NPM inks sister agreement with Osaka museum

2017/08/23

Taiwan’s National Palace Museum signed a memorandum of understanding with the Museum of Oriental Ceramics, Osaka Aug. 21 in Taipei City to establish sister relations with the Japanese institution.

Under the agreement inked by NPM Director Lin Jeng-yi and MOC, Osaka Director Tetsuro Degawa, the museums will co-organize exhibitions, loan artifacts from their respective collections, conduct joint research projects and set up a platform for sharing expertise. This is NPM’s second sister relationship with a foreign institution following the signing of a similar pact with San Francisco-based Asian Art Museum in July.

According to Lin, the establishment of such collaborative partnerships is a critical first step in bolstering exchanges with major international institutions and strengthening awareness of the Taipei-headquartered museum’s world-class resources. NPM will seek to secure accords with other prominent foreign museums going forward so as to further enhance its global competitiveness, he added.

NPM and MOC, Osaka first cooperated in 2006 when the Japanese institution loaned six 12th century celadon pieces from the Korean Kingdom of Goryeo (918-1392) to the Taipei museum. To celebrate the launch of NPM’s southern branch in 2015, the Osaka museum provided more than 330 porcelain and ceramic artifacts for the “Sailing the High Seas: Imari Porcelain Wares” and “The Enduring Beauty of Celadon: A Special Exhibition of Goryeo Celadons” exhibitions, running until Dec. 28, 2018 and March 11, 2018, respectively.

Last December, NPM loaned five celadon narcissus basins from the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127) to MOC, Osaka for an exhibition that ran until March 26, marking the first time these artifacts were showcased in Japan.

Founded in 1982, MOC, Osaka is a renowned repository of East Asian ceramics, housing some 6,000 pieces from mainland China, Japan and Korea. The museum also exhibits the famous Ataka Collection, approximately 1,000 pieces of mainly mainland Chinese and Korean ceramics donated by the 21 companies of the Sumitomo Group in the 1980s.

NPM, established in 1965, is the world’s largest treasure house of Chinese imperial art, boasting 650,000 antiquities covering 7,000 years from the prehistoric Neolithic period to the end of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). In 2015, the institution opened a second branch in southern Taiwan’s Chiayi County to showcase artifacts from diverse Asian civilizations.

Source: Taiwan Today (http://taiwantoday.tw/news.php?unit=18&post=120329)