“An Activism That Creates Problems”

A planned exhibition of works by Chinese calligrapher Qi Baishi at Stockholm’s Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities has been canceled after a dispute over another artwork scheduled for the museum’s reopening.

The museum’s Chinese partner, Beijing Fine Arts Academy, said it no longer wanted to meet its commitments because Taiwanese artist Kao Jun-Hoon’s work, “The Sun of Zeelandia,” had politicized the exhibition. The Chinese Embassy also sought to learn who would attend the reopening, to ensure that no representative of Taiwan in Sweden was present.

Kao’s work forms part of a decolonization project run by Sweden’s National Museums of World Culture. The project received 10 million kronor from the Riksbank’s anniversary foundation at the start of 2024. Its project manager, Didem Yildirim, said four objects would be placed at the entrances of the museums to provoke visitors. One was an East Asian shield, around which Kao created his artwork.

The shield belonged to Fredrik Coyet, a Swede who worked for the Dutch East India Company and served as governor of Dutch Formosa, now Taiwan, from 1656 to 1662. Coyet failed to resist the attack on Fort Zeelandia by Koxinga, also known as Zheng Chenggong, in 1662. The People’s Republic of China honors Koxinga for driving Western colonizers from Taiwan.

The writer, sinologist Kristina Sandklef, says the museum’s project appears suited to Kao’s focus on history, colonialism and racism, but argues that his emphasis on Japanese and Chinese colonialism has created the dispute. She presents the controversy as an example of activism that can affect Sweden’s international relations when it rests on insufficient knowledge of East Asian history.