibition will still proceed in October with 180 pieces from the National Palace Museum’s own collection, she said. Only two of those works are sturdy enough to be on permanent display — a porcelain vase of white dragons on a red background, specially designed to hold plum blossoms in spring, and an intricate metal vase with peony flowers and coiled dragons in painted enamels.
Also brought out in October will be more fragile pieces, like an extremely thin porcelain plate with a subtle landscape painted on it with enamel.
Ms. Chou suggested that the two museums could benefit from each other’s conservation expertise. The National Palace Museum’s strengths lie in using the latest techniques for displaying its collection, she noted, while the Beijing museum has a specialty in the restoration of clocks.
“We have a small number of clocks, but we don’t dare touch them because we don’t have skill in this,” Ms. Chou said.
Yet even the initial negotiations with the mainland are controversial in Taiwan. The opposition, the Democratic Progressive Party, favors greater political separation from the mainland.
The opposition party points out that the mainland still does not even accept the name of the National Palace Museum, as the term “National” might be construed as acknowledging the sovereignty of the Taipei government. The official Xinhua news agency of Beijing cites the full name only in quotation marks. This irks the Democratic Progressive Party.
“Culture and civilization belong to humankind, and we don’t have a problem with sharing that,” said Cheng Wentsan, the party’s chief spokesman. “The problem now is that China is using this in a political way. China is using this to degrade Taiwan.”
Ms. Chou, a well known art historian who earned her doctorate at the Sorbonne in the mid-1980s by researching the introduction of Chinese lacquer technology to Europe in the 17th century, said that she was trying to focus on the art and avoid political issues.
Yet her choice for the theme of the exhibition starting in October, art from the Qing dynasty reign of Emperor Yongzheng, has a political undertone nonetheless.
Yongzheng is still famous for having fought corruption. Chen Shui-bian, the Democratic Progressive Party leader who ran Taiwan as president for the constitutional maximum of eight years before stepping down last May, is now on trial on corruption charges. He strongly denies any wrongdoing.
“That is a coincidence,” Ms. Chou said of the Yongzheng theme. “We only think about his artistic taste.”
Yet the emperor has another claim to fame that may bode less well for any brotherly love between Taiwan and the mainland in years to come. Initially fourth in line for the succession, he seized the throne by outmaneuvering his brothers, at least two of whom were stripped of their titles and died in prison.@VIA: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/12/arts/design/12pala.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=design
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