Mingshi Cui
School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester
United Kingdom, Leicester
Mingshi Cui has just completed her PhD at the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester. Her current research project explores the potential of creating a digital object biography for the displaced object in a way that unveils its multi-layered interpretations and values. Mingshi’s research interests include material culture studies, intercultural communication, and digital humanities. Drawing upon her previous educational and working experiences, she is particularly interested in examining how to facilitate cross-cultural understanding in museums, enabling audiences and the museum professionals alike to better engage with the museum collections and empathize with the cultural groups been represented.
From digital platform to dialogic space--unfolding the hidden story of the displaced object
Museums in countries with colonial pasts are enmeshed in long-standing and recently exacerbated debates about the future of cultural artefacts that were obtained from other cultures under contexts of disempowerments in history. As discussions about the repatriation of these artefacts unfold, digital technologies are being increasingly used as interim measures of display for virtual restoration. The rationale behind such practices, however, deserves meticulous re-examination, considering its effectiveness in highlighting the pluralities of the object’s representational meanings imparted by different social actors throughout its journey, and in provoking more socially constructive dialogues on the difficult histories related to the displacements.
Hence, this presentation focuses on exploring the potential of digital technology to exhibit displaced objects dialogically, in ways that extend the debates on virtual repatriation and restoration. Using the story of a group of mural fragments originated in China but are now dispersed worldwide as a case study, I will unravel the polysemic nature of the displaced object and demonstrate how that could potentially enrich our understanding of intercultural encounters between individuals/groups in history. I would suggest that the application of digital technology should be retargeted at exposing the inconsistencies in the displaced object’s history. By making those discrepancies more visible on a proposed digital knowledge sharing platform, reflections on the various perceptions of the objects’ cultural significance and its broader implications for the history of overgeneralization and simplification of other cultures could be stimulated. The presentation calls for the need to fully utilise digital collaborative platforms to facilitate deeper understanding and dialogue between cultures and cultural institutions, and suggests a conceptual framework for creating such knowledge sharing space for connecting museum professionals and originating communities based on equal, non-hierarchical power relationships.
digital curation, digital storytelling, displaced object, critical heritage studies, cross-cultural understanding