Jiayi Chang
PhD candidate at the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester
Leicester, UK
Jiayi Chang is currently a third-year PhD student at the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester. Her research interest is museums and ideology, while her main research interest is the Communist Party of China and its extensive deployment of museums in fulfilling political objectives. The way she approaches her research is by observing and deconstructing the performances and narratives in museums. She respects the situatedness of the Chinese contemporary museum and heritage system and hopes to expand and diversify the understanding of the museum and counter homogenizing views that deny this diversity.
Others’ Past, Our Belief: Chinese Prehistoric Collections in The Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm
Museums, especially national museums, are socially and culturally shaped. The ideologies and values of the state not only influences the way museums tell the national past, but also shapes how heterogeneous culture is presented. The Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities (MFEA) at Stockholm housed a larger number of objects from Neolithic China than anyone else outside of China. These prehistoric objects are from Yangshao Culture, while the excavation in 1921 marked the birth of the Chinese modern archaeology and was led by a Swedish geologist Johan Gunnar Andersson, who later became MFEA’s founding director. Taken the permanent exhibition “China before China” curated in 2004 as a case study, this article investigates how MFEA displays these Chinese prehistoric collections through a Swedish value of openness, inclusivity and equality. It first briefly contextualizes how the colonized past of western museums downplay the historicity of objects and ethical controversy, and then reviews how these prehistoric objects became collections of MFEA after a joint excavation in Yangshao. Then it moves to analyze the three curatorial ways the exhibition convey Swedish values, including justifying the legitimacy of obtaining these objects under the Chinese government’s permission, highlighting the shared humanity in object categories to make the narrative understandable for western audiences, and openly discussing repatriation issues. On the one hand, the foreign culture can thus be understood in a socially inclusive society without losing its situatedness and characteristics, while on the other, such cross-cultural exhibitions converts other culture’s past into truths and beliefs which is appropriate to “our” society’s contemporary and future.
Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities; Archaeological curation; Cross-cultural; Socially inclusive.