Nearly 200 works of art from the collection of the Palace Museum, also known as the Forbidden City, will be shown in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in the US.
Our Washington correspondent He Fei has details.
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is the first US art museum to house works from the Palace Museum's permanent collection.
Nearly 200 pieces of art have been drawn from the thousands in its collections, organized into four sections based on the layout of the Forbidden City.
Li Jian with the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is the curator of the exhibition, entitled Forbidden City: Imperial Treasures from the Palace Museum, Beijing.
She says they try to show the audience a vivid image of the royal court in the Ming and Qing Dynasty.
"The first part demonstrates rituals of the Qing Court, which includes the portraits of the Qing emperors and paintings about the emperors' daily lives. The second part reveals court arts in the inner court. Therefore, you can tell, the whole exhibition is designed to follow the layout of the Forbidden City from the south to the north. The third part is court paintings. As we can't move the real royal gardens here, in this part we mainly focus on bird-and-flower paintings. And the last part depicts the religious life in the Palace, mainly Tibetan Buddhism and Taoism."
According to the curator, the exhibition offers a broad perspective of imperial China through evocative gallery design, graphic materials, architectural models, and video.
Dramatic images of the palace and amazing architectural scale will take visitors on a simulated journey into the buildings and grounds, once forbidden to the general public.
The museum will also use 3D printing technology to create a scaled model of the Forbidden City.
Further more, the exhibition is only one of the highlights of the two museums' collaborative project.
The two museums are in the midst of a series of projects between 2010 and 2016 that include exhibition exchanges and staff site visits in the areas of administration, curatorship, conservation, education and security.
Alex Nyerges is the director of Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
"Our partnership is a seven-year deal that includes exchanges of staff, exchanges of ideas and ways to do business. But it's also the exchange of two exhibitions. The exhibition that will open in Richmond, Treasure from the Forbidden. The other half of the exhibition exchange is when our Faberge collection will be the newly renovated galleries at the Palace Museum in 2016 to be showcased. It will be the first time a collection from an American museum will be house at the Palace Museum ever."
Lu Kang, the acting Chinese ambassador to the States, speaks highly about such cultural exchange projects.
He believes "the strongest bond that links China and US is culture", which is a line quoted from the Chinese Minister of Culture Cai Wu.
"China and US are now building the new model of major country relationship. To enable a long-term friendly relationship between our two countries, we need to not only enhance political trust, strengthen economic ties, but also advance people-to-people exchange and cultural exchange so that our two peoples could know more about each other and understand each other better. Cultural exchange has just the unique power to bring people together."
The exhibition Imperial Treasures from the Palace Museum will be on view later in October and will last for three months until January, 2015.
And in May 2016, art works from Virginia Museum of Fine Arts will travel to Beijing and be shown in the historic Meridian Gate.
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