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Cultural Treasures
National Palace Museum
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| The National Palace Museum, in a lovely mountain setting, is the storehouse of the treasures preserved from millennia of Chinese culture; it attracts countless Chinese and foreign visitors. |
To visit Taipei without seeing the National Palace Museum would be like visiting Paris without going to the Louvre: you would regret it all your life. The NPM is a microcosm of 5000 years of Chinese culture. Chinese culture is often described as “vast and profound,” but what does this really mean? Walk through the National Palace Museum and you will know.
The permanent collection of the NPM dates back to the Northern Song dynasty (which began over 1000 years ago); the current collection formerly belonged to the Qing court. The NPM was founded on October 10, 1925, and in 1949 moved to Taiwan with the ROC government. In 1965, the collection was moved from the Sun Yat-sen and Central museums, which were temporarily caring for it, to the current building in Waishuanghsi, a Taipeisuburb.
The works in the Taipei NPM come from three separate Qing museums, in Beijing, Shenyang, and at the summer retreat at Jehol (now Chengde). The collection has more than 700,000 items, double the number in the Louvre. There is no finer collection anywhere of Chinese art, including bronzeware, pottery and porcelain, paintings, jade, lacquerware, cloisonn? miniature carvings, clothing, religious objects, traditional Chinese stationery objects, embroidery, books, documents, and much more.
At the National Palace Museum you can come face-to-face with bronzeware from the Shang and Zhou dynasties; be drawn into the graceful landscape paintings of Song literati; stroll through the imperial kilns of the Song, Ming, and Qing dynasties; find the cricket concealed in a jade cabbage; be amazed at the shapes of stones carved by nature... Even if you spent a whole day there, you would not even be close to exhausting the possibilities!
Hours: 09:00--7:00, open year-round
Address: No. 221, Chihshan Rd. Sec. 2, Shihlin District, Taipei
Tel: (02) 2881-2021
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Taipei Fine Arts Museum
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| Besides ordinary gallery exhibitions, the musuem also occasionally provides a venue for performance art, which can be full of
surprises. |
Recent and old black-and-white images made into composite photos using a computer; a pitch-black room adorned only with a skull, symbolizing hopelessness; large outdoor advertisements for real estate... All of these are media for creativity in modern Taiwan, and reflect the experimental spirit and pluralistic orientations of the current generation of local artists. The Taipei Fine Arts Museum shows the vigorous face of art work from the 20th and the current century, and aims to inspire the limitless potential for imagination that lies buried deep in every person’s mind.
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| Song dynasty white porcelain is one of the valuable items displayed at the museum. |
Entering the museum, you immediately sense the creative vitality of Taiwan’s artists as you casually stroll through a retrospective on the past and future of art here. The museum has a permanent collection of nearly 1000 works, mostly paintings by the older generation of artists. Of particular importance are oil paintings by Liao Chi-chun (Courtyard with Banana Tree) and Chen Cheng-po (Summer Street Scene), as well as the glue-color painting Leisure by the female artist Chen Ching and the watercolor Tanshui Church by Ni Jiang-huai. The permanent collection is enough to bring you back time and again.
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| The Taipei Fine Arts Museum is modern in both form and design; it was Taiwan’s first modern arts museum. |
Peak time at the museum comes once every two years, the opening of the biennial exhibition. The theme of the 2002 Taipei Biennial is “Great Theatre of the World.” This title is inspired by the sacramental play El gran teatro del mundo by the Spanish playwright Don Pedro Calder de la Barca, (1600-1681), which depicts human fate through a play within a play. Theater as an art form has evolved, mutated and been absorbed by much more powerful media such as television and cinema. “Great Theatre of the World” treats the gallery as a stage and the exhibition as a play. It emphasizes the importance of experiencing things, art and reality at first hand, and addresses issues of perception and understanding. The exhibition, presenting works by Taiwanese and international artists from different backgrounds and generations, runs from 29 November 2002 to 3 March 2003.
Hours: 09:30--7:30, closed on Mondays
Address: No. 181, Chungshan N. Rd. Sec. 3, Taipei
Tel: (02) 2595-7656 |
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