The Museum of Chinese Art and Ethnography is pleased to present "Large Chinese vases and contact art", an exhibition that will animate the museum rooms from September 8th 2023 to February 28st, 2024.
The exhibit "Large Chinese vases and contact art" allows you to admire the collection of large vases, following an important restoration work, dating back to the Qing Dynasty. It is an enchanting path of vascular art that celebrates its stylistic variety and shows its infinite good taste, typical of a way that is as ancient as it is wonderful.
It will be an opportunity to explore that ceramic art, master of Chinese culture,, which in shaping and decorating artefacts of tangible splendor, favors the encounter between distant cultures, which communicate through the eloquence of beauty.
From the most ancient artifacts we arrive at an art of decadence, which however is not without successful works, for the essential gives way to an overall effect of great impact, and in front of which, one cannot but admire good taste and expertise.
A taste that favors contact between the East and the West, between the highly skilled Chinese craftsmen and the great families of the old continent, who commissioned, due to an increasing demand, exquisite porcelains with European shapes and decorations, a medium culture of exceptional value.
A market made of transformation, which in maintaining the excellent mastery of a millenary art, accelerates the path to modernity in a pro-European key.
The vase collection is intertwined with a further temporary section, the celebration of the Art of Contact, protagonist in China between the end of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, through the "Tong su jiao yu tu" - Illustrations for popular education, a series of paintings which, through the universal language of images, promote the understanding and dissemination of knowledge.
A contact that places Western modernity and Chinese tradition at the center, in a vivid reciprocal interweaving. Clear expression of a new education to the implementation of knowledge, in order to enhance a different way of thinking, which in emotionally approaching cultures determines concrete and fruitful aspects of improvement.
The European merchants were the first intermediaries, masters of a profitable work of mutual import and export of knowledge.
The Museum thus takes the opportunity to celebrate this wonderful connection in order to convey the message of mutual enrichment that arises from human intimate need for contact, a human, social and cultural contact.
Exhibit curated by: Chiara Allegri, Maurizio Salvarani and Laura Ferrari.
Info: Museo d’Arte Cinese ed Etnografico, viale San Martino, 8 – 43123 Parma
Tel: 0521-257337 - web: www.museocineseparma.org - mail:
