Fan Ni

CIMAM 2015 Annual Conference was a valuable experience, the agenda was very well designed and I benefited a lot during three days in Tokyo. The speakers included scholars, museum directors, curators and artists whose speeches were very inspiring, especially the artists since most of the participants are museum professionals and it was great to hear insightful thoughts besides peer colleagues. The conference was attended by professionals from over 50 countries and the discussions were very comprehensive based on current issues museums from all different regions are facing nowadays.

The speech delivered by Peggy Levitt, a professor and chair of sociology of Wellesley College and Harvard University, was particularly impressive for me. In her speech Ms. Levitt talked about the relationship between museums and the audiences. First of all who are the audiences of a museum? Except the visitors who come to the site, don’t forget the website viewers, social media followers, newsletter subscribers, and people who are involved with the museums in many different ways, they are all your audiences and the message receiver of the museums, we should see a larger picture when we talk the audiences.

Museums, especially modern and contemporary art museums, are places for sharing the knowledge and thoughts, audiences get to know the content of the museums, then discussions happen. It’s all about communication between the two, instead of presenting a show and letting audiences digest themselves, and be busy with next upcoming projects right away, museums should put energies on positively creating the communicating. Each museum might have different types of audiences and it’s our job to make it easier for them to be a real part of the communication.

The programs outside the conference room were amazing too. We had chance to visit the most important and representative art museums in Tokyo and were able to get familiar with the local art scene. There was also a traditional music performance produced by Hiroshi Sugimoto at Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, which was the highlight of the day.

CIMAM Annual Conference is a great platform to expand the horizons and meet people, I want to thank both CIMAM and Getty Foundation for providing such a precious opportunity for all of us.