China, Vatican to swop artworks

Paintings, vases and sculptures will be exhibited by both sides in a move likely to mend strained relations

VATICAN CITY • The art of diplomacy is being taken to a new level by the Vatican and China, which will be exchanging paintings, vases and sculptures in a bid to mend often strained ties, officials said on Tuesday .

Forty works from the Vatican will go on show in Beijing's Forbidden City and 40 from China in the Vatican Museums will be displayed in unprecedented simultaneous exhibitions in March, art chiefs from both countries told a news conference.

"It will be an event that overcomes borders and time and that unites different cultures and civilisations," Mr Zhu Jiancheng, head of the government-backed China Culture Investment Fund, said.

"It will strengthen the friendship between China and the Vatican and it will favour the normalisation of diplomatic relations," he added of the project, in which each side will loan artworks to the other.

Relations between the Vatican and Beijing have been strained for decades.

Chinese Catholics are divided between those loyal to the pope - the so-called "underground Church" - and those who belong to the state-backed church known as The Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association.

The main dispute blocking diplomatic ties is the Vatican's insistence that the pope - and not the government - be responsible for appointing bishops.

Pope Francis and his predecessors Benedict and John Paul have tried to improve relations with Beijing, whose communist party severed relations in 1951.

But efforts at agreement have often stalled.

"With no fear and no barriers, beauty and art are truly a vehicle of dialogue," said Ms Barbara Jatta, director of the Vatican Museums.

"This is the key of the success that we, at the Vatican Museums, love to call the diplomacy of art," added Ms Jatta, the first woman to head the museums, which receive about six million visitors a year.

The simultaneous shows are reminiscent of the "ping-pong diplomacy" of the early 1970s, when China and the United States each hosted national teams of the sport as a prelude to President Richard Nixon's historic trip to Beijing in 1972.

Ms Jatta said for the Beijing exhibition, experts would select 39 works of art that originated in China and are now in the Vatican's Anima Mundi (Soul Of The World) ethnological collection, which numbers 80,000 pieces, 20,000 of them Chinese.

"In a sense, 39 of them will be going back home," she said.

The 40th piece would be an object of Western European Christian art, a painting which has not yet been selected.

The Chinese artworks displayed in the Vatican will be 10 paintings by contemporary Chinese artist Zhang Yan and 30 works of art from China's state collections representing various periods of Chinese history.

REUTERS

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A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Straits Times on November 23, 2017, with the headline China, Vatican to swop artworks. Subscribe