On Friday 24 March, 2023, our visiting scholar Lu Zhang gave a lecture on “Staging Chinese Good Will: Display, Political Engagement and Art Mobility in the International Exhibition of Chinese Art 1935-36, London” at the University of Helsinki. As the first exhibition that the Chinese government collaborated with the British government, and the first time that the China sent its national treasures from the National Palace Museum (Gugong bowuyuan 故宫博物院, previously the Chinese imperial palace) to exhibit abroad, the International Exhibition of Chinese Art at Burlington House in 1935 to 1936 has drawn increasing scholarly interests in the last fifteen years, which revolves around the exhibition history, and the internationalism and nationalism embodied in the exhibition.
Zhang Lu’s research regarding the 1935 Exhibition is based on the archives and historical photographs from several institutions in China and Britain. It aims to understand this symbolic cultural-political process as an intercultural transmission between China and the world and a diplomatic manifestation of China to demonstrate its good will and determination for modernization via the allure of its ancient civilization. Given the overlapping historical contexts in the 1930s, there are two foci in her research. Firstly, by examining the 1935 Exhibition in terms of its negotiation and collaboration between China and Britain, and its organisation, curation, narration and reception, Zhang tries to understand the political and diplomatic engagements that the Government of the Republic of China (1911 – 1949) invested in this cultural event. Moreover, the odyssey of the artworks for the 1935 Exhibition and beyond, and the separation of the Palace Museum between mainland China and Taiwan in 1949 have added an extra layer of political meaning to these artworks. Ultimately, the current situation of “one China, four Palace Museums” presents a vivid picture of the intertwining discussion of art and politics in contemporary China.
Lu Zhang is currently a PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Nottingham, the UK. Her research focuses on the history of collecting and exhibiting Chinese art outside China from the late 19th century till now, as well as the cultural diplomacy and art repatriation of the Chinese government in different historical periods. Coming from a hybrid background of Journalism and Art History, Lu has studied at Nanchang University in China (BA, 2010) in China, the School of Oriental and African Studies University of London (MA, 2011) in the UK, and Institut d’études supérieures des arts (MA, 2017) in Paris. She has work experience in media, art gallery, and academia as a journalist, editor, curator, and teacher.
In the academic year 2021-22, she worked as a teaching affiliate in the Department of Cultural, Media and Visual Studies of the UoN in Visual Culture of the Sixties: Culture & Counterculture (fall term) and Memory, Media and Visual Culture (spring term). At the same time, she was a research associate at the Digital Transformation Hub at the UoN, leading the Archaeology Slide Digitalisation Project. Lu is a winner of the UoN Asian Research Institute Postgraduate Research Award in 2022, which allowed her to conduct her archival research on the 1935 International Exhibition of Chinese Art at the Royal Academy of Arts London.