Curious curatorship at Chi Mei

There are plenty of factory sites marring the countryside around Tainan, but only the Chi Mei compund has a 4m-tall replica of Michelangelo's David in the courtyard at the entrance.

The statue at the gate of the sprawling industrial complex -- where dozens of base products that eventually are turned into items as varied as police-car sirens and TFT-LCD screens for notebook computers -- is the first exhibit at the wholly singular Chi Mei Museum (奇美博物館). Inside the company's administrative building are four floors filled with a curious collection of Western artwork, taxidermed creatures, antiques, musical instruments and old tools of warfare without any parallel in Taiwan.

"The museum collects primarily classical Western paintings and sculpture. There are already institutions that exhibit modern art in Taiwan and if people want to see ancient Chinese artifacts, they can always go to the Palace Museum in Taipei. We try to offer something a bit different," said Pan Hsin-hsin, public relations manager of the museum. Another reason few Chinese articles are exhibited, she said, is that Chi Mei's director Hsu Wen-lung (許文龍) has no desire to do boosterism for Chinese culture.

"Mr Hsu feels very strongly about Taiwan and doesn't want to parrot the things we were always taught growing up about China being the biggest and oldest and best civlization in the world. Here, he's trying to show people that other civilizations were doing great things often much earlier than Chinese people," Pan said.

Where exactly taxidermed polar bears fit into this principle may remain a mystery, but the museum certainly opens a different window to the world and its one that's worth seeing during a trip to Tainan.

Visitors begin by taking in the museum's significant collection of Western paintings and sculptures, which, while not first rate, contains works by European masters, such as El Greco, Leon Augustin Lhermitte, Claudel and Degas. With a few exemplary paintings per period, the exhibition covers about 600 years of Western art starting with the Renaissance and then moving through the Baroque, Rococo, Symbolists, Neo-Classicists and French Academists until the beginning of the Impressionists, while touching on the Dutch, English and Florentine schools of painting, among others.

The oldest painting on view is The Madonna of Humility, a 14th-century work by Paolo di Giovanni Fei. Because Renaissance works are jealously guarded by their countries of origin, purchases of such art are virtually impossible and prohibitively expensive, so its presence at the museum is a rare coup for a Taiwanese collection. Likewise, the 1605 Saint Martin and the Mendiant by El Greco, is a giant trophy that gives the museum's collection critical weight. Mr Hsu's personal preference for figurative art is especially apparent in the later works of the exhbition, such as Lhermitte's The Tavern Interior and William Adolphe Bouguereau's Madonna with the Christ Child and Saint John the Baptist, both of which are dated from the early 1880s, when Impressionism and explorations of abstraction were challenging classical painting. Corot's Batelier a la Pointe de l'Ile and Heri Lebasque's Baigneuse are as far as the museum goes into non-classical work, with the exception of a late-era Salvador Dali drawer sculpture.