Guimet

China

2024

In 2024, the Musée Guimet celebrates China to mark the Franco-Chinese Year of Cultural Tourism and the 60th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two countries.

The Musée Guimet invites you on a fabulous journey to discover a millenia-old civilisation,from the abundance of contemporary creativity reinvented by artificial intelligence to the priceless treasures of the Tang dynasty, from the unequalled beauty of 8^th-century imperial porcelain to the splendour of women's finery at the Ming court.

Guimet x China 2024 consists of four exhibitions, exceptional installations and a diverse cultural programme at our auditorium, from 27 April until March 2025.

T’ang Haywen

A Chinese painter in Paris (1927-1991)

6 March - 17 June 2024

The Musée Guimet invites visitors to discover the work of T'ang Haywen on the occasion of the exceptional entry into the national collections of over 200 works saved from dispersal.

The paintings of this Chinese artist who moved to Paris in 1948 a bridge connecting traditional Chinese monochrome ink with the bold bright colour of Western art, a duality that inhabited the artist throughout his life.

Past exhibition

Guardians of Time

Monumental installations by Jiang Qiong Er

April 2024 - February 2025

From 27 April, Shanghai-born designer Jiang Qiong Er is set to transform the façade of the museum, anchoring it in Chinese culture.

For this bold project, the artist has drawn on her country's most ancient sources of inspirations reinterpreted by artificial intelligence to create surprise encounters, building a bridge between China and France, between the past and the 21^st century.

By taking over several of the building's most emblematic spaces, from the entrance hall to the terrace, via the historic library and the 4th floor rotunda, she invites visitors to experience sights, sounds and smells of the building, opening the door to everyone's imagination and creating a suspended instant of poetry.

Currently at the museum

Unblemished colours

Chinese monochrome masterpieces (8^th-18^th century)

12 June – 16 September 2024

A quest for perfection, and the pursuit of ever-purer forms and colours. An initiatory journey through beauty, via ten centuries of creation and design in China.

Bringing together nearly 300 masterpieces from Richard Kan’s (Hong Kong) Zhuyuetang collection and the Guimet collection, this exhibit illustrates China’s taste for formal simplicity and pure colour, perfected throughout the centuries.

In their infinite quest for purity and the perfect form and colour, the potters of China created unique pieces with an extraordinarily refined aesthetic, which are presented in this exhibition.

Currently at the museum

Gold Ming

The splendours and beauties of Imperial China (14t^h-17^th century)

18 September 2024 – 13 January 2025

How did women made themselves beautiful in the Ming period?

As part of an exceptional collaboration with the Qujiang Museum in Xi'an, the Musée Guimet is presenting an exceptional collection of gold objects, including ornaments, jewellery and decorative objects and techniques such as engraving, filigree and damascene work and inlaying with jade and precious stones.

These magnificent pieces illustrate the perfect mastery of the art of imperial goldsmithing under the Ming dynasty (1368-1644).

Tang China

A cosmopolitan dynasty (7^th - 10^th century)

20 November 2024 - 3 March 2025

This winter, with the support of Art Exhibitions China, the Musée Guimet is taking visitors on a journey to the heart of Chang'an, the glorious, cosmopolitan capital of the Tang dynasty (618-907).

A cultural and commercial crossroads on the Silk Roads, this sprawling city was the largest in the world in the 8th century.

More than 200 millenia-old exceptional works of art loaned by numerous museums in China's provinces invite visitors to discover this city of wonders, frequented by thousands of merchants, pilgrims, scholars, musicians, artists, craftsmen and court aristocrats from all over the empire and beyond.