Xiamen Museum Shows Local Culture

The theme of2013International Museum Day is Museums (memory+creativity)=social change. Territorial culture is a sort of local common memory based on which museums perform their creation, in order to reveal the local culture and educate the public.The attribute of museum itself leads to the fact that museum could exhibit either the local memory which has died away, or the preservation and transmission of the local culture. By protecting and exhibiting the local tradition, local comprehensive museum takes one of the main parts in transmitting the local culture.This thesis takes Xiamen Museum as the case, for the reason that the city of Xiamen has its own special attraction, and there are some advantages and disadvantages in the practice of Xiamen Museum for revealing the local culture. Therefore, through the reorganizing, summarizing, inducing and analyzing the exhibition of Xiamen Museum, we can explore how to find a better solution to develop itself.Within a museum context, exhibition is the most direct way for showing the regional culture. This research focuses on how the exhibition in Xiamen Museum interprets the local cultural character, how it is captured, and why it is valuable. First, it starts with the summary of local culture in Xiamen region and the development progress of Xiamen Museum. And then, the permanent exhibitions and the temporary exhibitions in the museum are showed for understanding the effect of local culture on the subjects of the museum. Last but not least, the collections and the spatial exhibition of the "Folk Custom in Minnan and Taiwan" exhibition is analyzed specially, for a reference on how folk custom exhibition is designed in local museum.This thesis also talks about the people in local culture’s exhibition. Visitors and expositors are the parties and exhibitors of the local culture. This research goes through their situations by inner records, interviews and questionnaires to those relevant. On one hand, normally, the visiting action in museum is for one time; but by a local cultural exhibition, the visit might be repeated and leads to a correspondence with their previous memory, and then becoming part of the exhibition unconsciously. One the other hand, expounding work is a reinterpretation of the exhibition, and the expositors is a very essential and active part of this procedure. Xiamen Museum has made a great success in the voluntary expositor programme, but also has some shortcomings in making it a diversified and permanent group.