Musée Guimet - Guimet research plan 2026-2030

Guimet research plan 2026 2030 21

Part 1 → The structuring axes of research at the Villa Guimet

The study of these inscriptions , which will involve researchers from dif ferent sources

( universities , IFEO , CRCAO , EFEO , Inalco and other research centres ) , may lead to

a more ref ined dating of the works , enrich their documentary f ile , and , more broadly ,

to the sharing of this new information via the computerised database of the

collections .

Study of movable Uyghur

printing characters brought

back from the Pelliot mission

Particular attention will also be paid to Uyghur movable printing characters , of which

the museum has some 950 items , brought back by Paul Pelliot ' s mission to Central

Asia between 1906 and 1909 . Although they were the first known in the world ,

they have only been studied in a very synthetic way . This is why an in - depth study

of the use of these characters seems more than necessary . It should be noted

that they do not constitute a complete " font " allowing the publication of a work ,

but that they have probably been used for the writing of certain types of texts .

After a restoration of the corpus with photographic shots and marking ,

a classif ication by typology and an identif ication of the types used , a database will

be built , integrating movable characters of the same origin preserved in other

institutions working on this corpus .

This research project will be carried out in partnership with the Centre for Research

on East Asian Civilizations ( CRCAO ) with the help of Alice Crowther , ATER

in Methods of Philology at the Section of Historical and Philological Sciences of

the École Pratique des Hautes Études - PSL . It is scheduled from September 2025 ,

over 15 half - days .

Research avenues

for contemporary art

The Guimet Museum is not only a museum dedicated to the Asia of the past .

It is also interested in contemporary Asia , in all its diversity and vitality . Consequently ,

research projects concerning the contexts of creation of artworks cannot exclude

contemporary art .

In France , the exhibition Magiciens de la terre , conceived by Jean - Hubert Martin in

1989 for the Centre Pompidou , symbolically marked a decisive turning point .

From the 1990s onward what is called contemporary art has been perceived

exhibited and collected on a global planetary scale

By nature devoted to one part of the globe the Asian continent the Guimet

Museum unquestionably has a leading role to play in this f ield from which it must

ref lect sketch out the contours of a policy and implement various initiatives

In this perspective a first step will consist in drawing up an inventory of the

museum s contemporary exhibitions and acquisitions whose study is inscribed

within the history of the collections This will involve identifying the assumptions

that have guided these choices such as their inscription within the long term

a continuous historical perspective or their passage through Paris an ethnocentric

perspective Rethinking these approaches will allow for a better account of the

richness of contemporary Asian art scenes

Research must also address a gap In fact during the 1990s most institutions

progressively included artistic productions created precisely at the time of their

realization that broadening their geographic scope was necessary As a result the

contemporary artistic avant gardes of the second half of the 20th century have

been little considered in this expansion , just as the modern avant - gardes of the f irst

half of the 20th century .

Thus , a major challenge for the Guimet Museum will be to retrace these largely

ignored and little - known historical contexts in France ( and beyond ) , to import and

revisit the history of modern and contemporary Asian artistic avant - gardes

of the 20th and 21st centuries , with the production of dedicated documentation

and archives .

Accordingly , the research project concerning contemporary art may follow several

paths . For instance , the study of a corpus of Chinese photographs ( 1995 – 2000 )

produced by the second generation of contemporary Chinese artists ( the so - called

“ 1989 generation ” ) around the “ Beijing East Village ” community , based on

a donation by Caroline Puel and Xindong Cheng . Another path would be to study

the first contemporary Chinese generation ( 1976 – 1979 ) , known as the “ Stars

generation . ” Among its members is Huang Rui , a central f igure still little studied

in France . A third avenue may be devoted to Dansaekhwa , the Korean avant - garde

movement of the 1950s – 60s , often reduced to its formal dimension ( monochromy ) .

This study could be linked to the donation of Philippe Tirault . The recent donation

of polaroid photographs by Nobuyoshi Araki opens the way to an exhibition on

radical Japanese photography around the Provoke group ( with Moriyama , Fukase . . . )

and to a rereading of postwar Japanese avant - gardes . Finally , Mono - ha , a Japanese

movement of the 1960s – 70s close to minimalism or arte povera , still little known in

France despite its major inf luence in Asia , also has its rightful place in this research .

These various research directions form part of an ambitious policy of acquisition ,

scholarly valorization , and exhibition . They aim to fully establish the Guimet Museum

within the global history of contemporary art .

Studio of HUANG Rui painter photographer visual artist performer