 The exhibition "Jewels of Transcendence: Himalayan and Mongolian Treasures" was curated by Professor Xu Xiaodong, the Associate Director of the Art Museum and the Programme Director of RPCAA. It was held from September 2018 to February 2019 in the Art Museum. Due to the exquisiteness and rareness of the exhibits, it aroused great interest from local and mainland audiences, becoming the IMUSEUM’s most-watched exhibition in Hong Kong at that time. The tour exhibition started on 20 November 2019 and continued for 17 months. The first round was at Anhui Museum (2019.11.29–2020.2.23), then travelled to the China Port Museum (2020.4.15–2020.7.31) and Changsha Museum (2020.10.23–2021.1.17). Last but not least, Chengdu Jinsha Site Museum was the last stop of the tour (2021.2.1–2021.4.25), and the exhibits have returned to the museum successfully in the early of May 2021. |
This is the first large-scale tour exhibition attempted by the Art Museum. The museum would like to thank Cheng Xun Tang and Meng Die Xuan for their generosity in lending a total of 233 sets of exhibits for the tour. The event features ornaments, daily necessities and religious objects from the Mongolian and Himalayan, which showcase their respective history and culture, customs and lifestyles, spiritual beliefs and aesthetics. Shortly after the tour started, the Covid-19 broke out. As a result, museums across the country had encountered numerous restrictions such as closures and crowd control. Despite so, the number of visitors to the four exhibitions exceeded 800,000. To compensate for the inconvenience caused by the pandemic, all museums had put in unremitting efforts to develop and construct various online platforms with advanced technology. For example, constant disseminaton of tweets through WeChat, setting up 360° virtual tour on cloud exhibition halls, providing online audio tour guides, and organising online lectures by experts and scholars etc. The dissemination through Weibo and other social media platforms' reports also allowed more audiences to access the Glorious arts of the Himalayans and Mongolians.
The online exhibition had been visited over 930,000 times on the Jinsha Site Museum alone.
The exhibition’s official Weibo account had accumulated more than 3.5 million views; its five streaming events had also reached 1.14 million stream viewership. These events and activities attracted extensive media coverage, including over 500 media exposures and 430 reports by APP, WeChat and other online platforms. The popularity and influence of the exhibition is very much self-evident.
The exhibition is rated as: Major (Cultural) Exchange Programme 2021 by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and International Cooperation Department (Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan Affairs Office). It is also the only shortlisted project from Sichuan. The tour exhibition has greatly impacted the interaction between the Art Museum and mainland museums. |
