Bringing history to life

The ongoing Faberge Revealed exhibition from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts features Easter eggs at Beijing's Palace Museum. [Photo by Jiang Dong/China Daily]

As the Palace Museum in Beijing stages the ongoing Faberge Revealed exhibition－courtesy of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in the United States－displaying treasures owned by former Russian royal families, more US museums want to share their collections with their Chinese counterparts.

Last week, at the seventh China-US High Level Consultation on People-to-People Exchanges, professionals from top-tier US museums－The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, and the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery under the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington DC, reached an agreement with the Palace Museum in Beijing for closer collaboration.

Wang Yiyou, the curator of Chinese and East Asian Art at the Peabody Essex Museum, says the museums will build partnerships in areas like professional exchanges, preservation, studies of objects and research.

"It will be a well-rounded relationship," she says.

The Peabody Essex Museum has displayed Chinese treasures since 1800, a year after its founding, while the Freer and Sackler galleries are among the biggest repositories in the US of Chinese cultural relics.

All three institutions have worked with Chinese museums before.

The ongoing Faberge Revealed exhibition from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts features Easter eggs at Beijing's Palace Museum. [Photo by Jiang Dong/China Daily]

For example, over 2010-11, the Peabody Essex Museum worked with the Palace Museum to organize an exhibition in the US called The Emperor's Private Paradise: Treasures from the Forbidden City.

The exhibition, which comprised cultural relics from Juanqinzhai, a studio which made exquisite decorative art for Emperor Qianlong (1711-99), toured the US, including New York City, Boston and Milwaukee.

Wang says more than half a million visitors saw the display in the US－one of the biggest exhibitions held by the Peabody Essex Museum.

"We want to cooperate with the Palace Museum to start another round of exhibitions," says Wang.

Meanwhile, according to Jan Stuart, the curator of Chinese art at the Freer and Sackler galleries, there is a program that trains "future leaders of Chinese museums" since 2000, and Li Ji, the head of the archaeology department at the Palace Museum was one of the scholars who pursued the program there.

Besides, there were conservators and exhibition designers from the Palace Museum and other Chinese museums at her institution.