The National Palace Museum is home to treasured collections of artifacts. To a greater extent, it is a depository of collective memories spanning millenniums. In 2025, the Museum is celebrating a significant milestone: the centennial of a transformative journey from an imperial collection to a museum for all since its inception in 1925, the 75th anniversary since the artifacts were moved into the storehouses in Beigou, Taiwan, and the 60th anniversary of the inauguration of the National Palace Museum in Taiwan, the permanent home for the precious artifacts. The year 2025 also marks the 10th anniversary of the Southern Branch of the National Palace Museum. To commemorate these meaningful occasions, the Museum is presenting Enduring Legacy: A Centennial Celebration of the National Palace Museum. With the momentum nourished for a century, the exhibition is a retrospective of the path the Museum has treaded in Taiwan in the past six decades. It is also an outlook into the infinite possibilities the future holds.
Over the past 60 years, the National Palace Museum, now houses nearly 700,000 artifacts, has become one of the most influential museums around the globe. This exhibition brings to light the pivotal moments along the journey and the transitioning perception and portrayal of the collection, featuring over 100 pieces of paintings, calligraphy, antiquarian books, antiquities, archives and digital works, among which are multiple restricted display works from the painting and calligraphy collection and artifacts designated as national treasures and significant antiquities. While boasting artistic and historical values, they are also a window into the engaging exchange between the Museum and the public; into the shifting representation and interpretation of artifacts; into how the Museum has responded to and reflected such transitions through diverse perspectives, aesthetic values and cultural visions amid a changing society and the context of history.
Featuring six decades of growth and development at the Museum’s Northern Branch, the exhibition unfolds through Brilliance behind the Door, Dialogue with the World, Tapestry of the Knowledge and Expedition into the Future, highlighting the establishment and expansion of its collection system; international exchanges and exhibitions; progress in the research and interpretation of its collection; the development of the digital archive. Among the exhibits are multiple restricted display works from the Museum’s painting and calligraphy collection, as well as works designated by the Ministry of Culture as national treasures and significant antiquities. Also displayed are Gilt Bronze Sakyamuni Buddha and Bodhisattva Mandala. Donated by Mr. Peng Kai-dong, both have been designated as important cultural properties by the Japanese government and entrusted to Kyushu National Museum. In addition, Travelers among Mountains and Streams by Fan Kuan, Early Spring by Guo Xi and Whispering Pines in Myriad Valleys by Li Tang, famed internationally as the trio of monumental landscape paintings from the Northern Song dynasty, are making their debut at the Southern Branch of the National Palace Museum, with a focus that explores how these masterpieces have been perceived and interpreted as time progresses. History is not bound by the past, for it shares a close bond with the present. As the National Palace Museum evolves in Taiwan, as it attests to the entwining past and present, it is also ushering in the next centennial.