Current debates on museums and art museums tend to exclude university art museums. A lack of domestic research on university art museums was due primarily to the limited social influences exhibited by them—the Museum of Chinese Medicine at the Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, for instance, perceives less than ten visitors daily. Yet the abashed number of visitors align with the richness of its collections; the museum holds thousands of traditional medicinal records and over 800 specimens within its 1500 square meters exhibition hall, quite unparalleled within the entire medical field. Some other museums, however, attract few visitors with the paucity of their collections. The museum collection at the Renmin University of China is crowned only with Correspondence Letters from Chen Duxiu (et al.) to Hushi[MM1] , acquired by the State Administration of Culture Heritage at auctions in 2009. Such collection deficits are due to both economic as well as systematic reasons. The construction and management of university museums and art museums have not yet been included in the higher education evaluation system, thus counting towards a marginality of university museums.
Looking back to university museums in earlier days, the scenes were more liberal and research-focused. The Aurora Museum was founded in 1868 (formerly known as Xujiahui Museum) and was taken over by the Aurora University in 1930. Its research departments encompassed biology and archaeology, displaying a range of bronze, ceramics, jade, and coins in the antiquity hall. The museum also hosted a library dedicated to fine prints of animals and plants, both domestic and foreign, while it would also distribute specimens to experts worldwide.
In the Republic era, universities and/or educational institutions stood behind most of the museums. In 1905, the prominent entrepreneur Zhang Jian petitioned the Educational Department and Zhang Zhidong for setting up an Imperial Museum in the capital, and museums in other provinces gradually. [MM2] His six museum establishment manuals remain illuminating to this date, being: i) the form of architectures, ii) the orders of the display, iii) the laws of management, iv) the categorisations of models, v) the examples of collection, [MM3] and vi) the guidelines for commendation. Modern museum theologies already took shape within Zhang Jian’s propositions, yet what was more valuable was his foreseeing the importance of museums to be grounds of research for university students, while such field studies would, in turn, become beneficial to the universities. Though the imperial museum never landed, Zhang Jian nevertheless had already established Nantong Normal University—the first normal university in China—even before his propositions to Zhang Zhidong. Later, he progressed to setting up a private Nantong Museum in exhibiting nature, history, and art. Zhang Jian probably inherited much of his museum philosophies from Japanese, especially from his early years touring Japan’s Imperial Museums and art exhibitions, where traces of such influences could be found from his calling for collections proposals and visitor guide. Zhang Jian was among the first figures behind the modernisation of museums in China.
Another example is the West China Union University Museum in Chengdu (the nowadays Sichuan University Museum). Established in 1932, the museum hosted departments of artifacts, natural history, medicinal and dental sciences. In 1932, the Havard-Yenching Institute (who solely funded the museum) commissioned Dr. David Crockett Graham as the curator. Graham received a doctoral degree in cultural anthropology from Chicago University in 1927. His excavations of the Han Dynasty tombs and Tang/Song Dynasty ceramics in Sichuan followed modern academic regulations, thus preserving specimens with accurate records detailing ground conditions, and by this, contributed greatly to the development of modern archaeology in Southwest China. In 1934, Graham published A Preliminary Report of the Hanchow Excavations, the inaugural report on archaeological discoveries in the Ancient Shu sites, entailing also ethnographic findings of the ethnic minorities in Sichuan, and contributed fundamentally to anthropological researches in the Southwestern frontiers. The curator succeeding Graham was Zheng Dekun, who received his Ph.D in archaeology and museum management at Harvard University in 1941. Zheng Dekun introduced modern archaeological approaches in field archaeology, specimen collection, and systematic exhibition studies; simultaneously, he weaved modern management methodologies into routine museum management practices. Zheng Dekun remarked optimistically through West China Union University Museum in the Past Five Years, that “the museum has become an important local attraction, yielding frequent visits from scholars, students, and interested personnel alike; people from other provinces and abroad, high-ranking officials, international celebrities, allied air forces are also among the museum’s regular visitors.”
The aforementioned examples depict a picture where university museums and university art museums were pivotal in the importation and dissipation of modern ideologies, yet such thread of development was cut abrupt. I thus wish to call for a revival of the tradition, of universities to re-emphasis the non-trivial roles university museums take in the exchange and production of knowledge. I would also like to suggest university museums dropping some of its educational responsibilities by reducing the frequencies of exhibitions centering on works of its own staff and students—and turn instead to foster academic research, as the utmost ambition of knowledge production should not be confined to the mere employment of it. Otherwise, I’m afraid, such qualities of brave experimenting and creativity would leave universities. High school or professional education suffice the functional side, whereas university education is critical in nature, and it should outline the underlying foundations and laws of knowledge.
From the 1950s onward, the belief of university museums being educational institutes has been at large. In 1947, when Zheng Dekun, curator of the West China Union University Museum was setting the second five-year plan, he had in mind a vision of the museum to be a mecca for contemporary education—only failed to realise it due to his relocation to Hong Kong. Yet it is my personal belief that university museums should not be only defined as educational institutions. The highest benchmark for universities remains academic, with the goal of expanding human knowledge base, and educational purposes are fulfilled alongside. With the aid of the professional research facilities, university museums have a more urgent goal of generating new thoughts and ideological currents, rather than enhancing aesthetic education: museums, after all, were sites of philological debates at their origin in ancient Rome. Museum as a concept exceeds beyond confinements of “college” or “university”, it is the aggregation of a research institute, library, and college.
The Statutes of the International Council of Museums (1989) proposed at the 15th International Council of Museum Conference in Hague outlined three major responsibilities of museums—research, educate, and appreciate. Research was listed at the forefront, for without solid academic foundations, aesthetic education could not prosper. I believe a university museum should locate its research direction in regard to its existing collections, and the focus could be antiquities, contemporary art, or archaeology, as with the case of Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology at Peking University. Albeit selling less than 20 tickets even at the heights of the summer holidays, the museum stands out as the first archaeology centered university museum in China, having inherited collections from the archaeology department at Peking University in the 1920s, and later from Peking University Museum and the pre-history museum at Yenching University. Art museums come out of museums, and university art galleries should be termed “university art museums” instead. Museums have long evolved from the pragmatic notion of displaying ancient objects, the MoMA in New York for instance, is a strong evidence of the practicality and success of modern and contemporary concepts. A great number of Chinese artists took part in exhibitions at Western university museums, although some are still unclear of the importance of such participation. For them, it was only opportunities of attending an exhibition abroad, too often they failed to appreciate that the true significance lies in the research elements endowed, and the evaluation from the universities as academic institutions.
The development of Western museums falls into three periods: the Renaissance, the Classical, and the Modern era. Late 16th to the 17th century saw social elites owning cabinets of curiosities, collecting natural and manufactured artifacts. Even at that point there lied a certain modern element to it, for such collections provided opportunities for public viewing, and gradually scholars, artists, merchandisers, and ateliers could have opportunities to observe and research. When museums became phenomenal in the 18th century, however, a more monopolistic order was established, characterised by rigid classification standards echoing that of the encyclopedia’s. Cabinets of curiosities in Renaissance was also classified to some extents, only more emancipated, as it was innately personal for nobilities to build their collections under individual preferences.
Although with the same goal of trying to encapsulate and understand the world, divisions were large in terms of classification standards during the Renaissance and Classical era. In the Classical era, museums attempted to install definite standards, while Renaissance cabinets of curiosities were full in imagination and wonders, and the distinction also made the latter peculiar research subjects for university museums. The installation created by the American artist Mark Dion (1961-) in 2001 for Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota was, indeed, termed Cabinet of Curiosities. The installation critiques knowledge systems in place at universities by turning university art museums into laboratories, and arguably even further into cabinets of curiosities. For such cabinets assemble imaginations of the social elites, thus are experimenting and intangible in character. In fact, the earliest university museums were expanded from cabinets of curiosities: the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University founded in 1683 was the first ever university museum, its collections found basis from cabinets of curiosities. To reinitiate the notion of cabinets of curiosities in the contemporary context aims to foster students’ participation in challenging and revolutionising both the teaching ideologies at universities and existing hierarchies adopted by museums.
The occurrence of modern knowledge almost accounted directly to the decline of museums in the Classical era. With the French Revolution taking place in the late 18th and 19th century, the elitism among museums was overcome by a blow of democracy. Museums now open their doors to the city's residences, enlarged admission in effect turned museums into modern visual entities opposite fatuous. Admittedly, the seemingly modern museum apparatuses could also be manipulated as propagandistic sites voicing interests of the nation-state. The piece by Mark Dion was recalcitrance to the tame of national machines, and against classification under names of rationality, for such classifications signify dominating ideologies. Modern thinking proposes alternatives by asking: “who decides what counts as knowledge?”, “who is teaching?”, and “what knowledge is being conveyed?”—in the same vein as Foucault claimed “Who is speaking? Who, among the totality of speaking individuals, is accorded the right to use this sort of language? Who is qualified to do so? Who derives from it his own special quality, and his prestige [...]?”
The strongest opponent of museums in the early 20th century was that of the Futurism, who held museums were out of place as they failed to produce knowledge, nor exhibiting adventuring spirits. In the latter half of the 20th century, a thread of new museum theory flourished in the West, and it critiqued existing research methodologies of the traditional museum theories. Under the traditional model, questions of value, meaning, control, explanation, authority, and authenticity found no convincing explanations. Taking a Foucauldian approach, new museum theories examined the definite standards of museums, hence revealing fragility of the perceptions. New museum theories find a more suitable ground with art museums, for other types of museums—including natural and science museums—do not impart value controversies. The trajectories of science development leave no space for neo-historical judgement, yet persistent researches and re-valuation are indispensable in the art museum developments.
As long as universities without boundaries exist, so should be university museums without boundaries. Non-boundaries emphasis more in terms of the non-nationalism standpoint university museums shall stand, rather than physical removal of entrance tickets or visiting regulations. An overshadowing impression of Chinese university museums lies in the heavily local-orientated focus, and overt confinement of exhibition centering on geographic limitations. It is thus crucial for university museums to overcome such geographical restrictions defined by its location, and from the narrow sense of localism derived within, in order for university museums to produce modern knowledge. How should we then produce modern knowledge after such liberation? The two most important ideological revolutions of museums shield light on the way forward.
The first ideological revolution of museums took place between 1880 and 1920. Known as the “museum modernisation movement”, it advocated the integration of disciplines in university museums. The second ideological revolution from 1960 to 1980 urged museums to become social apparatuses with political influences. Whether the second ideological revolution was necessary for university art museums had no verdict; for the discussion on whether university museums should become politically influential institutions is in extension, a discussion on whether academics have political influence. Historically, no consensus was reached regarding academics’ saying in the political system, while I personally believe academics should be endowed with political influences, for European thinkers often speak of the current situation, and Chinese academics were also deeply entwined with state governing in early histories. Academic researches follow systematic steps, and knowledge must first find the basis of legalization from within itself, while discovering factors beyond practicality to be qualified and convinced in persuading and influencing government decisions.
The politicization of academics does not equate to academics being contaminated with political vices. In 1912, when Cai Yuanpei became the Director of the Ministry of Education, he appointed Lu Xun to be the Section Head of the Social Education Division, overseeing libraries, museums, and art museums alike. Yet there were no art museums to be managed. In 1913, Lu Xun appealed Opinions in Advocating Art [MM4] in the proposition of establishing a central museum, but received no reply. At the time officials put their minds nowhere but in their own careers, and due to a lack of emphasise on education, Lu Xun’s plan squandered, but the piece has nevertheless become an important modern essay on art.
In 1955, Huang Binhong, whom Fu Lei highly praised as “the highest-achieved artist in modern China”, passed away, his family intended to donate more than 4,000 pieces of his legacy and more than 3,000 pieces of his collection to the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, where Huang Binhong held a position. Influenced by the larger political climate at that time, university officials did not pay much attention to Huang Binhong and furthermore failed to comply with the family’s reasonable requirements of holding frequent exhibitions. Ultimately, the academy did not accept the donation. The anecdote reviewed today seems surprising, if not regretful, for otherwise the collections of the academy’s museum would be opulent.
From here, we can see that university art museums must first attach importance to the academic resources of its own school: this especially holds true for professional art academies. Art museums at comprehensive universities should establish research institutions and conduct interdisciplinary research according to their own disciplinary advantages. Yet the integration of disciplines or interdisciplinary studies should aim further than reaching a consensus; it is more substantial to explore the logic of knowledge, for university art museums are also birthplaces for the unknown.
Written in January, 2010
Duan Jun
