| Abstrakt: |
The opportunity to study in Beijing in 1974-5 give me exposure to some Ming sites, particularly the Ming tombs, but at that time all sites like temples were closed to visitors, even if the first post-Cultural Revolution stirrings of intellectual life were just visible, and I bought then the copy of the Zhonghua shuju I Ming shi i which I still have. What I I might i like to attempt is not another history of what we now call China in the Ming period (excellent ones exist), but a history of the I dynasty i , of the Ming ruling family, and necessarily one with a strong visual dimension. While I was at the V&A I worked on the reinstallation of the permanent Chinese galleries, which had Ming stuff in them of course, but then my career involved almost nothing after that in the way of exhibitions until I was co-curator of "Ming: 50 Years That Changed China" at the British Museum in 2014. Wh... In the museum in the 1980s I worked on a range of things from Ming to modern but I was definitely getting more and more interested in the Ming period. [Extracted from the article] |
