→ 1. The Ideal Museum
The Ideal Museum—reimagining how Chinese artifacts are interpreted and experienced through speculative design and editorial experimentation.
The Start Point
Chinese Eastern Zhou bronze tapir in Burrell Collection
When I paused in the East Asian exhibition hall of the Burrell Collection, the Chinese Eastern Zhou bronze tapir, placed with Bronze Dog, became the metaphorical starting point of my research in stage 3. This dislocation of cross-cultural understanding leads me to question: When an artifact is removed from its original context, renamed, and recategorized, what does it represent? This ritual vessel, originally used for sacrificial purposes in ancestral temples, became a spectacle of animal-shaped decorative elements in cross-cultural exhibitions.
From this trip, I began to rethink the definition of a museum. Is it an authority for knowledge, a space for people to wander and explore, or a place for diversity and cultural understanding? As a public institution preserving and disseminating culture, a museum’s “communication method” is worth re-questioning. After this field trip, I also put forward the proposition of “ideal museum” and made it my core project direction.
The Ideal Museum
For my graduation project, I designed six posters, each of which displayed a Chinese artifact from the Barrell Collection, and each poster had a different exhibition theme and focus. My posters deliberately subvert the traditional museum presentation logic of exhibits, using a visual language that mixes flat space to display these six different artifacts. Inspired by the traditional Chinese symmetrical composition, I used a large number of image and ancient symbols to explore a balance of movement and stability and a non-linear reading path in the picture.
I hope to explore the cultural display possibilities of artifacts in museums through these posters, combining the curatorial philosophy of museums and the thinking of speculative design. At the same time, I am also exploring how to convey different contexts. By designing different exhibition spaces—such as dynasties, patterns, and the original display environments of the artifacts—I showcased the context of the artifacts and explored how the display methods of these contexts can better help viewers understand Chinese culture.
① Posters in Museum
After completing the poster design, I reviewed the “non-architecture” concept mentioned in the initial brief. Through this project, I gradually clarified its position between architectural design research and graphic design outcomes. As a graphic designer, I gained a lot of inspiration for visual design language from architects’ works. In Archigram’s works, I saw many ways to express architectural concepts using sketches, structural diagrams, and even flowcharts. The research on these architectural works provided a continuous source of inspiration for my visual creation. In my poster design, I also used a large number of images from archaeological research, sketches, and floor plans as visual elements.