On May 17, 2022, China National Silk Museum (NSM) launched the
International Museum Day Forum on the theme of “The Power of
Museums: Research, Collaborations, and Community” virtually. Dr. An
Laishun, Vice President of ICOM, Dr. Kate Seymour, Chair of ICOM
International Committee for Conservation (ICOM-CC), Corinne
Thépaut-Cabasset, Chair of ICOM COSTUME, Prof. Sally Yerkovich,
Chair of ICOM Standing Committee on Ethics, Prof. Marie Louise Bech
Nosch, President of Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters,
Mr. Xudong Wang, Director of The Palace Museum, and many other
scholars all participated and gave presentations.
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Gallery view of "Gathering in the Galaxy:
Great Treasures from the Silk Roads", the first online 3D
exhibition on the SROM platform, 2021
On April 15, NSM officially launched the Silk Road Online
Curating Competition while the Silk Road Week will be initiated on
May 27. “NSM aims to celebrate the 30th anniversary through a
series of activities,” said by Dr. Zhao Feng, Director of the China
National Silk Museum.
30 Years, Showcase the Power of Museums
On May 18, 2022, the International Museum Day, themed “The Power
of Museums” is intended to highlight museums’ capability and
potential of influencing the world.
To celebrate the “International Museum Day”, NSM has just held
the “The Power of Museums” forum, inviting museum insiders to
discuss each museum’s practice for “Research and digitization,”
“International collaborations” and “Community integration.”
NSM has been planning and executing its digital museum platform,
which has involved more than 40 museums worldwide. That includes
digital collections, digital exhibitions, digital knowledge, and
virtual curating programmes, which are dedicated to developing the
Silk Road Online Museum into a curating platform widely recognized
by international museums. In 2022, the Silk Road Online Curating
Competition is launched, and it intends to invite students of
museology and design as well as jobholders to participate in the
curating competition.
In addition, since 2020, the week before and after June 22 (the
successful inscription of the Silk Roads on the UNESCO World
Heritage List) will be set as "Silk Road Week" every year for
encouraging museums and relevant cultural institutions along the
Silk Roads to hold relevant activities to elevate the spirit of the
Silk Roads. Shahbaz Khan, the representative of the UNESCO in
China, visited the opening ceremony and delivered a speech praising
the Silk Road Week event as a model for enhancing mutual learning
among people worldwide, fully embodying the Zhejiang’s practice in
the cultural heritage sector and Chinese wisdom, and was warmly
received by the cultural heritage sector both at home and
abroad.
The third "Silk Road Week" will be launched in 2022, and it will
invite Qinghai Province as the guest province and Uzbekistan as the
guest country to jointly explore the Silk Roads, one of the
greatest common heritages of mankind, to empower modern life.
For NSM, historical heritage is brought to life through
continuous events including the Chinese Costume Festival, Hangzhou
Global Qipao Festival, Biennale of Natural Dyes (BoND), and more,
which convert the findings into transmittable cultural content,
spreading and promoting in a way favored by the public.
30 Years, Make it to China’s top 10 museum
As the world’s biggest silk-specialized museum, NSM has been
dedicated to carrying forward systematic, original, and advanced
research from a global perspective. It aims to uncover the
scientific, historical, and artistic value of textiles unearthed
along the Silk Roads through multidisciplinary means, and to
explain the bi-directional circulation of the ancient Silk Roads
and its profound significance to the development of Chinese and the
world civilization.
NSM is devoted to serving one purpose: taking Chinese silk as
the core, derived from the cultural heritage of textiles and
clothing, to promote the four major sectors which are silk history,
technology protection, traditional crafts, and contemporary
fashion, and serving coordinated cultural, economic, and social
development. NSM aims to flourish the research, protection,
display, inheritance, and innovation of silk textile and clothing
culture. It is dedicated to carrying forward the Silk Road spirit
from home to abroad and working as a bridge for cultural exchanges
and mutual learning of civilizations.
NSM will spare no efforts in developing a research-oriented,
international, dedicated, and fashion-focused museum to revitalize
traditional craftsmanship as well as to promote the creative
transformation of innovative development of silk culture and
empower a better life.
At present, NSM has initially established a rather complete
textile preservation system of ancient and modern Chinese and
foreign textiles, forming a database and sample library of textile
cultural relics with complete chronology, clear archaeological
information, and complete varieties and categories. NSM also
constructed a global coverage of Chinese silk cultural relics
design material library, making the past serve the present.
By the end of 2021, China National Silk Museum has a total
collection of nearly 70,000 pieces/sets, covering ancient weaving
and embroidery treasures, ancient costumes unearthed and handed
down along the Silk Roads, modern Chinese and Western costumes,
national costumes of the world, and intangible culture of the
silkworm, mulberry, dyeing, weaving, embroidery, Chinese and
foreign fashion art, textile fabrics, design drafts, silk samples,
and fiber artworks.
30 Years, More In-depth Research
NSM adheres to conducting original research on the origin of
silk, cultural exchanges on the Silk Roads, traditional weaving and
dyeing, textile protection and restoration and so forth, and
strives to build a "research-oriented museum" and continue to lead
the international silk culture research.
Simultaneously, NSM takes silk as the research object to promote
international cooperation in cultural and scientific exchanges in a
comprehensive way. It also intends to provide technical support for
the research on textiles unearthed from national sites along the
Silk Roads by setting up overseas workstations and carrying out
project cooperation. The research results are published in
multilingual forms. Now, the research team has comprehensively
sorted out the silks scattered in the Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes from
Britain, France, Russia, and other countries, and published the
"Textiles from Dunhuang" in multiple languages, which fills the
void of Dunhuang Studies in silk research. The study is an
important support for research in the fields of the Silk Roads,
textile and clothing art history and other related fields. At the
same time, the team started the "Chinese Silk Art Series" project,
which will comprehensively collect, organize, research, edit and
publish 100 volumes of Chinese silk cultural relics collected in
museums around the world.
NSM is also actively exploring and constructing knowledge
content from a global perspective. In 2020, the museum launched the
"World Map of Silk" which is a cooperation project with scholars
and universities from many countries abroad. The project is based
on the silk heritage from a global perspective and the
identification of silk cultural relics, dating, geographical
traceability, technical restoration, modelling analysis and so
forth. As a cross-language interactive map of world silk, it aims
to conduct correlation analysis on the silk heritage information in
it, to help carry out cooperative research on silk cultural
exchanges, develop real-time interactive, growable and evolvable
knowledge service technologies, and visualize the research results,
to improve the World Silk Heritage Framework and build a global
knowledge community.
30 years, Build a fashion museum
As the first national silk professional museum in China, NSM
mainly focused on displaying the development achievements of
China's textile and silk industry at the beginning of its
establishment. At the same time, through the analysis of its own
advantages and the observation of the world's top art museums, NSM
decided to take fashion as the entry point to build a fashion
museum in China, in line with international standards.
Upholding this belief, NSM launched its first fashion exhibition
"Discovery· FASHION: 2011 Annual Fashion Review", presenting the
2011 annual fashion trends from clothing and fabrics, home textile
fabrics and finished products, clothing, and fashion information,
showing the fashion side of China and directly introduced the
concept of fashion into the museum exhibition. Today, the Fashion
China Annual Review Series of NSM has gone through 11 years and has
closely focused on sorting out representative fashion weeks,
events, exhibitions, and other similar activities in the country,
sifted and collected the most influential designer works and
textile fabric products of the year, and held a series of fashion
forums, fashion shows, and other series, that has attracted much
attention in China.
At the same time, NSM further extended its fashion vision to the
world, cooperated with ROM and V&A, and launched "Dior by Dior
(1947-1957)" and "Balenciaga: Shaping Fashion" in 2019 and 2020,
which attracted widespread attention.
In 2022, NSM adheres to the tenet of "making cultural relics
alive and making life better” and joins hands with Hangzhou Tower
to jointly create the "NSM· Fashion Museum", bringing the fashion
collections of the museum into the most fashionable place in
Hangzhou’s shopping mall. On February 26, the first exhibition of
"NSM· Fashion Museum", titled "Fashion
Silhouettes" raised its curtains, and new exhibitions will
be held every quarter. Director Zhao Feng said: "The National Silk
Fashion Museum is a cooperation between Zhejiang cultural
institutions and Hangzhou commercial business. This is the first
state-owned museum in China which enters the commercial space in
the city center and holds a long-term special exhibition in it;
Hangzhou Tower has also become the first large-scale commercial
space in China that introduce exhibitions from national museums on
a long-term basis; finally, this is the first fashion museum to be
opened in fashion space. Therefore, it is of great significance and
has a long-lasting influence.”
30 Years, Further Down the Silk Roads
China is the birthplace of silk in the world, and the
long-standing Chinese silk culture has written a profound chapter
in Chinese civilization. The ancient Silk Roads connect the East
and the West and have become an important trade and cultural
exchange channel, making outstanding contributions to mutual
learning between Eastern and Western civilizations.
To this end, the National Silk Museum has held the "Silk Road"
themed exhibitions for seven consecutive years since 2015, showing
the profound cultural heritage and superb silk technology of the
oriental country of silk in an all-round way, becoming a golden
symbol for Zhejiang to carry out cultural exchanges between China
and foreign countries. Among them, in 2020, the exhibition "The
Silk Roads: Before and After Richthofen" won the Top 10 Exhibitions
Awards for all the museums in China.
The rapid development of the museum is inseparable from the
painstaking efforts of the leaders. The director, Dr. Zhao Feng,
was appointed as the deputy director in 1991 and served as the
director in 2010, now it is his 31st year working at NSM. He is not
only a top expert in the field of Chinese silk and textiles but
also an important force in the field of international textiles and
museums. He has visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York,
the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, and the British Museum in
London as a visiting researcher. He is also member of the ICOM
Ethics Committee (ETHCOM), member of the Centre International
d'Etude des Textiles Anciens (CIETA), and chairman of the
International Association for the Study of Silk Road Textiles
(IASSRT). While attaching great importance to the
internationalization of national silk, he will also devote more to
promoting the voice of Chinese museums on the international stage.
"In the next 30 years, I hope that NSM can adhere to the consistent
concept of 'Broad vision, Solid foundation, High specificity,
Exquisite craftsmanship', take the wind of the times, condense
social aspirations, gather the strength of the whole museum, and
build a comprehensive, research-oriented, internationalized and
fashionable Chinese silk museum.”
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Media contact Contact: Jinfang Li Company Name: China
National Silk Museum Contact: 73-1, Yuhuangshan Road, Xihu
District, Hangzhou, Zhejiang,China Website: www.chinasilkmuseum.com
Email: lijinfang@cnsilkmuseum.org