針尖上跳舞

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 6^th 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.

There are 25 artworks chosen from Tokyo Fuij Art Museum’s collection, featuring screens, scrolls and Ukiyo-e. Many of them focus on the beauty of the Japanese national flower—cherry blossoms, and the local customs are also often seen as the subject matter in the arts.

The exhibits from Chimei Museum are western artworks of the 16^th to 20^th century. Besides paintings and sculptures, costumes, instruments and furniture with ornaments of flowers are on display as well. The 30 selections present the diversification and abundance of western artworks themed with flowers to the audience.

The picked 53 works of Japanese ruled period to nowadays from NTMoFA and the 20 artistic creations by the Taiwanese artists intervene into the social issues through the subject of flowers and plants, concerned and rethinking about the problems of the nature, the environment and the land, as well as the arguments of right to reside, of the fluidity of sexuality, and of power in romantic relationships.

      During the period of Flowers of Immense Charm—A Masterpiece Exhibition by Four Major Museums, the organizer also arrange several lectures of specific topics and forums hosted by curators, promoted with the grand event of Taichung World Flora Exposition. Via the diversified artistic techniques of expression and the popularized city tour, Flowers of Immense Charm—A Masterpiece Exhibition by Four Major Museums aims to build up much more channels of communication, to exchange all kinds of viewpoints from various cultures, since the imageries of flowers in arts are the epitome of culture and history.