Palace Museum to suspend free offer after low turnout
Free admission to seven exhibitions at the Hong Kong Palace Museum every Wednesday will be suspended in July amid low attendance, the art hub has said, adding that it will give away the tickets to the city’s underprivileged instead.
Louis Ng Chi-wa, director of the museum, yesterday said the decision was made because only about one third of those who had registered for free entry had shown up on the booked day over the past six months.
“Since the opening of the museum in July last year, there were more than 160,000 people who signed up for free admission every Wednesday. But the attendance has been low at only 35 per cent in the past six months, resulting in free tickets being wasted,” he said.
“So we decided to suspend the ‘free Wednesday’ arrangement from July. In the future, we will give away more tickets to the underprivileged, with plans to distribute more than 120,000 every year.”
Under the arrangement, visitors get to enjoy free entry to seven thematic exhibitions every Wednesday in the first 12 months of the opening of the museum, which is located in the West Kowloon Cultural District.
Betty Fung Ching Suk-yee, CEO of the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority, said it still faced financial difficulties, despite the authority’s final deficit for the previous financial year being a third less than the original forecast. “Despite the reopening of the city’s border with mainland China, we still face cash flow problems as the HK$21.6 billion government upfront endowment given in 2008 will be used up in one or two years,” she said. “The authority will continue to create new sources of income to improve its cash flow problems.”
The museum will stage a special exhibition featuring 52 classical paintings from London’s National Gallery from November to March next year, including works by famous artists such as Raphael, Rembrandt, William Turner, Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh.
Distinctive 3,000-year-old statues and masks uncovered in mysterious ruins in Sichuan province will be among 120 artefacts to be shown at the museum for four months from late September in an exhibition titled “Gazing at Sanxingdui: New Archaeological Discoveries in Sichuan”.
Half of the items were unearthed over the past three years. The site was only discovered in the 20th century and some believe it was at the heart of the obscure Shu Kingdom.
Considered one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the last century, the Sanxingdui ruins were first unearthed in the late 1920s when a farmer stumbled across more than 400 jade relics while digging a trench.
But the breakthrough came in the 1980s, when local workers found two sacrificial pits containing more than 1,700 artefacts made of gold, jade, bronze and ivory, which were crafted in a style completely unknown in the history of Chinese art.
Meanwhile, the Palace Museum has this month opened a gift shop called ART EXPRESS operated by The Commercial Press, together with a teahouse named XIA and a Chinese restaurant called King Lung Heen to raise its retail and dining experience revenues.