Art in Museums

In our meeting today, we discussed how art is presented in different museums of the western world. Currently I am in a class about contemporary art in Asia in the 21st century, so I was interested to find out how art is presented in the Eastern world versus the Western world.

When I think of the western world and art, I think of two different settings. The first is a vastly beautiful white room with images and three-dimensional objects spaced perfectly from one another, with descriptive wall panels, and stale distances between viewers. The second is something a little like this:



An almost Horror Vacui of a room.

But what do museums look like in the Eastern world? A little earlier today, I learned about the artist Jung-Yeon Min, from (of all things) a tumblr post. But I was fascinated not only by the content of her work, but the seemingly gigantic scale at which she worked.

How can this kind of painting have it's own white wall, or share a non-empty space with many other paintings (not necessarily like this one)?



Maybe I'm crazy for thinking there is some kind of difference between the two,
because when there's a museum like this in China:










And a museum like this in New York:






One has to think that they probably aren't too far off in terms of display.

My last question would probably have to be about items that are considered "exotic" or "primitive" in the western world. These items are usually the ones you will find in a darkly lit room, all in glass cases with carefully placed wall panels (in the western world). For example, ancient Chinese pottery, or African tribal masks. How are African tribal masks displayed in Africa? Or are they even displayed at all in their place of origin? We pride ourselves as westerners so interested in the creations of our culture, but maybe a mask is more to a tribe than a "work of art."

That's all for now, I hope it made sense.