The Taipei International Flora Exposition offers plenty of interactive opportunities to visitors, but for flower lovers looking for even more, the National Palace Museum (NPM) is offering an alternative — interactive flower installations — in the heart of the city.
The museum is showcasing a series of works, including flower images projected onto replicas of Song dynasty Ru porcelains, at Huashan 1914 Creative Park, National Palace Museum Director Chou Kung-shin (周功鑫) said.
When you blow into a tube attached to the replica, the flower petals in the projected images will slowly blossom, symbolizing the idea that God gave life to humans by breathing into their bodies, the museum said.
The two-room exhibition extends well beyond flowers. It also has an interactive table screen resembling an ink pond, which displays treasured paintings, and a naked-eye 3D animated film of comical figures inspired by the museum’s collection.
The “Colorful e-NPM” exhibition, the brainchild of the museum, creative artists and technology companies, is part of a bigger plan to bring art to life and give new perspectives to historical treasures by combining art and technology, Huashan Park chairman Wang Jung-wen (王榮文) said.
“I have dreamed of setting up an NPM branch here for a long time,” Wang said, but he realized that transporting valuable historic treasures to the park and preserving them there would be difficult.
“My dream was realized through digital technology,” he said proudly as he opened the downtown NPM branch, giving young people and tourists too busy to head to the actual museum a glimpse of ancient Chinese artifacts.
“We wanted to fully utilize the small space and give it infinite capacity,” Chou said of the 235m2 space, diminutive compared with the museum’s 6,600m2 of floor space at its complex in Taipei’s Shilin District.
Danielle St Germain-Gordon, vice president of development and membership at the American Association of Museums, said the Huashan Park initiative was conceived to get younger audiences immersed in art without dragging them into a more formal museum environment.
Hsieh Chun-ko (謝俊科), head of the museum’s Department of Education, Exhibition and Information Services, said Taiwanese audiences can expect more of these displays in the future and noted that some are already on tour in many cities in China.
For foreign business travelers who are too busy with work to even visit the Huashan park, the museum has put up a similar display in Terminal 2 of Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport, called “NPM Lohas.”
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