Digital Information Access in Cultural Institutions
Language and Translation
Uli Sigg said artworks from foreign countries and art, China as listed in words, "are often misinterpreted by the West" because "a western curator will always prefer a work that has to do with human rights" but not the true essence behind those art pieces.
Language and translation variance leads to another interpretation by the new cultural dominance in the United States.
It is reborn. About a new era to tell stories.
By Sean H. Gao
The Difference Between Backgrounds
With the change of the environment, the tastes and demands changed.
The history of the establishment of art museums in the United States is similar to its founding history and not too long ago. The world-famous Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Art Museum of Chicago were both established at the end of the 19th century. Before and after the decline and collapse of the European economy, wealthy American businessmen purchased artworks from all over the world, especially European art on a large scale, composing the extremely diversified and rich collections of these museums. With the outbreak of World War II, European artists fled to the United States. Paris, the "art capital", lost its long-standing art center status, and gradually shifted to New York, on the other side of the ocean. American art museums took advantage of the rapid development and leadership. The co-existence of several delicate art museums in one city in the United States has become the norm, and gradually formed a good trend of their own positioning and misplaced development among others.
Nowadays, the development of art museums in China grows rapidly, and the construction of art museums in various places becomes a normal adaptation for provinces. In the past ten years, the number of art museums in the country has grown from dozens to hundreds of now at a rate of ten times. It is also common for several art museums to coexist in some medium-sized and above cities, which in some cases do not seem that much important in the process of evolving museum environments at a non-mature stage. How to establish their own business plans, form a misplaced business model, avoid unnecessary vicious competition in the industry, and establish a sustainable museum ecology is crucial. Importantly, the differentiation and establishment of the art museums in New York, as mentioned above, give us a good reference from a perspective.
The following statement will focus on how Chinese art, porcelains as selected, is displayed and presented, comparing and contrasting visual adaptations of digital technologies during the curatorial design, and reflecting on how language and cultural deviation may occur at different perspectives and various cutting points when interpreting similar exhibits.
Case by case analysis on
PORCELAINS
UNESCO explained that porcelain is made of carefully selected porcelain clay or pottery stone through the process of proportioning, forming, drying, and firing. Eventhough porcelain is developed from pottery, they are different in raw materials, glazes, firing temperature, etc.
The selected porcelains retrospect to a current collection and previous exhibitions from the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the National Palace Museum (Taipei), and the Hubei Provincial Museum (Wuhan). In order to get a sense of the massive porcelain features and kinds, the plum vases (Meiping) are particularly selected to be analyzed in addition.
Meiping vase with floral decoration in underglaze blue, Qing Dynasty
National Palace Museum
Vase in Meiping Shape with Phoenix, late 16th–early 17th century
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Blue and White plum vase of the four loves in Yuan Dynasty
Hubei Provincial Museum
NATIONAL PALACE MUSEUM
National Palace Museum’s massive artworks were once suffered from the war and transportation. The most valuable artifacts were moved out of the city and preserved by Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist government. In addition, from February to May 1933, about 20,000 boxes of cultural relics from the Palace Museum, the Summer Palace, and the Imperial Academy were shipped to the South. This explains why the National Museum in Taipei preserves a huge collection of Chinese Art.
On the official website, the museum contains its “open-data” page under the main bar “collection”. The collection menu also contains “selections” and “theme sites” buttons to explore.
Since Taipei is one of the three special districts that does not entirely forbid outreach internet bans in China, it took about 3 seconds for the main open data page to load (from New York). It includes Exhibition Packages Download, Images, Nominal and Numerical Datasets Download, etc.
While searching Meiping or plum vase in the type-in search bar, an interesting fact is that the open data seems to reserve certain rights of presenting different objects for different users. If the default language is 中文 then you can actually get times more results than if you set English as the default language. Use the plum vase as an example, in 中文 you will get 93 results, whereas the English version only provides around a dozen.
On the specific result page, introductions show even more different reflect to different audiences. On 中文 page, you can have a list of listed information including object record number, name in both Chinese and English, category, material, function, size, period, and Chinese description. It also refer to other material sources and the original description of previous documents which stated this vase. However, the English page only has image number, dynasty, category, function, and description in Chinese.
THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
The Metropolitan Museum of Art (The MET) is the largest art museum in the U.S. In 1870, a group of bankers, businessmen, artists, launched an initiative to build the metropolitan museum of art. It was first designated to create a gathering place in order to encourage and develop the application in production and daily life of art, in order to promote the general education of art and provide guidance to the public. This massively shaped the form of the museum to be purchasing and donation-accepting process when acquiring exhibits.
On the official page, under Art category on the top bar, online exhibitions and information can be found at Art at home. When entering Search the Collection page, it is pretty easy to type in the keywords or filters of all results. Filtering criteria include object type/material, geographic location, date/era, and department.
The Open Access policy icon is listed near each photo of the results. “As part of the Met's Open Access policy, you can freely copy, modify and distribute this image, even for commercial purposes.” It also contains the API information which can directly enter the public domain database for further researches.
The main page however does not contain any button for switching languages. It should be a mistake since the MET has its own publications among numerous different languages, and they even have printed maps in various languages. Instead in contrast to the online resources they only have previous MetPublications for other languages, the main page does not offer the other language service.
Under the 83 Meiping searching results, only 38 are presented in color pictures. These 83 results are not only limited to Chinese culture but also to Japan and Korea. These colored images are set particularly popped up because these are the on-site porcelains the museum presented. Others which are shown in black and white photos are mainly described as “not on view”. This phenomenon is interesting because even if click into those not on site artwork pages, it only gives object details but still one colorless image instead of five among onsite objects. It means that the museum still manipulate some restrictions among online resources in order to acquire on-site views for visitors.
HUBEI PROVINCIAL MUSEUM
Hubei provincial museum was constructed in1953. It is a modern provincial museum compared with some other provincial museums in China. Although Hubei Province is a large outrages province in education and history in China, the actual online resources are not as frequently-updated as such a huge city of Wuhan. On the introduction page, it dated that “It is a state-level museum and one of the eight key museums sponsored jointly by the central and local governments”. There are also architectural, collections, and historical backgrounds of Chu to current introductions listed.
The main page has a designed huge flipped search bar that contains buttons of Overview, Exhibition, Cultural & Creative Products, Collection, and Guidance. Pretty the same as what we may find in other Chinese museum official web pages, Chinese versions contain more selection buttons and navigations than the English versions.
On the overview page, there are more contents listed as Curator’s words, introduction, history, and more. Curator in this content respect to European culture that as the head administer or the president of this museum. The Organization Chart, funny to notice, is actually not showing in the Chinese version but was listed in the English version of the museum. One thing worth noticing is that the last updated time of the introductory content listed there was May 15th, 2016, about 5 years ago. Not only for introduction but also curator’s talk, organization chart, history, and academic committee pages are all dated to May 2016 and have never been updated since then.
The exhibition page was divided into temporary and permanent, listed about 20 different exhibitions. As far as I know about the museum, the museum owns this Meiping vase at the permanent exhibition called “the Art of Earth and Fire Ancient Porcelain”. However, the description of this exhibition is still dated back to 2016, and does not have a single picture of the very famous vase. Three temporary exhibitions are listed on the page, and the most current one was in fact ended in July 2019 and updated in 2020, despite the other two from 2016. To my knowledge and satisfaction, I found the vase finally at the Collection category on the main bar. It is under the Treasure of Hubei Museum bar which contains the four most precious relics of the museum.
Author and Editor: Sean H. Gao, 2021
Sources
"The National Palace Museum Open Data Platform". National Palace Museum, https://theme.npm.edu.tw/opendata/index.aspx?lang=2. Accessed 11 Dec. 2021.
"Collection-National Palace Museum". National Palace Museum, https://www.npm.gov.tw/Collection-Intro.aspx?sno=01000022&l=2. Accessed 10 Dec. 2021.
"Meiping vase with floral decoration in underglaze blue, Qing dynasty (1644-1911)". National Palace Museum, https://theme.npm.edu.tw/opendata/DigitImageSets.aspx?sNo=04025106&lang=2&Key=meiping^22^2&pageNo=1. Accessed 10 Dec. 2021.
"故宫典藏资料检索“. National Palace Museum, https://digitalarchive.npm.gov.tw/ITColumn. Accessed 10 Dec. 2021.
"清 青花花卉纹梅瓶”. National Palace Museum, https://digitalarchive.npm.gov.tw/Antique/Content?uid=22632&Dept=U. Accessed 9 Dec. 2021.
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Jeff, Wallenfeldt. "National Palace Museum | History, Facts & Collections". Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/National-Palace-Museum. Accessed 10 Dec. 2021.
"Chinese Porcelain | Silk Roads Programme". UNESCO Silk Roads Programme, https://en.unesco.org/silkroad/content/chinese-porcelain. Accessed10 Dec. 2021.
"Hubei Provincial Museum Hubei Provincial Institution of Culture". Hubei Provincial Museum, http://www.hbww.org/home/EnglishIndex.aspx. Accessed 14 Dec. 2021.
"湖北省博物馆，湖北省文物考古研究所". Hubei Provincial Museum, http://www.hbww.org/Home/Index.aspx. Accessed 14 Dec. 2021.
"Blue and White plum vase of the four lovers in Yuan Dynasty". Hubei Provincial Museum, http://www.hbww.org/Views/E_ArtGoodsDetail.aspx?PNo=e_Collection&No=e_GZZQ&Guid=603e10ba-75f7-4fbd-bff6-bbbdc3c80b92&Type=Detail. Accessed 14 Dec. 2021.
"Vase in Meiping Shape with Phoenix | China | Ming Dynasty". The Metropolitan Museum of Art, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/42190?searchField=All&sortBy=Relevance&ft=meiping&offset=0&rpp=20&pos=10. Accessed 10 Dec 2021.
Pictures
1. Photo by Sean H. Gao
2. Wix Stock Photo
3. https://theme.npm.edu.tw/opendata/DigitImageSets.aspx?sNo=04025106&lang=2&Key=meiping^22^2&pageNo=1