Guimet Museum looking for cross-cultural cooperation

Jacques Giès, president of Musée Guimet, visited Taiwan this week for the country's rich cultural resources and contemporary arts. Giès is also a professor in Asian art and fluent in Chinese.

“We go deep,” said the Asian art expert, addressing the museum's thirst for deeper and greater cultural exchanges.

Guimet, one of the most important foreign institutions that specialize in Asian art, proudly houses more than 42,000 masterpieces. Founder Emile Guimet traveled in devotion to collecting extensive objects of the religions of ancient Egypt, classical antiquity and Asia from the 1870s to 1880s. Since its official inauguration in 1889, the museum has continued to focus on Asian civilizations and its religions.

Guimet Museum is currently implementing a movement in contemporary art.

According to Giès, there is a gap of two hundred years between classic art and modern art. “Quickly and directly we hope to fill the gap which separates the historical findings in the past and the very creations of the present,” said the President.

The effort started last year. Taiwanese visual artist Peng Hung-chih (彭弘智) held his solo exhibition “God Pound” last summer at the library in Guimet Museum.

Yet the success of this new movement will require huge financial assistance. The faction is currently short of funds, mostly due to the on-going economic crisis. The museum is seeking to arrange a society for individual art-lovers and corporations to facilitate and engage them in cultural exchanges.

The museum is up for all possibilities, including those outside the conventional arts. “My criterion is intensity, so everything could be [a form of art],” said the museum director who believes that the fabric of arts can lie in anything. “Anything! We don't know where it would go [yet],” he rationalized.

In commenting on Le Louvre and Taiwan-based filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang's latest joint cooperation, the film “Face,” Giès told The China Post that the cooperation was great and their museum wanted to be more open as well.

To show his dedication to the cross-cultural cooperation, the director will lend museums in Taiwan some extraordinary pieces for free. He generously told Chou Kung-shin (周功鑫), director of National Palace Museum (NPM), that she could ask for any pieces she wanted.

The two counterparts were once colleagues in the University of Paris VIII in France.

Giès praised the ongoing Yongzheng exhibition at NPM as a huge success by saying it was “true to history, and scientific.”

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