The National Palace Museum (NPM) in Taipei and its southern branch in Chiayi County are to stay open throughout the Lunar New Year holiday, providing the public with an artistic and cultural option for things to do with family and friends during the break.
Visitors to the Taipei museum may also pick up free red envelopes or new year couplets written with auspicious blessings until Wednesday next week.
The Gleam Ensemble, a small classical Western musical troupe from Taiwan, is to put on a free concert at the Taipei museum from 3pm to 4pm on Tuesday.
Photo courtesy of Chiayi County Government
Meanwhile, the Southern Branch of the museum said that it has an ongoing collaboration with the county’s Sugar Cane Train Railway at Suantou Sugar Factory, which allows train passengers to use their ticket stubs to enter the museum for free until Thursday.
In other news, the National Museum of History in Taipei is set to reopen to the public on Feb. 21, after a five-year renovation of the first public museum established by the Nationalist government in Taiwan after 1949.
Aside from expanding the museum’s display space by 866.12m2, people will for the first time be allowed to visit the top floor of the five-story museum, it said.
The fifth floor was previously used to store the museum’s collection of more than 50,000 artifacts, including prehistoric colored pottery, as well as modern calligraphy, it said.
The top floor is to host a special exhibition of the architectural features of the museum, which was built in the style of a northern Chinese palace, it said.
Visitors will also be able to enjoy views of the Taipei Botanical Garden and the cultural and educational institutes in “Nanhai Academy,” veteran architecture researcher Lee Chian-lang (李乾朗) said.
Formally opened on March 12, 1956, the museum was built next to the lotus pond in the botanical garden and started with a collection of artifacts handed over by Japan after World War II and items originally from Henan Museum in China.
A new permanent exhibition titled “Discover our connections, right here” features Chang Dai-chien’s (張大千) 1965 painting Morning View at Alishan (阿里山曉望), as well as fang-hu, a squarish ritual wine vessel, from China’s Spring and Autumn period, the museum said.
Three of the 750 so-called “Chinese culture” boxes containing copies of artifacts that included works by artists in Taiwan will also be on display.
The artifacts toured more than 30 countries between 1969 and 1986 to assert the role played by the Republic of China in preserving Chinese culture, as the country faced an increasingly challenging diplomatic environment.
The museum is also to host a special exhibition titled “Monuments of Brush and Ink” showcasing calligraphy and ink painting masterpieces in its collection, as well as the “Birth of the Modernist Art Movement in Taiwan” in another exhibition, it said.
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