This silence is noteworthy, given the extent of Asian holdings in Western museums.
- The British Museum alone has over 30,000 pieces of South Asian artefacts.
- The Rijksmuseum, together with the Wereldmuseum and other Dutch institutions, are replete with treasures from Indonesia and Sri Lanka, legacies of the Dutch East India Company’s 200-year reign.
- Indochina is also amply represented in France’s museum treasures.
- Germany has numerous ethnological museums bursting with treasures from its erstwhile colonial empire throughout Asia.
- Other US-based museums, such as the Metropolitan Museum, grew their collections during the period of Western ascendancy on the Asian continent.
Recent work by various Asian museum professionals and scholars is slowly attempting to redress this balance.
- Previous research from India aims to rethink how temples were systematically plundered of bronzes during colonial times, with pieces taken from contexts of worship and transformed into ‘art objects’ within Western museums.
- Research from Southeast Asia emphasises the nature of various expeditions aimed at gathering objects within the colonial period, with unequal exchange or appropriations.
- Research from China reflects upon the imperial plunder during the Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion, leading to an endless dispersion of treasures across Western and American shores.
- The 2019 International Council of Museums (ICOM) conference in Kyoto was a potential turning point as a collective of Asian museum professionals gave coordinated presentations on the subject of decolonisation, looking at it from the point of view of the Asian region.
Western museums have to begin with an understanding that they are custodians, not owners, of a large part of Asian cultural heritage. There is a responsibility, as custodians, to share power, and sometimes that includes repatriating objects to communities of origin.
Until such time as Asian voices are heard within these institutions, until knowledge systems, values, and conceptions of understanding are centred, not marginalised, it cannot be said that these institutions have fully come to terms with colonialism.
The next chapter of museum decolonisation will be written by Asian communities reclaiming our right to speak for ourselves, to interpret our heritage, and to demand that institutions holding our patrimony finally listen. That is the unfinished story that must now be told.
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Comment Hugo de Block:
- It’s an old divide that’s indeed still with us : Asian art was usually seen as higher on the evolutionary ladder than Africa, Oceania and the Americas. Which is also why there are still study programs in Africa, Oceania and the Americas, excluding Asia. Different coffee table books, less ‘tribal’, ‘high arts’, and thus different disciplines. But yes, Asia was dragged empty too, war booty galore, but in a kind of different category (that we need to tackle since it’s yet another remnant of scientific racism). And a little bit like Said put it in Orientalism too.
