Letter from our vice-president

Marked by many turbulences, including social ones, the end of 2019 ended with the cancellation and postponement of one of our conferences.

To this was added a trip to the workshops of two Korean artists, Park In-Kyung and Lee Young-See, whose incredible turn which was not without evoking Raymond Quenau, was confined to the St Lazare station, in waiting for a hypothetical train ...

We were hopeful that 2020 would unfold under better auspices. It was without counting on the appearance of an invisible enemy, the Covid 19, come to upset our daily life.
Deprived of effective protective barriers and anxious to preserve Friends and Stakeholders of our association, we have, even before the official declaration of containment on March 16, made deep cuts in our program while suffering the shock of the cancellation of our trip to North China.
Painful operation which had to be extended, thereafter, to all our activities until the summer holidays, with particular regret for the conference visit of the exhibition Bai Ming - Chinese artist of international renown whose certain works have been exhibited at the Cernuschi-museum in Louvière, Belgium.

In total, since the beginning of the year, only the remarkable conference by Françoise Capelle on the Rohingyas and the no less remarkable exhibition devoted, at the Besançon museum, to the influence of François Boucher on the development of the Orientalism in France in the 18th Century.

Exodus of the Rohingya. Source STR / AFP.

The Chinese garden. Francois Boucher. Oil on canvas. 1742.

Rabbit. Bronze with carnelian inlay. End of the Edo period. 19th century.

Of course, the long-awaited reopening of our museum after nine months of work cannot be overshadowed.
Ephemeral alas! it allowed, for a few days, the discovery of a new chronological journey of the Middle Empire, a journey establishing a link between the world of the past and the contemporary world, from the Neolithic to the 21st century.
Enriched with display cases, dedicated to Vietnam, Korea and Japan, which bear witness to the intensity of exchanges between this empire and its neighbors in South East Asia, the museum has been equipped with a specially designed graphic art room. equipped for the exhibition of particularly fragile works, the presentation of which will be done in rotations. All accompanied by a tribute to Henri Cernuschi, its founder, in a red case, synthesis of the Asian color and that of the 19th century museums, under a new light that magnifies the collections.

Showcase illustrating the collection of Japanese art brought back by Henri Cernuschi.

“Youth”. Ru Xiaofang. White porcelain. 2012

Amida Buddha seen from the mezzanine.

And now ?

We just have to wait for the start of the academic year, which should, at the time of writing, signal the resumption of cultural activities, according to official information collected.
Currently in the draft, the 2020-2021 program of our association will naturally include the conferences victims of the pandemic. We hope that many of you will then return to our auditorium where our team will be happy to welcome again its Friends as well as all people open to Asian culture.

In the meantime, we can only wish you patience and courage and hope that you will be able to count on the rereading and in-depth study of the summaries of our conferences published in the biannual Bulletins of our society of Friends to come to your aid.

To each of you, using the formula in force, we say: "Take good care of yourself and your loved ones", making sure of our faithful and friendly sympathy.

Jacqueline Berthelot-Blanchet

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