Versailles masterpieces set for HK show
About 100 masterpieces from the Palace of Versailles will be displayed in Hong Kong in December this year after a showcase in Beijing, as part of celebrations to commemorate the 60th anniversary of diplomatic relations between China and France.
Bringing the exhibition to China was important to learning what the country’s audience wanted to see and why they visited the French palace, said Laurent Salome, director of the National Museum of the Palaces of Versailles and Trianon.
“China was 12 to 14 per cent of the visitors of Versailles before the pandemic, and now it’s just 2 per cent but I think [the numbers are] going to come back very soon,” Salome said in a panel discussion during the International Cultural Summit in Hong Kong.
“By coming here and working on exhibitions with our colleagues in the museums, we see the reactions and so it helps us have a real exchange when they come [to Versailles],” he said, adding that he was not looking at tourist numbers but building deeper connections with visitors.
Hong Kong Palace Museum said about 80 to 100 pieces would be exhibited, as part of the FrancoChinese year of cultural tourism.
The Beijing edition of the exhibition will feature nearly 150 works that illustrate the exchanges between France and China in the 17th and 18th centuries from the collections of Versailles and Beijing’s Palace Museum, where the show will be held from April 1.
Hong Kong will host a reworked version of the Beijing show.
Asked whether the exhibits brought from Versailles were used as a charm offensive to China, Salome said exchanges such as this were one way of building closer ties.
“We need to be closer to understand each other better, because we live in a world which can be very scary. The more we are friends with each other and have fun together, the better,” he said.
Salome said gifting art was a very important diplomatic tool in France that was likely to have started in the 17th and 18th centuries.
It also reflected the country as an important cultural nation, he added.
“France has always been very interested in creating those [kinds of] links. We have all these projects with Abu Dhabi, which has become crucial for France in the Middle East. And our relationship with China is, of course, very important,” he said.
The Palace of Versailles said the coming exhibition was an enhanced version of the one held 10 years ago on its grounds to celebrate the 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations.
Since 2018, the palace has organised a travelling exhibition titled “Virtually Versailles” which offers visitors three-dimensional reconstructions of its grounds.
The exhibition was in Hong Kong last year. It was also in Shanghai, Macau and Singapore and will be opening in Hangzhou in May.
The collaboration between Versailles and the West Kowloon Cultural District is a result of a memorandum of understanding, one of 21 that Hong Kong’s arts hub signed as part of the three-day International Cultural Summit that took place earlier this week.
The summit concluded on Tuesday and drew the top brass of museums and cultural institutions from the United States, United Kingdom, France, Spain, Qatar, Australia, Colombia, Japan, Singapore, Thailand, mainland China and more to Hong Kong.