Treasures of Thousand Years: Presented with the Subject “Flowers” by Four Museums
(原文刊載於《國美藝誌》2018年12月號,第5期)
The exhibition Flowers of Immense Charm—A Masterpiece Exhibition by Four Major Museums inaugurated on October 6th in National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (NTMoFA) corresponds to Taichung World Flora Exposition, hosted by NTMoFA, National Palace Museum, Chimei Museum and Tokyo Fuij Art Museum. As the beginning of Taichung World Flora Exposition, the exhibition is themed with lovable flowers, displaying artworks representing cultures from China, the Western, Japan and Taiwan to show different aspects of culture and arts.
Supervised by the Ministry of Culture and Taichung City Government, and held by NTMoFA and Cultural Affairs Bureau, Taichung City Government, the exhibition is curated by professor Hsiao Chong-Ray, collaborating with four curators from the museums. The curating team carefully selected 148 artworks from the museums’ collection, whose years of creation span over one thousand years; in addition, the team also chose 20 artworks made by Taiwanese artists to enrich the exhibition. The showing contains paintings, cultural relics, books and documentaries, sculptures, crafts, installations, and new media artworks to demonstrate how art interprets the imageries of flowers and how the artists apply the symbolic meanings of flowers to their works.
Among the comprehensive exhibits, National Palace Museum provides 40 works of Song to Qing Dynasty, including cultural relics, paintings, calligraphies, books and documentaries. Some of them manifest the relationship between vases and floral design, while some exploit the analogy between humanities and flowers, as well as the metaphors brought by flowers, whose images were used as decorations of the implements.