Wen-Qian Lee, Hsu Huang
Wen-Qian Lee
Graduate Student
Graduate Institute of Museum Studies, Taipei National University of the Arts
Taichung, Taiwan
Wen-Qian Lee is a museum enthusiast pursuing a master's degree in museology. She currently applies her expertise at the 921 Earthquake Museum of Taiwan, a department of the National Museum of Natural Science. Prior to her museum career, she honed her skills as a graphic designer, seamlessly integrating this experience with her museum work. As a Museum Educator, she participates in the development of exhibits, educational activities, and visitor services. This role has provided her with exposure to the intersection of museum advocacy, conservation, and exhibition, while Wen-Qian focuses on the power of museums to drive social change and ecological sustainability, particularly through social engagement and advocacy.
Hsu Huang
Director of the Exhibits Department
National Museum of Natural Science
Taichung, Taiwan
Hsu Huang is an associate curator at the National Museum of Natural Science in Taiwan. He has been working in the Department of Exhibition as the Director, and has conducted and designed many exhibitions in the past 30 years. One of the exhibitions curated by Hsu Huang is “When the South Wind Blows – the Documentary Photography of Taixi Village”, which is the topic focusing on air pollution issues in Taiwan. And this exhibition had been nominated and entering the short list of TAISHIN Arts Award in 2015. Hsu Huang has also been the Editor-in-Chief of the academic journal: Museology Quarterly since 2011. Apart from his present job, Hsu Huang had been the first Director of the Lan-yang Museum of Yilan County in Taiwan, and a PhD candidate at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. The practical experience generated his research interests in issues concerning, for example, relationships between knowledge and space, and the social responsibility of museum exhibitions.
Museum Actions for Animal Conservation: Constructing the Exhibition Framework for Advocacy
Be transmitting scientific knowledge, how can museum exhibitions contribute to collective action for animal conservation? And what would be the framework for the exhibition?
In the face of ecological crises and species extinction caused by drastic environmental changes, museum exhibitions are considered an important avenue for promoting public understanding and inspiring animal conservation practices. Studies reveal that traditional exhibitions fail to fully convey the urgency and criticality of conservation problems and lacking the motivation and impact to inspire actions.
This paper argues that advocacy is an important approach to conservation practice in museums. Museums can become active social actors, proactively engaging with real-world issues to bring social change. According to this view, advocacy refers to museums taking concrete actions to support the position or demands of a specific issue, thereby changing public perceptions or practices. Advocacy exhibitions aim to encourage audience participation in conservation actions and practices. By establishing advocacy networks, formulating compelling advocacy appeals, and creating opportunities for public engagement and action, these exhibitions can contribute to changing the challenges of conservation.
The purpose of this paper is to analyze the content of conservation exhibitions to construct an advocacy exhibition framework. By literature review, different dimensions of the advocacy exhibition framework are summarized and analyzed, and a schema of the framework is proposed. Two exhibitions are chosen: “Bonvoyage! Buni.” curated by the National Museum of Natural Science and “To See or to Say Goodbye” by the Leopard Cat Association of Taiwan as case studies to observe the performance of individual cases in different dimensions. Methods of exhibition analysis and interviews with the curatorial team to discuss the content and exhibition strategies are applied. Through analysis and the development of an exhibition framework, this paper echoes the concept and trend of museum activism and is presented as a reference for the future development of advocacy exhibitions.
Museum exhibitions, Animal conservation, Museum Advocacy, Exhibitions Framework, Museum Activism