Taiwan’s Palace Museum Must Tell Taiwan’s Story

On June 13, 2025, President Lai Ching-te stood before a crowd at the National Palace Museum to celebrate the opening of From Impressionism to Modernism: Masterpieces from The Met. He offered a sweeping vision: that the Palace Museum should be “Taiwan’s museum” and “the world’s museum,” a bridge between local identity and global recognition. But behind the soaring rhetoric lay a telling omission: not a single word about Taiwan’s own cultural subjectivity.

The exhibition itself is undeniably a coup—81 major works on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, curated with integrity and respect for the Western art tradition. And yet, this triumph of cultural diplomacy inadvertently exposes a deeper crisis: Taiwan’s most symbolically important cultural institution still speaks in the voice of a long-dead empire.

The National Palace Museum remains rooted in a Chinese imperial narrative. Its vast collections, looted from Beijing’s Forbidden City during the Chinese Civil War and transplanted to Taipei by the Kuomintang, reflect a conception of history that is not Taiwan’s own. While Taiwan’s democracy has grown stronger and its Indigenous and local cultures have gained overdue recognition, the museum’s storyline has barely budged. “Taiwan’s museum” continues to center an aesthetic, historical, and political order that excludes most of Taiwan’s past and present.

Even the museum’s Southern Branch—established in part to reflect broader Asian cultures—has struggled to escape China’s gravitational pull. Its exhibitions often treat other cultures as satellites orbiting the Chinese core, rather than as equal civilizations with their own trajectories. The curatorial logic remains hierarchical, Sinocentric, and unchallenged.

Contrast this with South Korea’s National Museum, which has moved decisively to reframe its collections around Korean cultural sovereignty. Recent exhibitions like New Nation, New Art and Vienna 1900 do not just display international masterpieces—they are woven into Korea’s own story, addressing colonial legacies, aesthetic transformations, and the global politics of modernity. South Korea’s museum does not borrow art to mask insecurity—it borrows to sharpen self-understanding.

President Lai’s administration has done much to promote cultural dignity elsewhere—supporting mother tongue education, Indigenous rights, and transitional justice. But when it comes to institutions like the Palace Museum, which embody the cultural authority of the state, there remains a deafening silence. The avoidance is political. To acknowledge the need for curatorial transformation is to challenge the foundational narratives of both the museum and the postwar Republic of China state.

But if Taiwan is to present itself as a confident, pluralistic democracy on the world stage, it must tell its own story—not just borrow others. International exhibitions are important. But without reimagining the museum’s internal structure—without incorporating Indigenous histories, colonial experiences, and postwar trauma—the Palace Museum will remain a beautiful echo chamber of someone else’s past.

Cultural diplomacy means more than importing masterpieces. It means developing the narrative power to translate one’s own experience for the world. Until Taiwan can do that, even the grandest exhibitions will be little more than borrowed light.

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