Experimental gallery designed with Museum visitors’ participation
(Toronto, Ontario – October 13, 2017) This week, the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) introduces visitors to an exciting new display featuring rare pieces from the Museum’s renowned Asian Collection. Designing Asian Design: How we learned to stop fearing new ideas and experiment with an exhibit about design using Chinese, Japanese, and Korean artworks is the culmination of a unique collaboration between visitors and the ROM.
Designing Asian Design explores art and culture in a different and provocative way, by combining contemporary design with traditional forms. Developed as an experimental gallery guided by audience input, the exhibit provides ROM visitors with the opportunity to experience Asian art and objects with a fresh and creative perspective. This contemporary approach challenges our understanding of East Asian culture, and overall exhibit design.
The project began as a prototype display in the Museum’s Herman Herzog Levy Gallery. ROM visitors were presented with a selection of objects and a variety of visual elements and were encouraged to provide feedback about how the exhibit pieces could be reimagined and combined to create a series of displays.
From concept to presentation, the Designing Asian Design exhibition took a year to complete. Exhibition curator Dr. Chen Shen, Vice President, World Cultures Senior Curator, East Asian Archaeology, worked with ROM designers, technicians, conservators, and preparators to interpret and incorporate visitor input into the exhibition. The visitors participation helped bring together the design elements of the display with the artifacts, resulting in a truly unique exhibit experience.
Housed in five cases, the exhibition’s Chinese, Japanese, and Korean objects and design elements represent key principles of Asian design, based on themes of tradition, symbolism, Yin and Yang, folklore, myths and the earth’s natural elements.
Designing Asian Design is located in the Museum’s Herman Herzog Levy Gallery, adjacent to the Chinese, Japanese and Korean galleries. The exhibition will be on display for the next two years and is free with general admission to the Museum.
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Media Contact
Wendy Vincent, Bilingual Publicist
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About the ROM
Opened in 1914, the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) showcases art, culture, and nature from around the globe and across the ages. One of North America's most renowned cultural institutions, Canada's largest museum is home to a world-class collection of more than six million objects and specimens, featured in 40 gallery and exhibition spaces. As the country’s preeminent field research institute and an international leader in new and original findings in biodiversity, palaeontology, earth sciences, the visual arts, material culture, and archaeology, the ROM plays a vital role in advancing our global understanding of the artistic, cultural, and natural world. The Renaissance ROM expansion project (2007) merged the iconic architectural heritage of the original building with the Studio Daniel Libeskind-designed Michael Lee-Chin Crystal. A distinctive new symbol of Toronto for the 21st century, the Lee-Chin Crystal marked the beginning of a new era for the ROM as the country's premier cultural and social destination.