How do museum curators introduce a painting? Explore NPM's explanatory labels

Over the past several decades, and depending on the period and type of the exhibit, the National Palace Museum has used various label formats to accompany its works of painting and calligraphy on display.

Through the years, changes have been made to the dimensions, materials, color, position, wording, contents, and translation of these cards.

This exhibition takes a special look at the subject of National Palace Museum labels on paintings changing over time.

1. The Earliest Labels at the Museum
The earliest-known labels at the National Palace Museum for painting and calligraphy are large grid-red cards used after the Museum’s holdings were moved to Taipei from Taichung.

Chang Dai-chien’s copy of a late Tang dynasty Avalokitesvara bodhisattva wall painting from Dunhuang

and Pan Gongshou’s copy of Zhao Mengfu’s portrait of the Buddhist monk Zhongfeng were displayed there in April 1971.

The two museum labels here are most likely the ones accompanying these two works at the time.

Judging from the style of calligraphy and related documentary sources, they were done by such early researchers in the Department of Painting and Calligraphy as:

Chiang Chao-shen,

Fu Shen,

She Cheng.

They were artists themselves with considerable talent in calligraphy. In addition to preparing explanations for the exhibit works, they had to spend much time to plan and transcribe them into beautiful writing.

These museum labels represent a time in the past and can actually be considered works of art in their own right, thus giving them special meaning.

4. Dragon-Border Explanatory Labels: From Handmade to Printed
There is also a group of explanatory labels with dragon-decorated borders used at the National Palace Museum from the 1980s to the 1990s.

Although they look similar to each other, they ideally reflect the changes in word-processing that took place at this time in Taiwan and the dramatic influence on producing explanatory cards.

The area for writing on these dragon-border cards was reduced considerably compared to earlier versions, and though some cards in Chinese were still written in brush and ink, the characters also became smaller.

Afterwards, only the title line was written in clerical script, the text portion changed to being typed on a typewriter. And even later the Chinese contents were then photo-typeset and printed on the card.

5. Pursuing Audience-Friendly Museum Labels
Starting around 2000, dragon-border explanatory cards were phased out to make way for cards that make it easier for visitors to read and understand the contents.

In place of the dragon border, a simple line was used and the size of the writing increased as much as possible, the use of words also gradually becoming closer to everyday language.

In recent years, the increasing convenience of laser and digital printing has made it easier to add special designs to the cards, thereby individualizing them for different exhibition themes. As a result, the English translation can be included with the Chinese on the same card.

And as long as the card design does not detract from the exhibition pieces, it offers important related information to the audience in an eye-pleasing way.