Exhibition Period: 25 January 2022 - 5 May 2022

Exhibition Venue:  Exhibition Hall 13, Fourth Floor, Tsinghua University Art Museum 

Glass is one of the most important man-made materials of ancient times in the world. It is a non-crystalline silicate chemical compound produced from the main raw material quartz sand (SiQ2) to which fluxing and coloring agents are added and burned in a certain temperature. Honored as the art of "fire and sand," glass was once deemed as valuable as gold. Its great creation in chemistry had a profound and far-reaching impact on the Iives of ancient people.

In 2022, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the normalization of diplomatic relations between China and Japan, and based on the 325 pieces and sets of ancient glass artifacts from around the world collected by the Hirayara lkuo Silk Road Museum, Japan, as well as the support received from numerous museums and provincal archaeological institutes around China in form of loan works, Tsinghua University Art Museum is undertaking the special exhibition "Marvelous Colors, Manifold Forms: Cultural Exchanges in Glass Art among the Ancient East and West." With regard to the exhibition title,"marvelous" (yi) connotes the multifarious attributes and implications associated with ancient glass, including those of "foreign lands" (yiyu), the strange and exotic" (qiyi), the "rare and wondrous" (zhenyi). This exhibition takes chronological time as its axis, so as to reveal the interrelated aspects of the world civilizations and their histories, including their histories of technological development, the arts, and trade exchanges, as seen through the material of glass; thereby evidencing the mutual learning among exchanges between eastern and Western civilizations as well as the broad inclusivity and great creativity of the Chinese civilization.

Source: Tsinghua University Art Museum

Editor: Guo Lili