Museums in Motion: Sichuan’s “Museum-on-Wheels”

In the past couple of decades, there has been a democratizing trend in museums. Rather than the "museum-as-the-curator's-playground" phenomenon, since the 1990’s there has been a steady rise in museum education. Whereas museums' early focus was on scholarly research and art conservation, funds are progressively being redirected towards outreach and public programming.

The Sichuan Museum, however, has taken this a step further with their Liudong Bowuguan (流动博物馆), or "Mobile Museum." Rather than just bringing the public to the museum, they are also bringing the museum directly to the public.

The Mobile Museum is the only one of its kind in China. Whereas some museums have similar activities as part of their education programming, Sichuan is unique for having its own eight-person department. Officially initiated February of 2010, this program began with the generous donation of four trucks to the museum. In this way, the staff can literally pack-up exhibitions and bring them to citizens across the province.

Since its inception, the Mobile Museum has traveled to forty places across Sichuan. They target a wide-range of audiences, traveling to distant, mountainous regions, minority villages, and more local areas such as schools, mines, and orphanages. They have targeted areas affected by the 2008 earthquake, and gone directly into schools to teach. When visiting poor minority villages, they have even gifted them with technological supplies and equipment such as projectors.

This program has at least one exhibition per month. These shows are based on the museum’s permanent collection, and have covered topics such as Sichuan bronzes, Han dynasty earthenware bricks, Han dynasty jades, and the Long March.

When I asked how they physically transport and display their exhibitions, staff member Zhu Kaituo gestured to the black metal stands that were stacked behind me. Through a series of photos, I was shown how those stands are used to hang wall paneling with images and text. They are also used to hang scrolls—in one case, facsimiles of paintings by 20^th century legacy Zhang Daqian. Although they seem to work primarily with text and images, they also transport artifacts, reproductions, and multi-media materials such as touch-screens and projectors. The museum also brings along its staff to give presentations, artists to do live-demonstrations, and in some cases, even art-appraisers to evaluate the locals' antiques.

Exhibit wall text

A traveling show on Han Dynasty earthenware bricks

Cases containing earthenware bricks

Staff member teaching visitors about bricks

Many Western museums are creating impressive, multi-media websites to make their collections more accessible through extensive image databases and educational resources. However, all of these efforts are based on the assumption that the public not only has access to a computer and the internet, but also has the education-level to use it. Since this is not the case for Sichuan Museum, they've found a more direct and personal way to resolve their gaps in viewership.

For those of you who are curious, here's a video from a Chinese news report about the Mobile Museum. The content is pretty much all covered above, but you can watch it for the visuals.

Kudos to Sichuan Museum for paving the way. Let’s hope that other Chinese museums will follow their lead.

*I claim no credit for any of the above images; they were all taken from baidu's image search engine.