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The National Palace Museum is about to establish a southern branch in the County of Chia-yi. It will be a museum dedicated to the theme of Asian art and culture, a place for visitors to explore the Asia where we live.
From the Arabian Peninsula eastwards to the archipelagos of the western rim of the Pacific Ocean, the length and breadth of this terrain we call Asia abound ubiquitously with ancient civilizations. Although there has never been a unified Asia or a common continental consciousness, exchanges among these civilizations has always been frequent and has never abated.
Such interaction, realized via land and sea routes, usually came in the form of trade transactions, exchanges of envoys, religious proselytization, pilgrimage to sacred sites, military conquests and tribal migrations, generating cultural activities in various directions and at different pace. In the course of these exchanges, Asian peoples continued to emulate, out of curiosity, emulate one another, and to learn and absorb new things, in spite of the differences in thought, faith, technical brilliance or style of adornment, thus injecting new life into old traditions, making them grow anew and be disseminated further. As a matter of fact, each and every artifact has a message to disclose from the civilization which was once its backdrop.
So, what is Asia, after all? To answer the question, we must go beyond delivering a body of superficial knowledge of who our neighbors are to probe into the sorts of contact that Asian peoples had come into and the sorts of cultural transmission, interaction, competition and integration that such contact had triggered through the ages. Towards this end, a large number of artifacts are selected from the National Palace Museum's own collections to highlight the vibrant themes of "Asian Scriptures," "Buddhist Sculptures," "Fabrics and Textiles," "Blue and White Porcelains," "Tea Cultures and Traditions" and "Western Trends in Asian Culture," topics that will help the visitors acquire an in-depth understanding of the patterns of cultural transmission, dissemination and evolution in Asia. It is expected that such an examination of the multi-faceted Asian perspectives on thought, sculptural art, household utensils, clothing, food and drink, and of Asia's response to the influx of Western influences will offer us an opportunity to reflect more upon the very character of our own culture.
The exhibition constitutes the first episode of a continuing series of thematic presentations that the Museum's Southern Branch is to launch in the years ahead. The visitors are encouraged to take this rare opportunity to embark with us on a journey of cultural exploration, and to look forward to other episodes that are yet to come.