by R.R. Knoop
“Do you know how they used to make a PowerPoint – something with glass?” a Chinese student asked me, apparently in a moment of confidence. Together with two other students, she had been assigned to me as guide and babysitter during a visit to Shandong University in Qingdao. Despite a year of DuoLingo, I still don’t speak a word of Chinese and can’t pay with Alipay either. In that historic port city in northern China, halfway between Shanghai and Beijing, I spent a week at the end of October as a guest of the Institute for Cultural Heritage.
From Epidiascope to Transync AI
An alumna of mine from Hangzhou, where I had given a series of workshops ten years earlier, had meanwhile obtained her PhD and had a postdoc appointment in Qingdao. She had told her professor to invite me. I gave two lectures to a room of extremely interested staff members and master’s students. I had already done that in the Netherlands for a decade as a lecturer at the Reinwardt Academy, the faculty for heritage of the Amsterdam University of the Arts AHK. What was new here was that my English text was simultaneously translated on a second screen by the program Transync AI (you can just download it). English on top, Chinese underneath.
The dialogue with my audience that followed was also projected AI-translated, now in four boxes. The students were not surprised. I was. Rarely have I had such a focused Sino-Dutch conversation. But in turn, I was able to explain the curious student from the opening of this piece, how grandpa used to teach using slides – usually two side by side, so you could show an overview alongside a detail, or compare two images. They had heard of it, yes, but couldn’t really picture it. After they googled it (it’s probably called something completely different in Chinese), they came up with a picture of an epidiascope — one of those bulky light projectors you place on a book illustration so it can be projected onto a screen. In any case, I could lecture once more about how advancing technology still borrows the vocabulary of the previous phase. Even in Microsoft PowerPoint, the images are still called slides; slides. a leftover from physically sliding glass slides back and forth in those old lamp-based projectors.
Museum boom
How did I end up there? What had I done before in Hangzhou? To answer that, we need to go back in time. In 2013, Patrick de Vries, then cultural attaché of our embassy in Beijing, decided to focus cultural cooperation between our two countries on the creative industries, film and… museums. There was a real museum boom going on in China; from around 200 at the turn of the century to 3,600 at the time. It was an opportunity waiting to be tapped. De Vries had found a partner in the Reinwardt Academy to explore whether there might be a market in China for Dutch ‘museum training’.
That turned out to be the case, and since then, – supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science – we have held a dozen one-week workshops in Beijing and Xian for senior museum staff from across China. Whether this contributed to the growth to more than seven thousand museums today is hard to say, but I believe it certainly helped.
Workshops in Hangzhou
This Dutch involvement in China’s museum sector had an interesting side effect. During our initial exploration in 2013, we also visited universities and art academies. One of them, the prestigious Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, invited us (quite something, since the one who invites pays) to teach about ‘participatory museums’. They had heard of the concept, but did not fully understand it. The penny dropped for me, when during the first meeting, it became clear that the concept of ‘workshop’ as a working method turned out to be unfamiliar. So in 2015-2016, together with a Reinwardt colleague, I taught an extended six-week workshop on that very topic to some fifty master’s students and PhD candidates. It was a resounding success, complete with photo sessions and certificates for everyone, and a crazy hat from our consulate-general in Shanghai.
See here:
The warm bond remained and I taught online lectures or even a whole series every year. I therefore combined the invitation to come to Qingdao with a week of workshop in Hangzhou last October.
Now the students completed in five days what their counterparts ten years earlier had needed six weeks for. Includes videos featuring a walk-through of a virtual museum that they had developed on my instructions. In the workshop, the assignment was to complete a group task every day – after an introductory lecture by me and a museum visit – of increasing complexity, all centered on the theme ‘Museum Audience from Recipient to Maker’ , and tied to a topic that would meet a specific Chinese public need.
Because that is, after all, what participatory museum practices are about. Once again, I was stunned. They had absorbed all the Chinese and English-language literature I had assigned. Their creativity knew no bounds and was often strikingly critical of society. They came up with brilliant ideas to address perceived needs: intergenerational museums (built around the board game mahjong!), a project on Alzheimer (as China too, is ageing) of resonance as an answer to one-way communication, especially from the government. I was particularly taken with the concept of fluidity (some things, according to the students, really are not fixed at all).
Surprises in Thinking about Heritage
Finally, I witnessed a simultaneous clash and renewal in thinking about heritage. The clash lay in the confrontation beween old and new. The brand new suburban district of Qingdao surrounding the campus where I stayed – an hour and a half by metro from the center – displayed the familiar, endless rows of high-rise towers stretching to the horizon. On the edge of the campus, where the city met the countryside, a market or fairtook place, where, as in the past, farmers sold their goods on days determined by the lunar calendar. The rhythms of these two worlds did not seem fully synchronized to me, although the vendors were perfectly content, according to my guides. My professor-host considered the ‘moon market’ (as I call it) an important piece of local intangible heritage.
This cutting-edge renewal in heritage thinking found its counterpart in downtown Qingdao. Famous for its original beer brewery Tsingtao, founded by German colonists in 1903, the city rapidly grew from almost nothing into a metropolis of over six million inhabitants. Everyone is, in a sense, a migrant. But the German colonists (Qingdao was a protectorate directly under the Kaiserliche Marine) wanted nothing to do with the incoming Chinese population, who they considered unclean. As a result, a strictly segregated Chinatown was designed at the beginning of the 20th century, with collective courtyard houses ( liyuan) that complied with the strictest German hygiene standards. Apartheid, essentially. After the Germans left, the neighborhood became a transitional area for temporary residents. A kind of Jordaan as it used to be: overcrowded, hazardous, on the fringes, unhygienic. This district, called Dabaodao, has recently been rediscovered as an important heritage site (see here) It now looks largely pristine and bears a sttiking recemblance to the Jordaan today.
Hip, expensive and thoroughly gentrified. To my surprise, the newly opened neighborhood museum presents the daily life and living conditions in Dabaodao decade by decade, including the mottled Mao-era years.
I found that was truly remarkable.
Dr. Riemer R. Knoop is a researcher, consultant and essayist with his own agency Gordion Cultural Advice. Between 2011 and 2019, he served as a lector in Cultural Heritage at the Reinwardt Academy (AHK).
