Taiwan’s National Palace Museum unveiled March 8 a two-pronged promotion plan aimed at reinventing the institution through increasing its international competitiveness and bolstering local recognition of its resources, with NPM Director Lin Jeng-yi stating that the initiative will enhance the museum’s professionalism while ensuring its sustainable development.
To further its international reach, NPM will work to strengthen cooperation with prominent museums around the world by integrating resources from various government agencies. It will also promote local culture and heritage abroad by creating a new cooperation mechanism, forging partnerships with overseas institutions and pursuing the signing of memorandums of understanding.
These efforts are expected to further diversify the sources of foreign visitors. According to NPM statistics, the museum, which received 4.67 million total visits in 2016, experienced a shift in its visitor profile last year.
While mainland Chinese tour group visitors dropped by 28.8 percent year on year to 1.8 million, tour group visitors from Japan, Southeast Asia and Western nations increased to help offset this decline. NPM data for 2016 show tour group visitors from the U.S. and Europe rose 58.6 percent year on year, while those from Southeast Asia and Japan registered annual increases of 23.9 percent and 17.4 percent, respectively.
Under the portion of the plan to boost local recognition, NPM will seek to stage more exhibitions in cooperation with foreign institutions. It also intends to build on recent projects that use multimedia technologies to strengthen public engagement.
Successful examples in this regard include the iPalace Channel for e-learning as well as the digital “Giuseppe Castiglione-Lang Shining New Media Art Exhibition.” A multimedia presentation platform, the NPM iPalace Channel enhances the experiences of visitors to the website and enables them to learn more about various exhibitions staged by the museum.
The “Giuseppe Castiglione-Lang Shining New Media Art Exhibition” uses virtual reality technology to bring to life the paintings of Giuseppe Castiglione, a Jesuit from Milan who traveled to China to proselytize in the late 17th century. Adopting the local name Lang Shining, Castiglione spent 51 years in the service of emperors Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong, leaving behind a large body of work.
Established in 1965, NPM is home to the world’s largest collection of Chinese imperial art spanning 7,000 years from the prehistoric Neolithic period to the end of the Qing dynasty in the early 20th century. In 2015, the institution opened a second branch in southern Taiwan’s Chiayi County showcasing artifacts from diverse Asian civilizations. (KWS-E)
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