Visiting museum as raising people's intercultural awareness and happiness

Visiting museum is a good way for raising people’s awareness on the intercultural differences and gain happiness from the visiting. Recently, the Vanabbe Museum is showing an exhibition on Chinese history and culture, which is new to Dutch people and may be able to bring some inspiration to them.

First, one of the exhibit is a group of 24 photos, showing the 24 solar terms in Chinese culture. A solar term is any of 24 points in traditional East Asian lunisolar calendars that matches a particular astronomical event or signifies some natural phenomenon. It is a traditional way of Chinese people viewing the days in a year and is very different from Western thoughts. Western culture is likely to figure out things by scientific data and this is interesting to bring a new kind of thinking to them by this exhibition.

Next is a Chinese painting of a ghost. The image of ghost or monster is very different in traditional Eastern and Western thinking. In the past, Chinese people drew pictures of ghost like the photo above, very colourful and give a strong feeling to audiences. But for western people, the ghost they illustrate is more like some bad spirit, mostly untouchable or in pale white. The painting may seem strange to Western people as its painting style is quite weird and also usually the artist try to draw exaggeratedly so to express their emotion stronger to audiences. These kind of paintings is a new experience to Western people for knowing the different interpretation of the same topic of people from the East.

The last is the workshop which visitors can choose the paintings they like and form their new art. There are lots of paintings hanging on the boards and visitors can take them down and put them on the wall to form their new piece of artwork. It is fun to not only observing the paintings but is able to develop people’s thought on top of it. People can be creative and add their ideas to the paintings. After their own interpretation towards the paintings they choose, the paintings become their unique artworks and it brings a sense of satisfaction as well as accomplishment to people which is a very nice experience.

In conclusion, visiting museum not only widen people's horizon by seeing more about the other parts of this world, but facilitate people to think more about the intercultural differences between countries. Also, the workshop offers by the museum is a good way of involving visitors into the exhibition and encourage them to add in their ideas into the artwork which happiness can be attained at the end.