China’s famed Palace Museum opened a branch in Hong Kong yesterday located in the the West Kowloon Cultural District.
Works of calligraphy and paintings on silk dating back more than 1,000 years featured heavily in the exhibition, housed in a seven-story building in a newly developed harborside arts district.
More than 900 treasures from the collection of the Palace Museum in Beijing are put on display on rotation at the opening exhibitions. Some of the pieces are being shown in Hong Kong for the first time.
The delicate artworks will be returned to Beijing for safekeeping after 30 days.
From paintings and bronze wares to embroideries and ancient architectures, the exhibits span the 5,000-year history of Chinese civilization, covering all categories of the collection of the Palace Museum, including 166 pieces of first-class cultural relics of the country.
This will be the largest and highest-level cultural heritage exhibitions of the Palace Museum outside of the mainland since its establishment in 1925.
Preparatory work for the exhibitions began in 2018, with the Palace Museum fielding a team of leading experts and scholars, in collaboration with the curatorial team of the museum.
The opening of the exhibition came just two days after China’s leader Xi Jinping marked the anniversary of Hong Kong’s return with a visit to what is officially called the special autonomous region and a speech emphasizing Beijing’s vision of “One country, two systems.”
About 80% of the around 140,000 tickets for the first four weeks of the opening exhibitions have already been sold.
Kevin Yeung, secretary for culture, sports and tourism of the HKSAR government, said the museum will leverage Hong Kong’s own cultural edge to tell a good China story.
General admission is priced at HKD50, while special exhibition tickets will be HKD120.
The museum will be free to all on Wednesdays during the first year of opening, and 150,000 general admission tickets will be sponsored by corporates and other organizations for distribution to underprivileged groups, the museum said
Daisy Wang, the museum’s deputy director, said the current exhibition was a “once in a lifetime opportunity to look at some of the rarest early works of painting and calligraphy in Chinese art history.”
The collection was built during the Ming and Qing dynasties and many of its finest works now reside in Taiwan, where they were taken after the Communists seized power on the mainland in 1949. MDT/Agencies
