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2 China's palace
politics By Jonathan Adams
TAIPEI - When Taiwan National Palace
Museum curator Yu Pei-chin began organizing the
biggest ever exhibit of highly prized ru
ware - rare, light-blue-green ceramics fired in
the early 12th century - she called up her
counterparts at Beijing's Palace Museum out of
curiosity.
"How many pieces of ru
ware do you have?" she asked a museum official.
"How many do you have there?" the official shot
back. "We have 21," Yu said. "Perhaps we have
about 20 pieces
too," came the response.
(Based on public information, Yu guesses the real
number in Beijing is closer to 15.) Yu didn't
bother to ask whether Beijing could send over its
ru ware for the exhibit - "I knew it
wouldn't be permitted."
So goes the frosty
relationship between Taiwan and mainland China,
which extends even to their cultural institutions.
For decades, the cross-strait political impasse
has spurred an enduring rivalry between
government-run "palace" museums showcasing the
cream of imperial Chinese art in Beijing and
Taipei.
To this day, Beijing has the
palace (more commonly known as the Forbidden
City), while Taiwan possesses the best of the
collection - a fact that has been a long-standing
bone of contention for Beijing and for Chinese
nationalists. (One former employee of Taiwan's
museum said that while she was studying art
history in Paris, some earnest students from China
constantly badgered her about how Taiwan must give
back the art it had "stolen".)
The
politicization of the collection is a source of
frustration for Chinese art lovers and experts on
both sides of the Taiwan Strait, who have
nonetheless quietly built up contacts in the past
decade through conferences and informal exchanges.
"The museum field shouldn't be political, but
unfortunately the two palace museums cannot avoid
politics," said another curator at Taiwan's
museum.
Politics intruded once again
recently, as the palace museum in Taipei held its
grand reopening celebration last week after a long
renovation. Beijing museum officials accused
Taiwan's government of revising the museum's
charter to de-emphasize the collection's Chinese
essence. Their complaints were echoed by some
opposition legislators in Taipei, who accuse
Taiwan's government of waging a "cultural
revolution" to suit a pro-independence agenda.
Taiwan's museum director has denied any
such campaign, but acknowledged the
cabinet-proposed charter change, which would
revise the wording of the museum's mission from
collecting artifacts from ancient China to
collecting "domestic and foreign" art. (That
proposal awaits approval from the
opposition-controlled legislature.)
In
fact, throughout the collection's history, art and
politics have been inseparable. The Emperor
Qianlong (1711-99) was fond of defacing or
praising palace artwork - including some of the
ru ware now on display in Taiwan - with
critiques or laudatory poems. Ever since,
successive governments have been putting their own
stamps on the collection.
When Chiang
Kai-shek and his Kuomintang party fled to Taiwan
in 1949, they took the best part of the collection
with them and built a museum in the hills ringing
Taipei to house it. During the Cultural Revolution
era, that museum became Exhibit A in the
Nationalists' claim to be the guardians of Chinese
civilization, as their communist enemies across
the strait went about destroying cultural relics
in the name of creating a new China.
Then,
in 2000, Taiwan's collection passed into the hands
of the independence-minded Democratic Progressive
Party (DPP) - making President Chen Shui-bian the
unlikely ward of what are considered the finest
treasures of Chinese art. For some in Taiwan, that
was akin to giving the punk-rock teenage son the
keys to Daddy's Jaguar. Chen's political
appointees at the museum have scandalized some of
the island's traditionalists with moves to strip
away symbols of the former authoritarian Taiwanese
regime - for example, by shunting a once-prominent
statue of Chiang Kai-shek to a side wing.
Now, the latest director, Lin Mun-lee, is
trying to bring a hip, multicultural flavor to the
museum. She has invited young
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