The construction of Tsinghua University Art Museum is completed, and it will be opened to the public in September. What is the meaning of such university museums and what should they do?

       In 1683, Oxford University established Ashmolean Museum, the world’s first university museum, in which an important category of collections was artwork. Since the 19th century, many universities around the world have set up their own art museums one after another, such as Fitzwilliam Museum founded by Cambridge University in 1816, Yale University Art Gallery established in 1832, the oldest university art museum in the Western Hemisphere, Fogg Art Museum set up by Harvard University in 1895 (now merged with The Arthur M. Sackler Gallery), etc., which are all currently world-renowned museums. Building up a university art museum well-matched with the university in its academic status has become an important approach for a number of famous universities to improving their faculty’s and students’ as well as the entire public’s artistic and cultural accomplishment. Generally, most university art museums have their collections donated or bequeathed; these collections, playing a significant academic role, are also an important part of the university’s art history and art teaching research.

       Chinese universities once tried to set up art museums as well. As early as 1926, Liang Qichao and Wang Guowei made efforts to promote the opening of the archeology exhibition room at Tsinghua University. In April 1947, Liang Sicheng, Chen Mengjia, Deng Yizhe and other professors attended the Chinese Art Archeology Conference held at Princeton University in the US, and were astonished by the progress made in research in paintings, copper wares and architecture during the discussion at the conference. After returning to China, the three professors jointly wrote a letter to the then president Mei Yiqi, saying “most Western universities have Far East Division to collect and exhibit Chinese antiques; they also have professors giving lectures on Chinese art; universities in our country, however, have no specialized programs yet to assume this important task”. Therefore, in April the next year, Tsinghua University was officially approved to set up the antique exhibition room for public displays, with up to nearly a thousand pieces of historical relics exhibited.

       The establishment of university art museums can, on the one hand, strengthen the development of humanities for comprehensive universities, and on the other, demonstrate the universities’ social responsibilities in public education, which to some extent suggests the future of university art museums in China. The final goal of university art museums, no matter what they are for, collection, research or exhibition, is to meet the long-term need of public cultural education. Science, religion and art, as well as physics, mathematics, poetry and music have always been inseparable. The rise of our country is not only reflected in politics, economy and technology, but also in the inheritance of thousands years of Chinese culture.

       The mission of university art museums is not limited to exhibiting and collecting objects related to academic research; they are also supposed to offer specialized venues for teaching and research as well as to cultivate talents in art, archeology, art history and museology. Visitors can have dynamic interactions with the museum, bettering what they can learn through museum visiting. From another perspective, this will help build up more university art museums in the real world instead of just designing them on drawings.

（Du Pengfei  Executive Director of Tsinghua University Art Museum）