‘It’s not revenge’: how Europe’s largest museum of Asian art sees restitution and repatriation, and the importance of East-West dialogue
- Yannick Lintz, the president of Paris’ Musée Guimet, believes provenance is key to understanding whether objects have a place in museums outside their origin
- She says she admires what has been done at Hong Kong museums, and will be on a panel at the first Hong Kong International Cultural Summit
When you enter the Guimet National Museum of Asian Arts, in Paris, France – the largest museum of Asian art in Europe – what you see first is not its vast array of porcelain objects from China or Buddhist artworks from India.
Instead, in a departure from many other Asian art museums, Musée Guimet opens with a Khmer courtyard of sculptures, straight from Angkor.
“It’s funny because when we think of Asia in Europe, for us in this part of the world, there are two main cultures: the Chinese one and the Indian one,” says Yannick Lintz, president of the Guimet. “So it’s an original entrance for this Asian art museum.
“You don’t enter immediately into India or China: first, you are in Cambodia.”
This entrance is partly a result of Cambodia being a protectorate of France from 1863 to 1953, but also a reflection of how the Guimet houses works from not just the largest Asian nations, but across the continent, from Afghanistan all the way to Japan.
