This research will discuss how East Asian cultures - those of Korea, China and
Japan - have been represented and interpreted in British museums according to changes
in the curatorial management. World cultural museums' previous interpretations of other
cultures have developed within a framework of European imperial gaze that have
classified and constructed non-Western cultural collections and images as ‘uncivilised’.
However, British museums re-represented cultural otherness focused on cultural
interaction, especially from the 1980s on.
Based on cultural, historical and museological contexts, the case studies will focus
on the analysis of East Asian collections and galleries of the British Museum and
Ashmolean Museum of Oxford. The British Museum's participation to Cultural
Olympiad programme in 2012 and Ashmolean Museum's transformation in 2009 will
be explored in order to investigate reflection of cross-cultural perspectives on displays.
Different stages of collection development and inter-cultural relationships between each
culture and world cultures have constructed distinguishable cultural images in the
museums. This analysis of re-interpretations of East Asian cultures in British museums
will remain significant discourse for curatorial method and development in 21st century
museology.